May I Have a Word? Hearsay

Withdrawn, your honor

I was met with some objection when, in a comment to a recent blog post, I described readers' reports of what was said at a Richardson City Council meeting as hearsay. I said, "I now have hearsay from two people and still no video, audio, or transcript of any of this talk."

You would think I called the reader a liar. Which, I guess, when it comes right down to it, maybe I carelessly did, although that was not my intent. Most hearers can be forgiven if they understood the word to mean idle gossip or, worse, malicious rumor or even deliberate untruth. It's often used that way. Instead, all I intended was the neutral connotation as defined by Dictionary.com:

hearsay [heer-sey] noun
1. unverified, unofficial information gained or acquired from another and not part of one's direct knowledge

My knowledge of what was said at the city council meeting consists solely of unofficial information acquired from this reader and not part of my own direct knowledge. In other words, according to this definition, my knowledge is hearsay. That implies nothing about the truth or falsehood of what I heard, only that I heard it from another and didn't experience it myself.

Then there's the legal definition of hearsay. Wikipedia defines hearsay as "information gathered by Person A from Person B concerning some event, condition, or thing of which Person A had no direct experience." In the legal sense, the report from that reader (Person B) of what was said at the city council meeting is not hearsay. It's evidence of what the reader heard. In contrast, if I were, in turn, to report what was said by the city council members, using only the first person's report as my source, my report (as Person A) would be hearsay, because I didn't hear the city council's discussions myself.

All clear? The lesson, for me, is that hearsay is the kind of word that's OK to use by professionals in a controlled setting like a courtroom. It's also the kind of word to use to insult someone, if that's your intent. But it's not the kind of word to use in any kind of neutral sense, at least not without running the real risk of insulting someone. So, your honor, you are right to sustain the objection. I withdraw my statement.