Gish gallop

2012 political cartoon depicting candidate Mitt Romney engaging in a Gish gallop during a presidential debate

29 June 2024

A Gish gallop is a rhetorical tactic in which a debater quickly runs through an extended series of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and shoddy arguments that are impossible to refute in the context of the debate format. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, then the director of the National Center for Science Education, and named after young-Earth creationist Duane Gish, who was fond of using the technique in debates with scientists over evolution. Gish did not invent the technique, which is as old as debate itself. Scott wrote in 1994:

Now, there are ways to have a formal debate that actually teaches the audience something about science, or evolution, and that has the potential to expose creation science for the junk it is. This is to have a narrowly-focused exchange in which the debaters deal with a limited number of topics. Instead of the “Gish Gallop” format of most debates where the creationist is allowed to run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn't a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate, the debaters have limited topics and limited time.

Use of the term was mainly restricted to creationist debates about evolution until around 2010, when it started to be used in other contexts. The following is from a 9 August 2010 blog post by physicist Greg Gbur about the website Conservapedia using the tactic in an attempt to discredit Einstein’s theories of relativity:

Over the past day, Twitter has been abuzz with tweets on the Conservapedia page on “Counterexamples to relativity”, provides a list of 24 “points” that attempt to show the weakness of Einstein’s crazy ideas!

In my mind, perhaps the most despicable sort of denialism or crankery, however, is that which is based on some sort of political or religious ideology. This is clearly what is going on here, and the author relies on a familiar form of rhetorical trickery known as the “Gish Gallop”: throw as many claims out there as possible, regardless of their validity, with the realization that most people will be swayed by the amount of “evidence”, and not look too closely at the details.

Looking at the “evidence”, it is clear that there isn’t a single point made that isn’t misleading, incoherent, or simply dishonest. A person reading the Conservapedia post will be measurably more ignorant afterwards, and I get the distinct impression that this is what the author intended.

And by 2012 the term was being applied to electoral politics in the context of Republican Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency in that year. From the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun of 14 October 2012:

What I didn't realize until just this week was that lying was the strategy from the start by Republicans, not merely, as I had assumed, the usual blunderbuss and hyperbole employed by both parties in campaigns past.

It's called the “Gish Gallop,” and it is a brilliant creation in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, where rumors and stories come and go in a single day, never to be fully analyzed for validity or vetted for accuracy.

There is a similar debate tactic known as squid ink, but in that tactic the torrent consists of factual, accurate, and on-point information rather than lies.

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Sources:

Gbur, Greg. “Right-Wing Refutations of Relativity Really, Really Wrong!” Skulls in the Stars (blog), 9 August 2010.

Goldman, Michael. “‘Gish Gallop’ Delivers Unique View of Reality.” Sun (Lowell, Massachusetts), 14 October 2012. ProQuest Newspapers.

Scott, Eugenie. “Debates and the Globetrotters,” 7 July 1994. TalkOrigins Archive.

Image credit: Pat Bagley / Cagle Cartoons, 2012. Duluth News Tribune, 6 October 2012. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted image used to illustrate the topic under discussion.

praseodymium / neodymium / didymium

Castor and Pollux rescuing their sister Helen during the sack of Troy, Jean-Bruno Gassies, 1817, oil on canvas

28 June 2024

Praseodymium is a chemical element with atomic number 59 and the symbol Pr. Neodymium has atomic number 60 and the symbol Nd. Both are silvery, malleable metals that are found together in nature, making them twins of a sort. Both are widely used in the production of colored glass and magnets. Additionally, praseodymium is a component in a number of alloys, and neodymium is used to produce lasers of a certain wavelength.

Praseodymium and neodymium have similar etymologies and their discovery, as well as their existence in nature, are bound up with one another. In 1841, Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered a substance that he believed was an element. He dubbed it didymium, after the Greek δίδυμος (didymos), or twin, because the substance was found with cerium and lanthanium. Mosander was wrong about it being an element, but the name was apt, as didymium turned out to be a combination of the metals which would later become known as praseodymium and neodymium. Mosander announced his discovery in July 1842, and his paper was translated into English and published in October 1843:

To the radical of this new oxide, I gave the name of Didymium (from the Greek word δίδυμος, whose plural δίδυμοι signifies twins), because it was discovered in conjunction with oxide of lanthanium. It is the oxide of didymium that gives to the salts of lanthanium and cerium the amethyst colour which is attributed to these salts; also the brown colour which the oxides of the same metals assume when heated to a red heat in contact with the air.

