Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Plums

My mom is so cute. One time, I was eating dinner at home with my parents. My mom brought out some plums and said “Wah, you need to try these plums. They are very delicious. Really, they’re so sweet and tasty.” She was very insistent that the plums were good to eat.

She took a bite of a plum. Her eyes widened in surprise and she said emphatically “What?! It’s not good! I became liar!” Hilarious.

Besides the strange humor of this statement, it is interesting how her expectation and her experience diverged. She was expecting the plum to be delicious, but her experience was otherwise. Her original statement wasn’t actually a lie, but the aspect of expectation was implied. What she really said was “I expect that these plums are delicious,” when in actual fact they were not.

If ate a plum and said to her “Mom, you lied! These plums are not delicious,” my statement would not be credible, as there was no intent to mislead. At most, I could say “Mom, I disagree,” or “You are mistaken,” or “Your statement doesn’t match my experience.”

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