10 Million Turnip Trucks

One of the standard techniques for proliferating fake news, memes, rumors, and related messages is the reliance on the premise that the targeted individual has zero clue as to what the real story is, and thus the author is literally free to write anything whatsoever that sounds like fun for the reader to believe, even if it’s literally preposterous. The foregoing was a mouthful of words, so I propose the anointing of the term “Turnip Trucking” to explain it concisely. (The reference is to the common expression, “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday, you know!”)

As an example of the use of this word, let’s say the author of a message wants to convince me that 10 million people showed up for a demonstration in Washington. (Believe it or not, I have actually seen this meme.) Obviously, if I think about it for, say, a microsecond, I realize that 10 million people have never, in all history, ever showed up at a single geographic point on the earth’s surface for anything. So my appropriate response would be, “Can you stop turnip trucking me?”

I think the use of this term would add a lot to conversations, since it would make them more concise and potentially funnier.