Author Archives: Ponderer

About Ponderer

Ponderer also writes science fiction and science-inspired rhyming poetry. Check her out at katerauner.wordpress.com/ She worked at Rocky Flats for 22 years - you may know her as Kathy London.

Lie Travels Around the Globe While the Truth is Putting on Its Shoes

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Quoteinvestigator says this expression has been evolving for three hundred years.

hiking bootIn 1787 “falsehood” was reaching “every corner of the earth”. In 1820 a colorful version was circulating with lies flying from “Maine to Georgia” while truth was “pulling her boots on”. By 1834 “error” was running “half over the world” while truth was “putting on his boots”. In 1924 a lie was circling the globe while a truth was “lacing its shoes on”.

You can read the citations for yourself on the site. I’m more excited by a recent study that shows this expression is true.

False news spreads faster than true stories, and it’s because of humans, not bots, according to a new study published today in Science. axios

I’m still angry at Russian meddling in our elections, and fake news continues to be a threat. Did the Russians change anyone’s vote? Who can tell? You and I look at loads of information – even if I told you a particular story you viewed was false-news-from-Russia (or, for that matter, from a fellow citizen) I doubt you could say that particular item tipped you over the edge.

The reason fake news works is because we’re human. “Avoid temptation to shift the blame elsewhere… Even if we solve bots and the foreign interference problem, it wouldn’t solve the problem of online misinformation.”

Researchers studied more than 4.5 million tweets between 2006 and 2017. They used six fact-checking sites, including Politifact and Snopes, to determine if an item was true.

They found false stories — especially political ones — traveled faster, farther and deeper into the network than the true kind. (True stories took six times as long as false ones to reach 1500 people.) And, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.

We humans are programmed for this. I’m reminded of the notion that, if our ancestors believed there was a lion rather than wind behind rustling grass, they lived to have offspring who led to us. Our brains find it safer to believe anything that confirms our fears, and so we share the item. The study says novelty also grabs us, and something we never heard before is more likely to be false (at least, on Twitter) but we share it.

sneakersIf you’ve tut-tutted over claims about male and female bell peppers, or Mars will appear the size of the full moon tomorrow night, or rumors of gang initiations that kill innocent people, or pizzagate – well, it’s just human nature. It takes effort to engage all that lovely pre-frontal cortex, but it’s worth it.

Pull the Rug Out

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wizard on flying carpet

This wizard should be safe

This is how you upset someone’s plans or ruin their chance for success, perhaps by withdrawing previous support.

Grammarist says the phrase originated in the early 20th century, in America, though their examples are recent.

Etymonline does not provide citations, but says “pull the rug out from under (someone) “suddenly deprive of important support” is from 1936, American English. Earlier in same sense was cut the grass under (one’s) feet (1580s).”

I guess old phrases never die, they just get reworked.

Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

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I caught this on NPR:

Home of sliced bread

Chillicothe Baking Company’s building in Chillicothe, Missouri, where bread was first machine-sliced for sale

You’ve heard people call some innovation the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, that was a real event. The first commercially sliced bread was sold in Chillicothe, Mo., on July 7, 1928. People had to slice it themselves in the old days. The innovation is now the occasion for an annual bluegrass festival, and lawmakers are debating a bill to declare sliced bread day

I remember my grandmother telling me how happy she was to buy bread instead of baking two or three times a week (related to family income I think), but I don’t remember her mentioning sliced bread. So I wanted to learn more.

Wikipedia says bread cut with a slicing machine was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” I guess those images of a Frenchman peddling along with a long loaf, bare naked (the loaf that is), under one arm are more romantic than preferred.

Thank you, Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, USA, for inventing the first loaf-at-a-time bread-slicing machine. One of his early customers, Gustav Papendick, figured out how to easily slide the sliced loaf into a bag. Sliced bread was a hit, and In 1930 Wonder Bread began marketing sliced bread nationwide. The convenience was credited with increasing consumption of bread and everything you might slather on it.

Theatlantic adds “with such products rapidly penetrating the American home, automated bread-making was not only an invention benchmark, but also a key indicator of the mechanization of daily life from the 1930s onward.” I guess that’s where my grandmother comes into the story.

