AskLG

Was anyone fooled today? How about another day? In that case, today seems fitting to talk about misdirection, misleading, deceit, Tomfoolery, and the likes. If there is one thing I’ve learned to look for is someone or something leading you to a desired action or response. Baseball pitchers, lawyers, magicians, comedians, and even politics use it. I know I know, hard to believe isn’t it?

The most common method, to fooling anybody, is when a person repeats an action in hopes that you, the subject, will learn it. In baseball a pitcher might throw fastballs high and inside the strike zone with the hopes that you will expect another pitch to be yet another fastball that’s high and inside. The thing is he’s about to throw a back door slider or sinker that is low and away. Some poker players act week when they have a great hand to lure you into betting. See where I’m getting at here?

Jokes are told the same way. People lead you to a certain response and at the last moment say the opposite. How many times have you heard a comedian talk about something they do and at the end deny it? It works, I’d say, 95 % of the time. Long story short, happiness and anger are expressed the same way, by grinning to show our teeth. The twist at the end throws us in a state of alarm so we grin and laugh. Oh yeah, laughing developed from us grunting thousands of years ago as a way to warn others. You learn something new everyday

Tags: "Do you understand the words that are coming out of my, April Fools Day, Evolution, Grin, Jokes, Laugh, Politics, Six Degrees of Separation, Spaceballs, Teeth

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under David. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.