# Strange Claims from an Interesting Book **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [October 16, 2022, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-claims-from-an-interesting-book/973339 "2022-10-16T19:52:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 11
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2022, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-claims-from-an-interesting-book/973339/11 "2022-10-16T21:50:17Z")
I don’t believe 1) even you use a ridiculously broad meaning of reproduction that includes any mention of people. As you say, 2) does seem to rely on a single study of studies from 2015. I’d really like to see an examination of studies post-COVID. Attitudes toward “expert” medicine appear to have changed, but some actual research would be nice. Skeptics have been loudly trumpeting 3) for twenty years. And 4) needs some explication. _Mutiny on the Bounty_ is the full title of the novel, hardly very long. Darwin’s book’s full title, however, was _On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life_. If by long titles, the author meant books that had an “or” in the middle, that was simply a fashion that stopped in the mid-19th century. I did a check on the topic in this thread from earlier this year. > [@Doubled book titles -or- when did book titles stop having "or" in them](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/doubled-book-titles-or-when-did-book-titles-stop-having-or-in-them/964126/5): > > Just from observation, the practice pretty much ended at the end of the 19th century and lasted only on lesser books. A quick check tells me the only Dickens’ novel to have an “or” was Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy’s Progress, from 1841. None of Trollope’s books did or George Eliot’s, and they both wrote in 1850s. On the American side, Nathanial Hawthorne didn’t use “or” and he started in the 1850s (except for 1828’s Fanshawe and that also lacked an “or”). However, Harriet Beech Stowe used t… Those titles may seem long, by today’s standards, if you only look at novels. Nonfiction books still have them: they’re called subtitles. It’s almost mandatory on nonfiction. Here’s [Amazon’s nonfiction bestsellers list](https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Nonfiction/zgbs/digital-text/157325011) and you can see the subtitles on the covers. The “or” titles are actually a shortening of early book titles. [Take this 1810 one that was the first book on building a flying car](https://www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/flying-cars-first). The good reason behind putting all this text up front is that books didn’t come with dust jackets or blurbs or any explanatory material. Putting favorable exposition on the front page gave readers a sense of what the book contained. By a generation or so later, sufficient numbers of newspapers and magazines existed that reviewed books, so that potential buyers did not have to physically go to book shops or engage in extensive correspondence to know what was available in subjects of interest. Since then, titles are something that changes year to year. Book titling is part fashion and part doing whatever sold for the last book. Short titles are favored in our short attention span world, true, but that simply creates a backlash of books with longer titles just to stand out. @Horatius, I didn’t mean to copy you: I had a long interruption before I hit send and didn’t check for new posts. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-claims-from-an-interesting-book/973339)._