Everybody here likes to hear fish stories, the wilder the better. I expect we'll have a lot of them after our Fishing Camp-Out this month. We enjoy them because they're funny, and nobody is fooled into thinking they really happened.
But some people tell fish stories all the time. They're not usually funny stories. In fact, they're really lies. I call them minnows and whoppers.
Minnows are little lies that just shade the truth. For instance, maybe a guy is playing Skish and says he hit a target 55 feet away when it was really only 40 feet. No serious damage is done, except to the guy's own character, from a minnow-like that.
The trouble is, if you get used to telling minnows, it becomes easier to tell whoppers - the big lies that may hurt somebody.
The best thing is to stick to the truth. Minnows have a way of growing into whoppers.