Thursday, March 06, 2008

State of the Doggerel: March 2008

Well, I've finally gotten the buzz words on equal footing with the cliche phrases. So, any new suggestions, or old suggestions that may bear repeating?

5 comments:

Don said...

Toxins! Morality! Technology!

Tom Foss said...

All good, especially technology. Every time I hear people railing against technology, I have to ask what they'd want to go back to. Because unless they're ditching everything up to and including levers and pulleys, they're still using technology.

Also, "things were better before/everything is going downhill today" would be good. Also, "the youth," "serious," and "bandwagon/popular."

As in "the youth today are less moral than ever. The new atheist movement has them leaving in droves, but they're only doing it because they want to follow the crowd. Today's atheists aren't serious."

Or, more technically, treating "young people" as some hive-mind, falsely accusing people of the bandwagon fallacy, and accusing people of playing Devil's Advocate or otherwise expressing things they don't believe.

"Devil's Advocate" is another good one, because too many people have no idea what it means. Playing Devil's Advocate still means you have to put forward a real, valid argument, even if you don't believe it. It's not enough to mount objections, then ignore responses and move on to new objections (or, raise stupid objections), saying "I was just playing Devil's Advocate."

Anonymous said...

Godless/Atheist!

Tom Foss said...

One that may or may not fit is "believe" or "believe in." There's multiple easily-conflated meanings, which I think tend to lead to confusion especially between atheists and theists. For instance--
*"I don't believe in God"--I do not accept the claim that God exists.
*"I don't believe in sex before marriage"--I do not find this morally/ethically acceptable.

And of course there's the usual meaning "I have been convinced that X is true."

Dikkii said...

"Treat the person, not the symptoms"

I really hate that one at the moment.