OddThinking

The Sydney Morning Herald has a regular column, Big Questions, where they invite readers to submit questions to be published, and other readers to submit answers.

What sort of nagging questions do their readers want – nay, need – to get answered?

They are not the questions that nag me. Like, how can, in evolutionary terms, can it be stable for all the males of certain species, like Antechinus flavipes, to mate with so much exertion that they die shortly afterwards?

They are not the questions that amuse me. Like, how can it be that sandpaper is useful to smooth a surface, and it is also useful to roughen a surface?

No! As a quick inspection of their archives proves, a very large number of the “big questions” that cause newspaper readers to lie awake at night are about – of all the sciences – etymology!

However, it is not the calibre of the questions that keep bringing me back to this column. It is the calibre of the answers.

There is a phenomena that occurs with a startling consistency. One person will write in, authoritatively, with the derivation of a word. Published right next to it will be another explanation – contradictory, but equally authoritative.

The nature of these urban legends about language fascinates me.

Perhaps the incorrect version was suggested as a possibility by one person to fill an gap in our knowledge – an idle guess or deliberate fabrication? Through the re-telling, this suggestion has turned into a fact, believed strongly enough to put one’s name against it in a newspaper.

Clearly, a large number of our culture’s knowledge base of “facts” about some of the most inconsequential items can be horribly, horribly wrong.

What can we learn from that about our culture’s knowledge base of facts about important questions? How much of our hard-earned knowledge, picked up slowly over the years, is complete nonsense? How many decisions do we make each day based on these nonsenses?