Cut Them Some Slack

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sailing shipThis phrase refers to applying lesser standards to someone’s effort, usually because they are trying hard or somehow encouraging your sympathy.

The phrase made me think of wearing a loosely fitted garment, something allowing you to move easily. But theidioms says the phrase comes from docking ships, “where ‘give me some slack’ meant to loosen the rope.”

25-startling-origins doesn’t live up to its click-bait title: “It is believed to be nautical in origin, and concerns not pulling on the rope so as to give the other person a chance to untangle it.”

I’m more familiar with the version “cut me some slack,” and cutting the rope doesn’t sound like a good idea when docking a ship – though it may be a last resort to a tangled mess. But I admit I’m a landlubber. Someone on wordwizard who claims to know boats says “CUT SOME SLACK and CUT SOMEONE SOME SLACK are not nautical terms nor have they ever been!” They’re pretty emphatic about it.

The only citation I found was this:

A similar phrase, with a similar meaning but slightly different form – ‘cut slack for’ – was used in 1855 by Frederick Douglas in his book My Bondage and My Freedom. theidioms

We’re Not Out of the Woods

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Hansel and GretelI guess forests have seemed to be deep, dark, and dangerous for a long time. To say “We’re not out of the woods” is to say we remain in trouble, that we have not overcome “a dangerous, perplexing, or difficult situation.” dictionary.com

Abigail Adams used the expression in a November, 1800 letter found in Papers of Benjamin Franklin (ginger) but the phrase seems to be much older, though I didn’t find the specific citations:

This expression, alluding to having been lost in a forest, dates from Roman times; it was first recorded in English in 1792. dictionary.com

Working Hard on the Wrong Problem Isn’t Republican or Democratic – It’s Stupid

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The United States Congress is expending vast amounts of time, energy, and polemics on legislating healthcare insurance, but nothing on a bigger issue: healthcare costs. The House in particular seems ready to eviscerate our major programs to Provide-For-The-General-Welfare, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They claim financial disaster awaits us otherwise, but surrendering the benefits of citizenship never seemed compelling to me.

(BTW – when did the word “benefits” develop a negative connotation? I always had salary and benefits as part of my job compensation and liked both words. I just can’t keep up with political correctness.)

A recent article from fivethirtyeight brings my gut feeling into intellectual focus.

Lawmakers’ plans to overhaul Social Security and other entitlement programs are missing the real problem… If the U.S. budget collapses after hemorrhaging too much red ink, the main culprit will be rising health care costs.

Social Security will get a little more expensive over the next 30 years; welfare and anti-poverty programs will get a little cheaper. But costs for programs like Medicare and Medicaid are expected to climb from the merely unaffordable to truly catastrophic. [my emphasis]

Yes, the demographics of the Baby Boom have an impact, but  that bulge in the system works itself out in 10 or 15 years when America’s percentage of elderly stabilizes. The program needs some maintenance tweaks, but Social Security isn’t a major problem. Programs often lumped into the negative term “welfare” (there’s that political correctness again) look manageable too.

The problem is totally different when you turn to health care. Spending on health programs — including Medicare, Medicaid and subsidies required by the Affordable Care Act — will never shrink or stabilize. The CBO predicts these costs will grow over 65 percent between now and 2047 — and then go right on growing after that, heedless of the fact that the percentage of the population that’s over 65 should no longer be increasing. [my emphasis]

Draconian cuts to programs that are not cost drivers will cause pain while allowing the financial problems to continue. Higher and higher taxes don’t address the underlying problem either, so trading traditional-Republicans for traditional-Democrats isn’t a solution. And swinging back and forth between them is ridiculous, though that may be where today’s hyper-partisan, two-party system leads us.

Health care costs are driving us towards bankruptcy. Costs have been rising faster than overall inflation for years and that’s expected to continue.

What’s the answer? There are regulatory and free-market ideas out there, but until we insist that Congress tackle the problem with real facts (when did that noun begin to need an adjective!) and open minds, we’re stuck in a downward spiral.