Or maybe today I'm just super pissy

[conuly]

because I'm also thinking "Instead of going 'I'm not sure, but I think $FACTOID', why not just spend a full minute googling first to see if it's true?" This goes double for etymologies - you might not have had an encyclopedia in your house before the internet, but there's a good chance you at least had access to a dictionary. Instead of passing around some maybe-fact for 20 plus years, with a silly disclaimer, just look the damn thing up already and take responsibility for preventing the spread of misinformation. "I think I was told that woman means womb-man!" No, it damn well doesn't, and I am not the bad guy here for telling you. I'm keeping you from embarrassing yourself for the next 20 years.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

This is another facet of that thing I wrote about yesterday, people want words to have deep and fundamental meanings. A lot of languages have much less opaque vocabulary than English so maybe we're more prone to expecting our words to be exciting little trivia nuggets becuase occasionally they are, and sometimes it's delightful to realize connections between words that don't seem related. But we way overdo that.

I've had to study Old English to know that "woman" has an unremarkable history and always meant merely what it means today, and no more. So I think people who lack that kind of knowledge are just desperate for there to be something a bit elevated and secret there for them to go "ah, you see, this makes whatever point I want to make!"

[conuly]

Yeah, but word origins aren't that obscure! They're in the dictionary.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I totally agree, there's no reason for this. It's a shame people prefer just-so stories to, y'know, actual facts.

[hudebnik]

It's a time-honored tradition: take a look at Isadore's Etymologies for page after page of word etymologies that would be really cool and interesting if there were any shred of evidence they were true. To be fair, Isadore didn't have a dictionary, much less Google.

[oursin]

Huh: I was once at a medical history symposium at which a star in the field gave a brilliant paper exploding in great detail the common beliefs about the origins of the terms 'quack' and 'quackery', and immediately they had finished, a retired doc (who had significant form for this sort of thing), sprang to his feet to say, was it not [ancient theory which had just been comprehensively dismissed]?

[delight]

Best part: I have heard this story from another person as well. I assume that you were at the same conference, and for the sake of the field hope you were at the same conference.

[oursin]

Good grief, I hope so! This was sadly now deceased rockstar historian of medicine.

I don't think the retired doc in question ever listened to the papers - at another symposium on history of drug addiction, one speaker, who had had well-known issues with current Home Office policies on prescribing, said, 'I always get somebody standing up in the question session asking do I want to have heroin on sale in supermarkets' - and blow me, rdiq did exactly that, straight afterwards.

[siderea]

Okay, so. I don't usually talk about this - I have a general policy of not talking about my moderation rules - but one of the things I moderate against, super hard, is this. If there is any evidence in a comment that the commenter didn't actually pay attention to what they're replying to, the comment gets/stays screened. I'm fine with actual disagreement, fine even with an amount of rudeness I expect would scandalize my followers if anyone were to try it. But I can crush this conversational pathology like a bug in my journal, so I do.

I only regret the internet has yet to give me a way to also deliver a powerful electric shock to the offender.

[conuly]

Though it's amusing to think that this particular doctor just went around saying the same stupid thing at every conference.

[conuly]

What a fuckwit.

[calimac]

I just went to my dictionary to see how it explains "woman" (which turns out to be just what I always thought, thanks), but I noticed that the two illustrative quotations to indicate the meanings of the word are "woman is fickle" and "brought out the woman in him." Gaaaah.

[oursin]

Haven't there recently been appeals to OED at least over less prejudical choice of illustrative quotes?

[rhoda_rants]

As a librarian, this, and your previous post, make me cringe SO MUCH. (Not at you, to be clear, but at the same things you're cringing over. Good lord.)

[redbird]

"I think I was told" is a weirdly vague disclaimer--like, maybe someone told them this, or maybe they made it up in their sleep? "My English teacher told us..." would at feel a bit more like they had a reason to believe it--people will swear by all sorts of things that Mr. So-and-so taught them in sixth grade.

[oursin]

At least I give the citation to The Journal Of I Saw It Somewhere Studies!

[conuly]

People have such enormous faith in their elementary and middle school English teachers. They just don't want to believe that their teachers were half-educated in grammar and had no more idea of what they were teaching than their students.

[ayebydan]

I think people often want English to be more than it is when the reality breaks down to it being a German formed language filled with stolen Latin words that pickpocketed every other language format along the way.

[greghousesgf]

I don't see this as much as I used to, but some feminists were spelling "women" as "wimmin" which always made me think of Popeye.

[conuly]

That is how the word is typically pronounced, of course, eye dialect representations notwithstanding.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The eternal question. And the answer is: most humans don't give a shit whether they're ACTUALLY right. What they want is to be thought right by their fellow stupid and ignorant humans, because being Thought Right earns valuable Points in stupid and ignorant human society. Were you expecting rationality from these apes? "Want in one hand....."

[conuly]

The easiest way to be thought right is simply to be right, and crush the opposition encourage higher standards all around.