My breath smells like gym socks.
What did the prophecy say? It said “In his next post in this discussion, Puck Mendelssohn will say my breath smells like gym socks.” I have now said that my breath smells like gym socks. We may now engage in various ways to fit the event to the claim. Perhaps Faizal Ali meant to include quote marks which somehow didn’t find their way to us, and this is a perfect fit. Perhaps I mean to suggest that all men are one, in accord with some of the sorts of rhetoric put out by peace-loving sorts, and that if my breath smells like gym socks, then so must Faizal Ali’s breath – it is not meant literally, but is an affirmation of the highest humane principles which applies to ALL manufacturers of dairy products. Or perhaps the whole thing is a clue. Why socks? A “sock puppet” is a false identity on the internet. Perhaps I AM Faizal Ali and this is a coy way of his admitting that he invented my posting identity, for whatever sorts of reasons people create sock puppets.
Example number two:
Faizal Ali’s breath smells like gym shorts.
Well, okay. Not quite the same. Or is it? Are there not substantial resemblances between the smell of gym socks and the smell of gym shorts? And are those resemblances not at their maximum when those garments are freshly laundered? So the prophecy HAS been fulfilled! Or has it?
But before one goes too deeply into the ways in which facts can be made to fit prophecies (especially when there are substantial opportunities, like a decades-long folkloric process preceding the writing-down phase, to fit 'em), or how documents can be read by midrash, legalistic fine-parsing, or other strange methods, it really does have to be remembered that when practically every part of a collection of documents is quite incredible, the agreement (and especially an agreement arrived at by pushing, shoving and squeezing) of one part of it with another does nothing to boost the credibility of any part of it.
Faizal Ali got some abuse in a prior thread for having analogized this to the Batman comics. I felt that was quite unfair; he had even taken the trouble to draw his analogy from the same genre, i.e., superhero stories. The internal consistency of Gone With The Wind would not convert it to history; this would be so even if all record of the Civil War was lost and we had only Gone With The Wind to rely upon for our understanding of the event.
And, of course, one can point out that the fit to prophecy is often quite poor, but that tends to be a run down a long and winding rabbit hole, at the end of which one barely knows what one was arguing about. Along the way one discovers some astonishing things, such as the fact that there are people who walk among us, who apparently have jobs and do actual work of some sort, whose grip upon reality is so poor that they will even defend the historicity of the birth narratives of Jesus. As that process unfolds, it does clarify the analogical fit with Batman, but it certainly sheds very little light on anything that would lead anyone to believe in ancient supernatural occurrences.
