Talk:Not even wrong/Archives/2018

This is an archive of past discussions about Not even wrong. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Interesting google ngram implication

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22not+even+wrong%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%22%20not%20even%20wrong%20%22%3B%2Cc0

shows essentially zero occurances of the phrase until 1980. This is followed by an exponential spike that peaks about 1995. This raises the obvious question, what happened in 1980 that suddenly made this phrase memetic instead of apocryphal?

Something about the run-up to McLean v. Arkansas? The article on Creation science says it started to gain public exposure in the 1960s or so... Just plain Bill (talk) 19:29, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

The fist ref (dated by 2005) in our article says ""Not even wrong" is enjoying a resurgence as the put-down of choice for questionable science" -- I guess the onset in ~~1890~~ 1980 marks the moment that various kooks and kranks discovered the internets, forcing the skeptics to step up their speak up accordingly. Staszek Lem (talk) 19:42, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

1890???

Typo : 1980. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:26, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Definition

I was reading this article and the definition of "not even wrong" struck me as odd. I had a look at the source (an article from the Guardian) and the only mention of this definition is a definition given by some mathematician interviewed. This seems like a problematic source to me185.111.75.108 (talk) 17:40, 28 October 2018 (UTC).