I was thinking about hearsay this morning.
We have all had this experience. Someone approaches us with a serious look on their face and says, did you hear what someone said? Instantly, we are invited into a story. We are asked to react to a statement that we did not hear, in a setting we did not witness, spoken by a person who is not present to explain what they meant.
We informally call this gossip. That is probably accurate, but I think the better word is hearsay.
There is a reason a court of law treats hearsay with suspicion. It is generally not admissible as evidence unless it meets very specific rules. The law understands something that we forget in daily life. Humans are not very good at carrying statements from one person to another without altering them. We miss context. We misunderstand intent. We remember the part that struck us emotionally, not necessarily the part that was accurate.
Then we fill in the gaps.
That is the dangerous part. We rarely repeat only what was said. We repeat what we think was meant. We add tone. We assign motive. We include our own interpretation, and then present the whole thing as if it were fact. By the time the story reaches the next person, it may have very little resemblance to what actually happened.
This is why hearsay should be handled carefully.
When someone tells me what another person supposedly said, I should not immediately form an opinion. I should not make a decision. I should not judge the absent person. At most, I have received a signal that something may need clarification. That is all.
The better discipline is to go to the source. Ask the person directly. Listen for yourself. Consider the setting, the relationship, the pressure of the moment, and the possibility that the whole thing has been misunderstood.
Most damage between people does not come from what was actually said. It comes from what someone said someone said.
That is a fragile foundation on which to build a conclusion.
“Most damage between people does not come from what was actually said. It comes from what someone said someone said.”
So my commitment is simple. I will be slower to believe hearsay. I will be careful when repeating what I heard. I will not let someone else’s interpretation become my evidence. If the matter is important enough to influence my judgment, then it is important enough to verify.
Rarely do people get this right. That includes me. But I can start by pausing the next time someone tells me what someone else said. I can ask myself whether I need to hear it directly. And if it matters, I can go to the source.
That is the only way to know what was actually said.
