Complex Numbers

Origins

I'm still learning new stuff all the time. This is a good thing. Though I'm not taking anything from Cracked at face value.

5 Phrases No One Would Use If They Knew Where They Came From  

"No One" is a bold statement, for instance.

We once told you that the famous quote about learning who rules over you by finding out who you’re not allowed to criticize actually originated in 1993 from a white supremacist sex criminal.

That doesn't require any digging to disprove. You're not "allowed" to criticize quadriplegics for being unable to move, for example, and I doubt they rule over you. I mean, you technically could criticize them, but you'd have to be a real dick.

And we revealed that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result” came not from Einstein but from Narcotics Anonymous and from a mystery novel about women’s tennis.

"If you want your quote to have weight, attribute it to Einstein." -George Washington

With the following phrases, you don’t need to have any idea where they came from to use them. But once you do know, ouch, you’ll never think of them the same way again.

Now, that phrasing, I can get behind.

5. ‘Yelling Fire in A Crowded Theater’ Comes from A Terrible Court Decision

When people say they’re being silenced, their opponents quickly point out that freedom of speech isn’t absolute (these same opponents, when their own side is silenced, will call this censorship deeply discriminatory and unfair). For example, they note you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. The logic here is that the First Amendment has some exceptions, so this latest thing might fall under that exception, maybe.

I actually knew this one, kind of, though as they say, the devil's in the details. They're too long to paste here, so you might want to read it. If not, consider the (almost) closing argument:

The actual decision that originated that argument was already bad. It was so bad that the judge who wrote that phrase, Oliver Wendell Holmes, changed his mind about speech protections in less than a year.

4. ‘Vox Populi’ Is Really About Why the Majority Voice Shouldn’t Win

“Vox populi, vox Dei,” posted Elon Musk recently, when a poll told him to bring back Trump’s Twitter account. The Latin phrase translates as “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” When the people speak, you must pay heed, because their word is law.

Again, even the slightest bit of thought could contradict this one. If we have "inalienable rights" at all, the whole idea is that those are rights that can't be taken away with a simple majority vote. To use a possibly extreme example, let's say that the people decide, by majority vote, that all Canadians living in the US should be executed. You can take such a vote, but that doesn't mean that the sentence will be carried out; that would be a violation of the Canadians' human rights.

And I'm not even going to get into the theological implications.

The earliest recorded use of “vox populi, vox Dei” is actually a letter from the year 798 that says listening blindly to the majority view is a bad idea. “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God,” wrote the scholar Alcuin of York, “since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”

3. Snake Oil Is Actually Effective, Hence the Phrase

When someone claims he can solve traffic using single-lane tunnels, or says you’ll double your money by buying Shiba Inu coins, you might say they’re slinging snake oil. That’s highly insulting — to snake oil.

I have to admit, this one was new to me, so I had to verify it elsewhere.   Wikipedia is only slightly more trustworthy than Cracked, but feel free to follow the links in the footnotes there.

These salesmen weren’t quacks because they sold snake oil. They were quacks because they didn’t sell snake oil.

In any case, even if snake oil is "effective," it's hardly the cure-all some of these hucksters made it out to be. That would be like saying that because aspirin cures headaches, it can also cure cancer. It did turn out to offer some protection from heart attacks, though, which is why science is important: you can investigate these claims and support or disprove them.

2. The Guy Who Coined the Term ‘Racism’ Had Some Strange Ideas About Race

Racism may have always existed. People were even racist in some Star Wars stories, and those happened a long time ago. But before 1902, if people had a word for the concept, it was “racialism.” The first person to call it “racism” was an army officer, Richard Henry Pratt.

And that's not even getting into droid slavery.

“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” said Pratt. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” That was from a speech where he spoke against racism.

I'm not a big fan of judging people of the past by today's moral standards, but that seems evil even by the standards of a century ago.

1. ‘Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child’ Comes from A 1600s Sex Poem

I'm not even quoting anything from this section. In any case, beating one's children for any reason fell out of fashion sometime in the last century. After I'd already become an adult, of course.

One has to be careful with stuff like this, though. Some phrases have been given a fauxtymology. For instance, I've heard people assert with quite a bit of confidence that "rule of thumb" came from an old law against beating your wife with any stick bigger around than your thumb. I even got screeched at once for saying it, because of its association with misogyny. But there's no truth   to that assertion at all. Most likely it just came from the association of the thumb with an inch.  

Language changes over time, and it has a way of fulfilling its own prophecies. But I still think it's important to know where these things come from.