LOL, I learned that, too. And kind of wish I hadn’t!
You had to remind me. 
Are you in this thread just to crab at people?
I don’t think the mission of the board had ever been to fight ignorance (has it?), i assumed that was cecil’s (and ed’s and the straight dope science advisory thingie’s) job. I’ve been here to have ignorance fought and be entertained and debate, etc.
Vinegar eels are not eels, but a type of roundworm. Feel better? Me, neither.
Back in the 1970s, the column was started in an irreverent alternative newspaper. Those had a mission: to print stuff that the mainstream news ignored, despised, or wouldn’t dare touch. The Straight Dope name was a reflection of that. We give you the straight dope: they feed you lies. “Fighting ignorance” was another poke in the eye of the “man.”
The column was a reflection of its audience. The dipsticks would send in wiseass questions that regular newspaper answer columns would burn before shredding. “Are there any calories in the average male ejaculation” made Cecil’s reputation. That was Ed’s doing. He had advantages. As a full-time reporter he got paid for answering questions. And he had the credentials to cold call people and interview them. Plus he had that supreme advantage of a columnist: a voice. I’ve said it before. Columnists with a voice will gain followers who will read everything they write. His answers might have been lame - read that response in the first Straight Dope book - but his comebacks were great - read the follow-up answer to a complaining reader. He was allowed the snark we’ve been denied.
The world has changed since 1978 when Ed took over. Today the entire internet serves as an alternate newspaper. Anybody can find the answer to any question. With an all-seeing magic computer in their pocket. Ed was superseded, and found it harder and harder to come up with interesting questions that couldn’t just be Googled. The semen questions gets 15 million hits. The Straight Dope is #14 on the first page. Right above it is this answer. Now that’s snark.
The Board was never designed to fight ignorance. Those threads are now maybe 1% of the whole. Fortunately, it has many people who are subject matter experts who sometimes manage to counterbalance the 90% who just pull stuff out of their asses. Ed never seemed to care. The Board wasn’t his idea. He had acolytes who did the proselytizing work. They succeeded but they’re gone too. Nobody is taking their place. What’s left is a small community. Enjoy it or not.
Agreed.
It’s not that ignorance never gets fought here. It does, at times. But less because of any mission statement and more due to the board naturally attracting a huge (well, relative to a small garden party) flock of compulsive debaters and pedants eager to correct others.
Not that I would know anything about that 
.
I consider all of us to be Cecil’s soldiers in the eternal fight against ignorance.
Viva la guerre contre l’ingorance!
I do enjoy the endless cry of “Cite!”
Your welcome.
But, on the bright side vinegar eels belong to the same phylum as roundworms and hookworms and they can survive in a wide range of pH levels, from 1.6 to 11. That makes me more comfortable about ingesting them and having them multiply profusely in my gut without doing them harm.
You’re. Ignorance fought.
You’re welcome. 
Smarty pants. 
uhh…gee, I dunno, but gosh, ya know, …HUH?
Forty years ago, the original newspaper column by Cecil Adams had a mission:
To sell papers, by entertaining people with interesting facts.
Then, twenty five years ago, a new thing called a website attached itself to the newspaper column, and also had a mission:
To run an entertaining message board .
. And to do so, it was necessary to filter out the stupid people who were overwhelming this new thing called the internet.
So Cecil, the world’s smartest human, invited a bunch of the world’s almost-as-smart people to join in the discussion. And keeping the slogan “fighting ignorance” as a motif was a great way to distinguish the SDMB from all the other message boards on usenet or whatever.
Now, didja notice the word I typed in a bold font above, twice?
And yes, to answer the OP, our mission does still matter.
Because, dammit, I want good, intelligent entertainment.
Hey, I may well be bored, but no one has ever accused me of being smart!
Did you know that the term “smarty pants” originated back in the 1860s, and that it is pretty much an American phrase, although there is a British variant - “smarty boots”.
? I’ve never heard of smarty boots !
It’s smarty pants over here too.
(Maybe it should be smarty trousers !)
Beckdawrek does.
I was just told on FB that the whole covid pandemic thing was a Democratic lie.
How long would a post like that remain unchallenged here, often with solid proof?
Yes, we still fight ignorance, but we have some fun while we are at it.
At last, a mission statement I can get behind!
No offense intended to our British members, but Brits are nuts. England and all their partners-in-crime (Whales, Scotchtapeland, et al) are simply a conglomeration of silly people. They talk funny, they walk funny, they dress funny and they do funny things!
Do you know they call the trunks of their cars “boots” in England!?! I mean, cmon, that’s just nutty. They probably call their car engines “bowler hats.” They don’t know how to spell correctly either. They put “U’s” where they don’t belong, for crying out loud. Colour!? No, it’s “color”, you silly Brits. They spell “tires” with a “Y”—“tyre”! Pajamas are “pyjamas” in merry ol’ England. “Program” is unnecessarily elongated to “programme” and “aluminum” is absurdly lengthened to something like “aluminimunuminuminum” in the empire where the sun don’t shine!
Brits don’t even pronounce the alphabet correctly. They call “Zee”, “Zed”, of all things! Zed is the name of someone in Appalachia who’s engaged to his prize hog, ol’ bloke.
Why can’t Brits learn to speak and write proper American English, the way God intended? Sometimes I think we should re-wage the Revolutionary War, just to get Brits in line with the rest of the cultured world, like the USSA (i.e. the United States of Sublime America). We can stick it to King Chuck E. Cheese, just like we stuck it to George III.
And, don’t even get me started with Australia. Aussies are like Brits on ‘shrooms. Heck, Ozzie Santa Clause wears swimming trunks, and Aussie toilets flush the wrong way! They erroneously call Marmite, Vegemite (I call them both Vomite). Shrimp on the barbie? No, only Ken should be on the Barbie.
Now, excuse me while I polish my guns and stuff a Big Mac down my big American gullet.
[to hedge off a potential pile-on from disgruntled Brits…my mum was British, so I believe that gives me a get-out-of-gaol card.]
Everything you say is true, however to their credit they seem to realize they are inferior to America and Americans. They are also rather adorable as they go about there lives pretending to be real people.
Aussies I have neither time nor patience for. I have recently learned of some obscure facts that someone stumbled upon regarding the reproductive systems of some animals in Australia. The very idea that people live among and regularly dine on such creatures is too appalling to abide.