Knowing stuff — facts, how to do stuff, how to find out about stuff, how to show what stuff you know– was pretty important in our house growing up. If any of us kids asked our parents a question, they were likely to ask right back, “What do you think?” or “How could you find out the answer to that?” I knew how to scour encyclopedias and set up controlled experiments long before I was allowed to go on bike rides by myself.

In a house like that you’d better believe that The Dad had to know the most of anyone. As Chief Knower my dad cut a pretty impressive figure. He could out-calculate, out-cook, out-repair, out-wilderness, out-remember, out-science-trivia, and out-design everyone we knew. One of my favorite family activities as I got older was to go head-to-head with him in knowledge and reasoning battles. In my mind they were like chivalric jousting sessions– will the apprentice surpass her teacher? He did not enjoy these debates as much as I did, especially on the occasions when I led my younger siblings in well-planned group attacks against the reigning order. I knew that to succeed, I would have to develop an artillery of hard-hitting, far-reaching skills, especially for times when my actual knowledge and experience came up, er, a bit short. The strategery:

  • Act confident.
  • Insofar as possible, know a lot about the subject.
  • Use details and examples.
  • When you don’t have many details, pad them with facts from a similar field (if you are talking about waffles, bring in info about pancakes).
  • Employ real statistics when you have them.
  • Employ fake statistics when you don’t (with caveats).
  • Call on your greater experience.
  • Call on common sense.
  • Elaborate the consequences of a mistaken point of view (lots of room for fun in this one!).

I had occasional success, but winning was never as awesome an experience as I had imagined. These days we have left behind the high-stakes battles over rules and religion in favor of more mundane, though perhaps equally unsolvable, topics, such as my reading habits. Do I read more books than almost everyone? The other day Dad and I went back and forth on this issue for about five minutes. At last, the fake statistic “There might be 25 people in the country who read more” was employed. It was perfect: specific, untestable, arresting, and mitigated by the caveat “might.” Case closed!

The fake statistic, the dodgy fact, the perfect comeback: loveable and lovely one and all. And that is why, to this day in the Land of Dottie Comma, you will hear me make statements –in even ordinary, non-debate conversations– such as “I was 87% sure I would have to make a trip to the DMV.” (Dr. G: “Oh really? Not 88%? not 86%?”) And if you disagree with me about the value of fake statistics and dodgy facts, I invite you to consider the wasteland all our conversation and poetry and fiction would become without them. Envision a vast waterless moonscape, with a crater for every place an apt comparison was left out and a pile of radioactive decay for every place that vagueries such as “pretty much” and “almost all” had to be left in. There are three-legged frogs hopping around the dried-up pond where metaphor and exagerration used to grow. You see where your logic takes you?