But in 1885 Carl Auer von Welsbach showed that the name didymium was appropriate for the ore but for a different reason than Mosander had ascribed to it. Didymium was not a single element but rather an ore made up of two other elements, which he dubbed praseodymium, from the Greek πράσιος (prasios), meaning leek-green, from the color of the element’s salts, and neodymium, from the Greek νεο (neo), or new. The dymium he took from didymium:

Da sonach die exacte Zerlegung des Didyms in mehrere Elemente realisirt ist, so sehlage ich vor, die Bezeichnung Didym nunmehr ganz zu streichen und beantrage, für das erste Element, entsprechendder Grünfärbung seiner Salze und seiner Abstammung die Benennung:

Praseodym mit dem Zeichen Pr

und für das zweite, als das “neue Didym”, die Benennung:

Neodym mit dem Zeichen Nd.

(Since the exact decomposition of Didym into several elements has now been achieved, I propose to delete the name Didym completely and request that the first element be named according to the green color of its salts and its origin:

Praseodymium with the sign Pr

and for the second, as the "new Didym", the name:

Neodymium with the symbol Nd.)

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Mosander, C. G. “On the New Metals, Lanthanium and Didymium, Which Are Associated with Cerium; and on Erbium and Terbium, New Metals Associated with Yttria.” London, Ediburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, third series, 23.152, October 1843. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2007, s.v. praseodymium, n.; September 2003, s.v. neodymium, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. didymium, n..

von Welsbach, Carl Auer. “Die Zerlegung des Didyms in seine Element.” Monatshefte für Chemie und verwandte Teile anderer Wissenschaften, 6, December 1885, 477–91 at 490. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Jean-Bruno Gassies, 1817. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain work as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

flap / flip / flop / flip-flop

26 June 2024

Flip-flopping, or reversing one’s position on a political issue, especially when it is perceived to have been done solely for a politician’s political gain, is a cardinal sin in American politics. But flip-flopping is by no means unique to the modern American political scene. Flip-floppers, or simply floppers, as they were originally known, have been so-called for almost two centuries, and they’ve been around under other names for a lot longer.

Both flip and flop are variants of the verb to flap, which is first recorded in the fourteenth century meaning to strike a sudden blow or as a noun meaning such a blow. Flap was applied to the flight of birds in the sixteenth century. The standalone verb to flip isn’t recorded until the early seventeenth century, but it probably dates to the same period as flap. And we have the reduplicative adverb flip-flap also appearing in the sixteenth century. In his 1583 Anatomie of Abuses, pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes comments on men’s fashion of the day, in particular on the practice of wearing ruffs, or those frilled Elizabethan collars:

They haue great and monsterous ruffes, made either of Cambrick, holland, lawn or els of some other the finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a yard deep, yea some more, very few lesse.

So that they stand a full quarter of a yarde (and more) from their necks hanging ouer their shoulder poynts, insted of a vaile. But if Aeolus with his blasts, or Neptune with his stormes, chaunce to hit vppon the crasie bark of their brused ruffes, then they goe flip flap in the winde like rags flying abroad, and lye vpon their shoulders like the dishcloute of a slutte.

Here slut is being used to refer to a slovenly woman, not necessarily one who exercises her sexual agency.

And a few pages later Stubbes presages the twentieth-century use of flip-flop to refer to a heelless sandal when he comments of on the practice of men wearing pantofles, a type of indoor slipper, out in public:

For how should they be easie, when as the héele hangeth an inch or two ouer the slipper on the ground? Insomuch as I haue knowen diuers mens legs swel with the same. And handsome how should they be, when as with their flipping & flapping vp and down in ye dirte they exaggerate a mountain of mire & gather a heape of clay & baggage together, loding the wearer with importable burthen?

The present-day sense of flip-flop meaning a heelless sandal, usually made of plastic or rubber, makes its appearance in the late 1950s.

While flip and flap entered into widespread use early on, flop is a comparative newcomer to the party. There are a few seventeenth-century uses of the noun and verb, but it doesn’t enter into widespread use until the nineteenth century. And it is in the latter half of that that century that we see flip-flop meaning sudden change in a political position. Here is an early example from the Daily Oregonian of 5 December 1867:

“FLIP-FLOP.”—The Walla Walla Statesman has blossomed into the most intense Copperheadism. […] We also observe that the Statesman is rejoicing greatly over the results of the recent elections. It says: “More than half the distance back that we were driven in the ‘fog’ at the Presidential campaign of 1864, we have recovered.” This is good considering the editor of the Statesman himself supported Mr. Lincoln in 1864, and helped to drive the party he now associates with into the “fog” and black Cimmerian darkness which enveloped it at that time. Newell is the grand original flip-flop in journalism.

Copperheads was the nickname given to Democrats during the Civil War who wanted to end the war and preserve the Union by giving into the South’s demands over slavery.

