Back in the day, old wives (and old husbands, for that matter) were far too busy eluding predators, fleeing barbarian hordes, and prostrating themselves on the ground in the face of seemingly inexplicable natural phenomena like lightning and eclipses, to come up with patently erroneous tales like this. But today, with your modern conveniences like EZ Pass, TiVo, and microwave popcorn, I guess old wives have enough time on their hands to concoct spurious nonsense like this two-gray-hairs-for-each-one-plucked thing.

If you pull out a gray hair, and wart the three months it usually takes for a hair to grow back, and the additional three months it takes for it to get long enough to notice, know what you’ll have? One gray hair.