Gullible
I was a very gullible kid. I think my gullibility peaked somewhere around middle school, but every now and then it rears its all-believing head. Last week I fell for the story about Samsung paying off their legal settlement to Apple with $1B in nickels. What a great story! But c’mon – there were warning signs. For one thing, where do you get that many nickels? How many nickels are even in circulation? Questions like that did indeed flash across my brain. But I shut them out. I wanted the story to be true. Aside from my desire to believe, there were other factors. I trusted the source (a person I follow on Twitter). And somehow the story just seemed too current to be fake.
All of which led to some embarrassment as I passed the tweet along to my own followers, many of whom quickly clued me in. This caused me to reflect on my own gullibility and that of others.
Dictionaries
There are two gullibility gags that we all know and involve dictionaries:
- “Did you know that ‘gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary? Go ahead, look it up.”
- “When you look up ‘gullible’ in the dictionary it shows a picture of you.”
Just to be clear, ‘gullible‘ is most certainly in the dictionary. Google will even define it for you if you enter it as a search phrase. Yay, the web!
Lately I’ve been working quite a bit with Chrome extensions. This gave me a thought: What if you could put yourself (or a friend) in the dictionary under “gullible”? And thus was born my latest Chrome extension, aptly named “In The Dictionary Under Gullible“. Enjoy!