I was at one of Michael O'Leary's excellent storytelling sessions and typically, having talked too much and listened to little, did not have the complete picture to share someone else's contribution. I therefore declared my intention to confabulate.
Surprisingly, I thought, confabulate was a word unfamiliar to the audience and I had to explain that it is the kind of gap filling that people with mental health or memory problems do to complete an account when they lack all the information.
Reflecting of this a bit more, it occurs to me that confabulation is probably part of the process that helps build urban myths and legends and may help to feed prejudices.
We stayed at a B&B and in the morning the owner, who did everything to make us comfortable and served a decent breakfast, felt the need to regale us with his attitudes on the ban on Baa, Baa Blacksheep and the Three Little Pigs story to appease "the blacks and the asians." He was pleased to inform us that he was serving sausages despite the "Common Market's attempt to ban them, on the "asians" being given taxis who then put the native taxi drivers out of business, and carried on with lots of other similar tales and opinions.
It would be easy to do a Gordon Brown and put this down to simple bigotry. What is more likely is that unfounded opinions are a kind of confabulation.
The sausage story can be traced back to an episode of Yes Minister, but the others have just grown and been circulated in the way that most urban legends grow, by word of mouth. I've heard it told that if you were to tell a newspaper, quite falsely, that you had seen a UFO and they then reported the story, a number of other people would then call to confirm the sighting with apparent sincerity.
Schools don't really teach about evidence, so if we are careless we believe what we hear unless we happen to know better. Snake Oil salesmen grow rich because most of us never ask for the evidence that their product works. Why blame people for similarly accepting explanations for things they know nothing about. They simply confabulate to fill the gaps.
Storytellers can be held to account. Who doesn't know the story of the Marie Celeste? The unfinished meals and half empty teacups - you've heard Arthur Conan Doyle's account. She was the Mary Celeste and the real story is equally fascinating. We confabulate on the one that's familiar.
