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

[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.