DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

My father was a barber and he and two other barbers worked in his shop. In the back of the shop was a counter that always seemed to have some miscellaneous paper on it - cartoons, political items, lists, sayings, and so on. In the early days this stuff was mimeographed but as the years passed it became photocopies.

At some point I learned that there was a name for this stuff - xeroxlore. Later for a short time the term faxlore came into use. Xeroxlore was very popular in offices and scholars actually study it.

Berkeley anthropology professor Alan Dundes once told the New York Times, "'You would think these things would be the same everywhere. But they are changed to fit a particular office or the local boss."

Dundes showed the Times a list of "office definitions" that translated "under consideration" as "never heard of it" and a scientific list that translated "correct within an order of magnitude" as "wrong." Have you seen them on your office bulletin board?

Recently I was reading one blogger who wrote, "For years I knew (some lyrics) as a bit of music-history xeroxlore. Only this year did I learn that it's music-history xeroxlore by Ezra Pound. Who knew?"

One thing I remember about xeroxlore is that when it dealt with politics or other serious stuff, it was almost always shot through with errors yet could inspire absolute faith in its accuracy.

I don't know if xeroxlore still exists. It's been a long time since I've seen anything like it on paper. But I see it being transmitted by email all the time. And, of course, it crosses over onto the internet. Recently an uncle sent me this item:

"Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program. He promised: 1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary, 2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual incomes into the Program, 3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program would be deductible from their income for tax purposes each year, 4.) That the money the participants put into the independent 'Trust Fund' rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, would only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program, and, 5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income."

Something about this did not sound right and I contacted Edward Berkowitz of George Washington University, a leading authority on the social security system.

Berkowitz replied, "I think most of this is wrong or misleading. FDR did not say that the program would be voluntary - that's just wrong. .... The Social Security program was compulsory for industrial and commercial workers (and gradually expanded in coverage after that). The trust fund started in 1939."

I also found a copy of the original 1936 booklet sent to workers describing the new social security system. It candidly informed them that their social security tax was starting at 1.5 percent and would then rise twice during their careers. And even those promises affected only the first round of employees. Changes in the system were always expected to apply to later workers.

And so on. My point is that there's a huge amount of bad information out there and some of it comes from sources that are supposed to be authoritative, like the online Wikipedia - which is filled with errors. I let my uncle know what I had found, but he had sent the original to dozens of people who probably sent it on to others.

We're at the mercy of many of these sources, which spread falsehoods like locusts. The original item my uncle sent me ended, "If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe changes will evolve. Maybe not, some Democrats are awfully sure of what isn't so. But it's worth a try. How many people can YOU send this to?"

With that kind of dedication to spreading bad information in an age when information can be passed around so rapidly to so many by simply touching a key, it's a very good idea to cultivate lots and lots of healthy skepticism.