We used to play a game called consequences when I was little. You wrote the name of a person or type of person on a sheet of paper, folded it over and passed it on to someone else, who wrote down who they met, another fold and what they did, another fold ‘and the consequences were…’ or some such sequence.

The idea was, because you didn’t know what came before, you constructed an amusing sequence. Remember, we didn’t have reality TV in those days, we had to make our own excruciating entertainment.

I’ve observed something similar happening with emails where, after a chain of forwarding, the subject of the email has no connection with body.

I recently sent an email to my editor at Transworld with the subject ‘RE: Marcus Chown Book Signing’. In fact it was about stock levels at our local Waterstones bookstore.

(If you want to know the sequence, the Waterstones store at the Science Museum sent me an email about a signing by the excellent science writer, Marcus Chown. (See the Popular Science events page for details.) I got into a conversation with them about the Popular Science website, at the end of which they happened to mention that copies of my new book The Global Warming Survival Kit had just arrived. I had been discussing its absence from our local Waterstones with my editor, so I forwarded the Science Museum email to her as a possible explanation of why I hadn’t seen it (i.e. the book had only just arrived in Waterstones’ branches). And the consequences were a totally meaningless subject.)

The example that inspired this post wasn’t particularly thrilling, but I suspect there have been some excellent cognitive dissonances between subjects and body texts of emails due to this effect. All examples welcome.