Bad Santas

[Capt Jack]

Chinese Whispers

The idea of the old children’s parlor game Chinese Whispers (or maybe you learned it as Broken Telephone or Russian Gossip) is to pass a message by whispering into your neighbor’s ear. Your neighbor whispers into her neighbor’s ear, and so on around a circle of players. Inevitably, the message changes from ear to ear to ear. For instance, My sister has skinny legs becomes My system’s have skinny eggs becomes My cistern’s thinly pegged becomes My assistant Sidney Haig. We thought we’d try it with a poem. So Denise whispers (by way of e-mail) her poem in English to Luisa, and Luisa translates Denise’s poem to Tagolog and whispers it to Nick, who then whispers his Spanish version to Nina, and so on. And finally Astrid tells us in English what she heard from Suzanne who heard it from Andree.

so basically, word of mouth leading to misinterpretations of the original message.