There are other senses of flop. The sense meaning a failure is recorded in Farmer and Henley’s 1903 volume of Slang and Its Analogues. A cheap, temporary place to sleep is recorded in Dave Ranney’s 1910 account of being homeless in New York City:

We got to talking, and he asked me where I was living. I smiled at the idea of my living! I wasn’t even existing! I told him I lived any place where I hung up my hat: that I didn’t put up at the Astor House very often; sometimes at the Delevan, or the Windsor, or in fact, any of the hotels on the Bowery were good enough for me—that is, if I had the price, fifteen cents. You can get a bed in a lodging-house for ten cents, or if you have only seven cents you can get a “flop.” You can sit in some joint all night if you have a nickel, but if you haven’t you can do the next best thing in line, and that is “carry the banner.” Think of walking the streets all night and being obliged to keep moving!

Finally, flop is a term in Hold ’em poker (a variety of seven-card stud) for the first three community cards dealt to the players. In the game each player is dealt a number of cards and then a number (for a total of seven) are dealt face up to be shared by all the players. With bets placed at each deal. The players must make the best five-card hand out of the seven cards dealt. In Texas Hold ’Em, the most popular variant, each player is dealt two hole cards; bets are placed; the flop of three cards is dealt; bets are placed; the turn community card is dealt; bets are placed; finally the river community card is dealt; and the final round of betting commences. This poker use of flop dates to at least the early 1970s.

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Sources:

Farmer, John S. and W. E. Henley. Slang and Its Analogues, vol 3 of 7. 1903, s.v. flop, subs., 31–32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Flip-Flop.” Daily Oregonian, 5 December 1867, 3/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. flop, n.3, flop, n.4, flop, n.5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. flap, n., flap, v., flip, v., flip-flap, adv, n., & adj., flip-flop, n. & adv., flip-flop, v., flop, n.1 (with poker sense added in 2006), flop, v.

Ranney, Dave. Dave Ranney or Thirty Years on the Bowery: An Autobiography. New York: American Tract Society, 1910, 69–70. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Stubbes, Phillip. The Anatomie of Abuses (part 1). London: John Kingston for Richard Jones, 1583sig. D7v and E4r–v. Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Michael Popp, 2018, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

fleabag

Bunks in “seven-cent,” New York City flophouse, c. 1890; Jacob Riis

24 June 2024

Fleabag is a pejorative term for a bed or place of lodging or for a dirty, disreputable person. It is apparently a calque of the German Flohbeutel, a pejorative for a person lacking personal hygiene, although the English word may have been coined independently. An 1805 German-English dictionary has the following entry:

der Flohbeutel, des -s, plur. ut nom. sing. flea-bag, name given to a low person that is full of fleas.

Of course, this is evidence of the German usage, not the English.

We see the English fleabag a few years later, in the sense of a bed, in an account about Daniel McNeal, an American naval captain that appears in the London Chronicle dated 13 September 1811:

At another time, he gave liberty at Leghorn to two of his lieutenants, his surgeon, and purser, to go on shore, and immediately got under way with only one commissioned officer on board. His officers were not able to join him for four months, which they did at last at Malta, after having been cruising up and down the Mediterranean for four months in a Swedish frigate. When they came on board, he accosted them in the following handsome manner, “D—n your liv[e?]s, I thought you were in America before this—I have just done as well without you as if you had been on board, but as you are here I suppose I must take so much live lumber on board—you had better look out for your old flea-bags,” (meaning their cabins).

(It looks as if there was a printer’s error in “lives,” with an extra letter being erased.)

The London Chronicle defines fleabag as “cabin,” although it seems more likely, given the nature of sleeping accommodations on board naval vessels of the era, what was meant was “hammock.”

And there is this bit of dialogue in Charles J. Lever’s 1839 novel The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer uses fleabag more generally to mean a place of lodging, rather than just a bed:

Still I was not to be roused from my trance, and continued my courtship as warmly as ever.

“I suppose you’ll come home now,” said a gruff voice behind Mary Anne.

I turned and perceived Mark Anthony, with a grim look of very peculiar import.

“Oh! Mark dear, I’m engaged to dance another set with this gentleman.”

“Ye are, are ye?” replied Mark, eyeing me askance. “Troth and I think the gentleman would be better if he went off to his flea-bag himself.”

In my mystified intellect this west country synonym for a bed a little puzzled me.

The fact that the German Flohbeutel referred to a person and the English fleabag originally to a bed hints that the English word was independently created and not a calque. English use of the word to refer to a person does not appear until the middle of the twentieth century.

