I follow several Gen X-themed accounts and pages on social media, and a recurring topic of conversation among members of my generation is the Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is the phenomenon of shared false memories among large groups of unconnected people.

Sometimes the Mandela Effect is truly weird. For instance, why do so many of us — me included — remember the Monopoly mascot wearing a monocle, the Fruits of the Loom spilling out of a cornucopia, and the comedian Sinbad playing a genie in a nonexistent film called Shazam? (I can explain the first two rationally, but that last one is just bizarre. I have a specific visual memory of that nonexistent tape at the video store, and I don’t know why.)

Other times, things that are described as the Mandela Effect have obvious explanations. For instance, there is nothing strange or sinister about people thinking the Berenstain Bears were called the “Berenstein” Bears; it’s just a spelling error created by the human instinct to adjust an anomaly to fit an expected pattern.

One example of the Mandela Effect that’s been making the rounds again this week is the widespread belief that Ed McMahon used to run around handing out checks for Publishers Clearing House.

This one isn’t the Mandela Effect so much as the Jell-O Effect: If the brand name of a new product is catchier than the generic term for that product, the brand name will become the colloquial term for all similar products subsequently introduced in that category. This is why all fruit-flavored gelatin, regardless of brand, is Jell-O; all red plastic cups sold at keggers are Solo cups; all disposable snotrags are Kleenexes; and, yes, all direct-mail sweepstakes are Publishers Clearing House. American Family Publishing — the company McMahon actually represented — was a Johnny-come-lately with a longer name that we couldn’t be arsed to remember, because we didn’t care.

A lot of people my age like to cite an episode of The Golden Girls as evidence that McMahon actually did work for PCH and that some mysterious overlord somewhere is trying to gaslight an entire generation into believing otherwise.

In the oft-referenced scene, Sophia prank-calls the notoriously gullible Rose and poses as a PCH representative, telling her that she has won the sweepstakes and that Ed McMahon will be coming to her house to deliver her check. The fact that McMahon never worked for PCH is part of the joke: Rose is too naive and too excited to question Sophia’s story, even when it contains a glaring error. It’s the Golden Girls equivalent of Han trying to impress Luke by telling him that the Falcon made the Kessel run in twelve parsecs or the Third Doctor claiming to fix something by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. People who don’t get that end up becoming part of the joke, as they reveal themselves to be as gullible as Rose.

Emily