Fallacy

[Dr. Goodword]

• fallacy •

Pronunciation: fæ-lê-si • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. An untruth, a false idea, conclusion, or argument. 2. Falseness, incorrectness, erroneousness.

Notes: The adjective accompanying today's noun is fallacious, and it does permit an adverb, fallaciously. We are also allowed to create an abstract noun, fallaciousness, from this adjective even though the meaning is pretty much the same as the second meaning of fallacy.

In Play: Fallacies are untruths, which means we are aswirl in them. We even find them entangled in our knowledge of words: "It is a widely-held fallacy that the Spanish architect Gaudí is the eponym of the English adjective gaudy." By the way, posh is not an abbreviation of "port out, starboard home" from the days of the British Empire in India. Another fallacy.

Word History: Today's Good Word is a makeover of Old French fallace, descendant of Latin fallacia "deceit". This word was built on fallax (fallac-s) "deceitful", derived from fallere "to deceive". The root of the Latin word also underlies English fail and false and, probably, Greek felos "deceitful". For sure we find it, after regular historical changes, in Russian zlo "evil". (It would not be a fallacy to say that we owe a debt of gratitude to Harry J. Walter for suggesting today's Good Word.)

[Perry Lassiter]

By definition, fallacy is a part of logicand can be studied systematically. It comes in roughly two forms, Aristotelian and mathematical or symbolic. Both work well. The lattef resembles identities in Trigonometry. I've come to recognize that a great deal of fallacies can be avoided by clear definitions. My roommate and Iin college loved to debate with others seeking to find one proposition or sentence mutually agreed on. THEN and only then, we would define the terms to prove our point. Plato has Socrates doing much the same in the dialogues. Incidentally, there's a fantastic book still in print called How to Lie with Statistics. Every high school student needs to be equipped!

[misterdoe]

A coworker who knows I have health issues sent me an email about supposed issues with artificial sweeteners. But the essay was full of fallacies. Most of them were in the form of "sweetener X creates condition Y; type Z cancer often involves condition Y; therefore, sweetener X causes cancer." By that logic, loud noise, nervousness, and broken bones could all cause cancer.

[Philip Hudson]

Perry would have to go highfalutin on us about this word. I am impressed.

[Perry Lassiter]

Being impressed by anything I say is a fallacy.