Apocryphal Personal History = The tendency to adopt a story heard and make it part of one's personal memories.

Among other things, I do a little writing at work. Usually I must subject my brilliant diamond-like prose to the dull editing tools of my superiors. I have many superiors. They all feel a need to be needed, so they all whack away at my diamonds. Usually they add little of substance. This is the way of the world. But they do make changes--usually of the variety colloquially known in the trade as "happy" to "glad" changes. Meaning that you write "happy" and the editor wants to change it to "glad." This too is the way of the world. Well anyway, for years I have complained to my coworkers about the "happy to glad" changes that the bosses inflict on my work. And the other day I overhead one of my coworkers telling another about the time a few years back that she wrote a paper and her supervisor changed the word "happy" to "glad," and wasn't that just the very epitome of the ridiculous. She had managed to somehow assimilate my oft-repeated complaint about the proverbial "happy to glad" syndrome into a memory involving her personal history. Isn't the mind a miraculous thing!