Have you played the game of Chinese Whispers/ Telephone?

Chinese whispers or telephone is an internationally popular children’s game in which players form a line, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they heard to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version.

Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.

This is one of the most popular party games among children and I wish adults played it more often in social gatherings and parties. It is such a symbolic representation of what generally happens in our social circles, grapevines and even in the media.

People hear/read something. They say/publish something else. The reasons for the difference can be anxiousness, impatience, erroneous corrections, difficulty to understand or deliberate tweaking of the matter. Unfortunately, unlike in the game, we do not compare the final version of the message with the original message. Hence, the only way to handle such a situation is to learn to take any message/news that we hear, with a pinch of salt.

Pinch/Grain of salt is an idiom that has an interesting origin.

To take a statement with ‘a grain of salt’ (or ‘a pinch of salt’) means to accept it while maintaining a degree of skepticism about its truth.

Hypotheses of the phrase’s origin include Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, regarding the discovery of a recipe for an antidote to a poison. In the antidote, one of the ingredients was a grain of salt. Threats involving the poison were thus to be taken “with a grain of salt”, and therefore less seriously.

The phrase cum grano salis (“with a grain of salt”) is not what Pliny wrote. It is constructed according to the grammar of modern European languages rather than Classical Latin. Pliny’s actual words were addito salis grano (“after having added a grain of salt”).

An alternative account says that the Roman general Pompey believed he could make himself immune to poison by ingesting small amounts of various poisons, and he took this treatment with a grain of salt to help him swallow the poison. In this version, the salt is not the antidote. It was taken merely to assist in swallowing the poison.

The Latin word sal (“salis” is the genitive) means both “salt” and “wit”, so that the Latin phrase “cum grano salis” could be translated as both “with a grain of salt” and “with a grain (small amount) of wit”.

Playing Chinese Whisper/ Telephone could be a good way to teach ourselves to consider whatever we hear with a pinch of salt. Or shall I say that this game can help us keep that grain of salt ready in order to help us swallow anything we hear without overly affecting us!

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