Further muddying the etymological trail is an Irish use of flea-park in a popular song, “De May-Bush,” allegedly from c. 1790. The song recounts a riot that happened in Smithfield, a suburb of Dublin, at around that date that was inspired by or in sympathy with the French Revolution:

Bill Durham, being up de nite afore,
Ri rigidi ri ri dum dee,
Was now in his flea-park, taking a snore,
When he heard de mob pass by his door.
Ri rigidi dum dee!

The problem is that there is no record of the song until it was published in 1843, well after fleabag was well established in English. And if the song does indeed date to c. 1790, there is no guarantee that this particular lyric is that old. Verses get added and dropped from popular songs all the time.

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Sources:

“American Naval Biography” (13 September 1811). London Chronicle, 12–13 September 1811, 262–63 at 262. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kuettner, Carl Gottlob and William Nicholson. New and Complete Dictionary of the German Language for Englishmen, vol. 1 of 3. Leipzig: E. B. Schwickert, 1805, 669. Google Books.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. fleabag, n., fleabag, adj.

Lever, Charles J. The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer. Dublin: William Curry, 1839, 266. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“De May-Bush.” In “Ireland Sixty Years Ago.” Dublin University Magazine, 21.132, December 1843, 655–76 at 671. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2021, s.v. fleabag, n.

Photo credit: Jacob Riis, c. 1890. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

potassium / potash

Pieces of potassium

21 June 2024

Potassium is a chemical element with the atomic number 19 and the symbol K. It is a soft, silvery-white, alkali metal that reacts rapidly and violently with oxygen. Potassium is necessary for life as we know it, required for nerve transmission among other cellular functions, and it has many commercial uses, notably in producing soaps and fertilizers.

Potassium was first derived from potash, the residue from burned plant matter. Potash is, unsurprisingly a compound of pot + ash. The English word appears in the early sixteenth century and has cognates in other Germanic languages. Over the centuries, exactly what is meant by potash has changed. Originally, it literally referred to the ashes of plants. Later, it denoted impure potassium carbonate obtained from such ashes; then, as methods improved, it denoted purer potassium carbonate. Senses over the years have included water with potassium salts and potassium hydroxide or caustic potash. In modern use, potash refers to any of the various salts of potassium, from whatever source, especially as used in fertilizer.

The spelling potasse, after the French, starts to be used in English-language chemistry circles by the end of the eighteenth century.

In 1807, chemist Humphry Davy was the first to isolate the element, distinguishing it from the chemically similar sodium, and he proposed the name potassium, after the French spelling:

Potasium [sic] and Sodium are the names by which I have ventured to call the two new substances: and whatever changes of theory, with regard to the composition of bodies, may hereafter take place, these terms can scarcely express an error; for they may be considered as implying simply the metals produced from potash and soda. I have consulted with many of the most eminent scientific persons in this country, upon the methods of derivation, and the one I have adopted has been the one most generally approved. is perhaps more significant than elegant. But it was not possible to found names upon specific properties not common to both; and though a name for the basis of soda might have been borrowed from the Greek, yet an analogous one could not have been applied to that of potash, for the ancients do not seem to have distinguished between the two alkalies.

But the name was not universally accepted. Earlier, in 1797, German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth had suggested the names kali and natron for the alkalis of plant and mineral matter, respectively:

Mein Vorschlag gehet dahin: slatt der bisherigen Benennungen, Pflanzenalkali, vegetabilisches Laugenfalz, Pottasche, u.s.w. den Namen Kali sestzusetzen; und statt der Benennungen Mineralalkali, Soda u.s.w. zu dessen ältern Namen Natron zurück zu kehren,

(My suggestion goes like this: based on the previous names, plant alkali, vegetable lye, potash, etc. to establish the name Kali; and instead of the names mineral alkali, soda, etc. to return to its older name Natron.)

Kali is from the post-classical Latin alkali, which was borrowed from the Arabic القَلْيَه (al-qalyah, potash). In 1809, German chemist Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert proposed calling the newly discovered element Kalium, rather than Davy’s potassium, and that name became the common one in German and the source for the symbol K.

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Sources:

Davy, Humphry. “The Bakerian Lecture: On Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity, Particularly the Decomposition of the Fixed Alkalies, and the Exhibition of the New Substances Which Constitute Their Bases; And on the General Nature of Alkaline Bodies” (19 November 1807). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98, 1808, 1–44 at 32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Klaproth, Martin Heinrich. “Beitrag zur Chemischen Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenalkai” (1797). Sammlung der Deutschen Abhandlungen, Welche in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin: Georg Decker, 1799, 68–71 at 71. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, s.v. potassium, n., potass, n., potash, n.; September 2009, s.v. alkali, n. and adj.

Photo credit: Dennis S.K., 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.