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Claim: A government memo regulating the sale of cabbages runs close to 27,000 words.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2000]
Origins: The wordy cabbage memo is often held up as a telling illustration of needless verbosity and prime example of the sort of pointless government 
spending everyone is in favor of seeing cut from the bone. It's a shame such an archetype is naught but pure invention, yet it appears it was never anything other than the product of one person's fertile imagination. Short and sweet, this much-vilified memo never existed.
Versions of the showcased list have been around for at least a half a century, with earlier ones decrying a memo by the government of France specifying the price of duck eggs, a British one referring to "shell eggs," and an American one (from 1953) about fresh fruits. While not all accounts agree on the precise number of words used in the various religious and patriotic texts pointed to as effective models of brevity, the 26,911 words expended in the cabbage tome eerily remains almost constant. In 1977, Mobil Oil was fooled by this thing A 1987 book (Pearls of Wisdom: A Book of Aphorisms) claimed an "EEC [European Economic Community] directive on the import of caramel and caramel products requires, apparently, no fewer than 26,911 words." Once again, someone was so charmed by a bit of authoritative-sounding apocrypha that he chose to pass it along as revealed truth. In a 1965 case report on the great cabbage hoax, Max Hall was able to trace numerous print sightings back as far as 1951. Oral reports Folklore this may well be, but the future for the non-existent cabbage memo still shines bright, if recent references to it are any guide. In 1994, David McIntosh, then serving on Vice President Dan Quayle's Council on Competitiveness, passed along the canard as one of those little facts one supplies to bolster a position. That same year, Congressman Lamar Smith used it to decry administrative excesses, as did Senator Orrin Hatch during the Regulatory Act debate in 1994. On a lesser scale of rumor-mongering, it also pops up in a 1992 monograph on regulatory costs by economist Thomas Hopkins. A New Hampshire coalition called "Get Government Off Our Backs!" was also bruiting it about in 1994. In 1993, Jack Critchfield, chief executive officer of Florida Progress Corp., passed along the cabbage tale in a speech to the Greater Largo Chamber of Commerce. William Randolph Hearst Jr. also stated it as fact in a 1992 article calling for federal spending to be slashed, attributing it to Joe Kingsbury-Smith, the newspaper chain's national editor. Lest one be tempted to fall into the trap of thinking the cabbage boat has sailed, a columnist in California spread the wordy memo tale as fact as late as April 2000. The cabbage memo has so far resisted all efforts to debunk it. The Washington Post has twice run bits detailing its known history (in 1992 and 1995), as did The New Republic in 1977. The Barbara "crucifer robin" Mikkelson Sightings: A version of the legend comes up during an episode of television's West Wing ("100,000 Airplanes," original air date Last updated: 10 July 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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