Glenn Beck, Ignoramus

By -
Here:

"And then confused as Beck prattled on about the etymology of 'gossip' and how King George sent spies into our land telling them to 'go sip' in the pubs with the Colonial rebels and thereby gather intelligence. That’s how 'gossip' came to mean what it does according to Glenn Beck."

If you have any wits, the second you hear that story, you ought to recognize it as almost certainly made up. (I say "almost certainly" because once in a while, an etymology like this is real.) And it took me about five seconds to look up the actual etymology online.

Sigh.

Comments

  1. Daniel9:14 AM

    A shame, though. I kind of like that explanation!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy10:25 PM

    Gene, you are turning into Brad DeLong. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah10:27 PM

    And Bob, I've heard about you and Silas.

    Not that there's anything wrong with that.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more