The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: It is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Salvador Dali
The difference between
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Makes sense. The false memories – the NOT accurate memories – are free to be polished, and have their flaws excised, and their facets cleaned up.
Real memories are warts and all (though selective use can do detours around the negative bits) – very often on the web you’ll see a statement that is perfect – and highly unlikely to be the way the statement was originally uttered by the statee. Unless the first utterance was in print, already polished before it puts on a clean shirt and goes out in public.
We are conditioned to think things said by politicians and celebrities, especially actors, are ‘better’ than what the rest of us would come up with, while simultaneously failing to consider how many times they had to say it before the director decided it sounded right. And spontaneous.
When I dig deeper on the web to find the original source of a quote, that kind of manipulation is often evident: the person to whom it is attributed did not originate the pithy remark, and the person who uttered it originally was a lot fuzzier than what the meme has settled into.
We crop and rearrange constantly.