With apologies for the delay, I’m just getting here.
friedo: yes, you were out of line in your first post. I’m glad you recognized it an apologized before a mod saw it, so we’ll sort of shrug our shoulders and ignore it.
wilmaxwell, welcome, glad to have you with us. Please be aware that we do NOT allow personal insults here. Your response to friedo was perfectly reasonable and I want to thank you for not responding in kind. In future, if someone insults you, you can REPORT it – click on the little red triangle with a ! in the upper right corner of their post – and a moderator will take action as needed. (Action can include scolding the person, Warning the person not to do it again, or more severe actions like suspension if the person has ignored several warnings… depends on the severity of the offense. For details on our rules, please go the the forum called “About this Message Board” and you’ll see the Registration Agreement and a few threads about Rules, Etiquette, etc.)
Personal insults are not allowed on the Straight Dope Message Boards – as you say, our goal is to fight ignorance, not to engage in name-calling – except in the forum called the BBQ Pit, where you may flame other posters, as an outlet.
Derleth, old friend, I couched my statement about Inuit and Yupik being more accurate in “according to somebody” because these claims of ethnic insult are often either mistaken or subject to debate. An example is the sloppy fuss over “squaw.”
My comment about Wikipedia was about the running controversy over Wiki’s feet of clay. Some university professors are throwing out research papers that hang on Wiki cites. Wiki is very useful, and it’s a vast source of information. However, Wiki’s “everybody writes us” policy results in some shaky pages among the solid information. It seems to me these days that half the things I ask Wiki for are called “stubs” or they beg for solid sources.
With that in mind, some Wiki references are no better than some guy you met in a bar. He may be rock solid right, or he may be fullasht.
Sorry, but it’s your own phallocentric bias showing, insisting that “dude” is a masculine only term. These days, my teens call each other “dude” regardless of gender.
They were throwing out “research papers” that hung on Britannica cites decades ago. And, on the other hand, Wikipedia throws out original research, no matter how sound it is. Research is research and encyclopedias are encyclopedias and the functions of the two are radically different.
(The Britannica made the mistake of allowing in a piece of original research in 1929. They’ve been apologizing for it for almost 40 years now, but the fake religion based on it is still around.)
Start with this article by Cecil. But one thing that he leaves out there is that, for the new edition of 1929, the Britannica asked Margaret Murray to write the “Witchcraft” article. That article remained in print as part of the Britannica until the new edition ca. 1970. The new “Witchcraft” article apologizes for all the people that were misled by Murray’s nonsense.
Ah. I had no idea how that myth got started. I’d always heard it started in the 1950s. And I definitely never knew Britannica was involved in it.
At least that fake religion seems to be on the wane around here. Generally it’s one of those things that high schoolers experiment with just to be different, but change their minds later.
