There is no particular order to my pet peeves presented here. I simply add them as they come to mind. If you disagree with any of these you can email me.
"Be very, very careful what you put into that head,
because you will never, ever get it out."
Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530)
Pathetic Fallacy:
The mistake of attributing human aspirations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, or traits to
events or inanimate objects which do not possess the capacity for such qualities. See the
discussion in any good encyclopedia.
I am not in favor of lying. Yet, I see it done frequently, not so much as to purposely mislead, but as a way to hide the inability to offer a simple and correct explanation. I will not offer cute silliness and then rationalize it as but a simplification in the service of understanding. Understand what, I wonder?
And so it is, that I have come to deplore the frequent use of the pathetic fallacy as a device for explaining anything.
The Pathetic Fallacy - Animism:
A belief that there there is conscious life --- spirits --- which occupy and animate
things in the natural world such as the rocks and the air. For someone who was an animist,
the things of which I complain would not be fallacious, but appropriate. For someone
explaining some scientific theory, on the other hand....
The pathetic fallacy is the name given the specious attribution of emotions --- which is
to say, pathos --- to the inanimate. Thus, when some entity like NASA tells children that,
“the moving object, due to its mass, wants to keep going,” it misleads them with
the pathetic fallacy. For, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, an inanimate mass
doesn’t have any wants. Well, there is a belief system which posits that everything
contains a spirit which motivates and directs its actions, and that system is called
animism. But, animism is not science. So, apparently we have NASA promoting animism among
our children under the guise of promoting science. This is scary. (One then wonders if
NASA thinks this way, or it only wants children to do so).
Rule:
When discussing the behavior of the natural world, you are not obliged to explain it; you could merely describe it. However, if you do offer an explanation, you are obliged to get it right.A teacher, writer or anyone must not present nonsense as a way of pretending to gave an explanation, and, alas, to offer the pathetic fallacy is to offer scientific nonsense.
You know you are in trouble if...
Any time anyone uses words suggestive of human aspirations, or emotions, to explain the
behavior of the inanimate natural world, there is trouble: love, hate, want, attempt and
try are high on the list.
Simple Fallacy (there are millions of these):
The water in a sink (or toilet) rotates one way as it drains in the northern hemisphere
and the other way in the southern hemisphere. Called the Coriolis Effect, it is caused by
the rotation of the Earth.
Fact:
The direction of rotation of a draining sink is determined by the way it was filled, or by vortices introduced while washing, regardless of the hemisphere in which one is located.