Suggestions

Suggestions can lead to whole stories.  

This page suggests a landscape to me, even though it is nothing like a realistic landscape. The colours aren't even correct. But my brain takes a few shapes and the composition and says, 'landscape'. 

It can be the same when we only have a few of the facts in a situation. We take them and make a whole story out of it. For example, my husband is a vicar and he has a lot of ear piercings. When he turned up at church without any of his earrings in for a couple of weeks, stories started to go around that 'someone' had told him to take them out. The 'someone' changed, depending on who was airing the opinion. For the few who actually asked rather than putting together their own story, he had an X-ray at the dentist's and needed to take out his earrings. He just hadn't got round to putting them back in. 

This is a fairly innocent example, but the result isn't always so innocent. Reputations can be harmed by gossip, so let's not take a few scraps and make a whole garment out of them.