Unnerving

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 397, 31 January 1947, Page 10

Unnerving

FIND 2ZB’s Tuesday night "opular Fallacies session much more unnerving than anything of the It Walks By Night variety. Moreover it is heard at 6.30, a time when the whole family is likely to be doing its dinner-time listening. Nothing more unsettling for the children to go to bed on can well be imagined, since it brings into question beliefs on the truth of which they have perhaps depended. Last Monday, for example, we started off by learning that a forest need not necessarily have trees in it, a supposition likely to play havoc with their ideas on The Babes in the Wood or The Sleeping Beauty. There was also something for Mother and Father to like awake over in the session’s exposure of a popular fallacy in regard to insurance, learned judge expounding the "average clause," thereby showing that though you may fallaciously believe your house and chattels to be fully insured they seldom are. The only fallacy that no one in the family minded was the one about not being allowed to touch a dead body till the police arrives. To quote the announcer: "You can mess the clues up all you like and the police won’t mind a bit." However he didn’t sound nearly as sincere as when expounding that average clause. I await next week’s session with the eagerness of a knowingly doomed candidate for his examination results.