Topic 26: The Tendency to Exaggerate

 Carol: 

Order Me a Up A Whopper

When I woke up this morning, I looked down into the yard instead of up at the mountain. It has been raining buckets here for two days, and now those weeds with the little yellow flowers are growing as high as, well, an elephant’s eye. If I’ve told Marc once, I’ve told him a million times that we need to weedwack more often.  I’d nag him to do it this morning, but he is snowed under at work right now. I’d ask Megan to do it, but this latest cold has knocked her dead. I’d do it myself, but I have tons of stuff to work on this morning, including finishing this darn essay on the tendency to exaggerate.

                             

The weeds are as high as a coyote's eye.

When I drew the topic, I wondered if this was kind of like that “curiosity in chickens” topic. As a breed, do chickens exhibit curiosity? Never did really answer that question. As a culture, do Americans tend to exaggerate?  Do we live in a world where everything has to be the biggest, the best, the brightest, the fastest, the most?  And if it isn’t, can we just “make it so” with the words we choose? Or am I just exaggerating?

In the United States we have a strong history of story-telling that stretches the truth both for fun and to make a point. In fact, every region of the country has its own tall tale, starting with Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack, and his big blue ox Babe. According to legend he was born in Maine and he was so big it took seven storks to deliver him. Eventually, he got so large he outgrew the state of Maine, so his parents moved to Minnesota.  If he’d gone much further west, he would have met up with Pecos Bill, the cowboy who was so tough he could ride anything, including a tornado. It’s only fitting that Pecos Bill  would marry a woman like  Slue Foot Sue, who looked pretty good in that river riding a catfish as big as a whale. If Maine got too small for Paul Bunyan, Texas got too tame for Pecos Bill, so he headed out to New Mexico.

In Arizona, we just don’t need to make up tall tales because the real characters are already larger than life. Take Mary Katherine Haroney (1850-1940).  Her history rivals any folktale, how  she was born into an aristocratic family in Budapest, was sent with them to Mexico in 1862, then turned up in  a “sporting house” in Kansas in 1874, next to Texas where she met up her “on-again, off-again” lover Doc Holliday, and finally to Arizona. At some point, the aristocrat from Hungary became Kate Elder, the prostitute, but in Prescott we call her “Big Nose Kate.”  At the end of the 1870’s, Kate, Doc Holliday, and the Earps were all here. Virgil Earp was an assistant constable, Wyatt’s wife Bessie was running a sporting house, and Doc was doing a lot of gambling at the Palace Bar.  Long after that shoot-out in Tombstone, long after her final break-up with Doc Holliday, Big Nose Kate returned to Prescott. She lived in the Arizona Pioneer Home, died a week before her 90th birthday, and is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.  And that’s no whopper.  

Big Nose Kate

Sources:
Big Nose Kate
Paul Bunyan
Pecos Bill: A Legend of Frontier Spirit

Megan: 

has diagnosed herself with either pneumonia or tuberculosis, or maybe some other life-threatening respiratory disease. Hopefully, she will be cured soon.