…etymology. It seems like 90% of the time you are part of a conversation, or just overhear one where someone says “You know where that comes from? It’s from…”, the “fact” they give is total urban legend bullshit. Yesterday at the bar, I over heard 2 different conversations that I had to hold my tongue not to butt-in and correct, and again at the Grocery store this morning.
People spout dietary science BS pretty commonly, but it’s far more often that someone says something correct than word/phrase origins. And things like Magnetohydrodynamics that nobody knows enough to give a correct answer, never are part of a conversation to be incorrect about in t
The first place.
Edited: Ahh crap. I screwed up the title capitalization and punctuation so it looks like one of those sentence fragment spam threads. :smack:
Is “science” just any word ending with -ology? If so, I’ll go with astrology, phrenology, or mixology.
You’re right about false etymologies though. The Word Detective called out any acronym before WWII as probably false, and warned to take a skeptical look at nautical origins.
This phenomenon is not new, it was so frequent in the past that when false word origins were uttered the usual response was some form of the phrase “Eat my _____!”. It was used so often it eventually became abbreviated in writing to “etym”, from which the term “etymology” was formed.
Wow, that’s interesting! I just posted about that on Facebook! Got tons of likes and shares so it’ll be common knowledge soon. Check Trump’s tweets for confirmation.
So is your issue that sometimes science is wrong and you want to know which science is most wrong most often?
Or are you fussing that clueless people who don’t know something just make crap up and you want to know which science is most prone to having crap made up by idjits?
The answer to the second question is easy: which topic do humans talk about most? That’s the one they make up the most clueless stuff about. So probably male-female relationships or diet / health / exercise. Or politics; plenty of idjits there.
Etymology is as accurate as any other science you can name.
The problem is that people who aren’t etymologist and who haven’t studied the field come up with false etymologies and etymological urban legends. They repeat stories without actually consulting a dictionary.
That’s not the fault of etymology (whose results are ridiculously easy to find these days). It’s like complaining that astronomy is wrong because some people say the Earth is flat.
Right. It’s because each one of us speaks at least one language – and not just knows how, but actually does it, all the time (including in our heads) – so we naturally tend to think we are “experts” in etymologies and other language-related knowledge, when in fact most of us aren’t.
Don’t reply if you don’t have anything to add to the discussion other than dumping on it.
Consequently, however, just report posts you think do this, don’t call it out yourself, that’s what the mods are for…doing it yourself just makes it look a little like jr modding.
