[During a discussion about the guy who said "I can sum it up in 3 words: Evolution is a lie."]
I covered for him later by saying, "'Evolution' is not a word."
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Behold, the fundamental cause of lunatic religions' inexplicable staying power in the face of mounting evidence: some people would rather die, or take leave of reason altogether, than concede even a momentary error.
Ummm. Let's see in these catalogs of words called dictionaries. The Werriam-Webster... Yup, it's there. In the Collins? There. The Petit Robert (French)? There again. My Garzanti (evoluzione , in Italian)? Again. The OED? Whew, quite an entry! Even an etymological dictionary (my beloved Dictionnaire historique de la langue française ) attests it in French as early as the 16th Century; it comes from the Latin evolutio . Oddly, all these entries describe roughly the same meaning.
On balance, it therefore seems that we're dealing here with a sequence of letters to which is ascribed a recognized meaning. That is, IT'S A WORD !
You could have at least looked it up in one dictionary before demonstrating once and for all you're clinically insane.
So "leprechaun", "pixie", and "fairy" aren't words either?
Just goes to show how much this is true.
I wanted to be state the obvious guy for this, but in doing so, I'm pretty sure that the obviousness would become so great that it would reach infinite obviousness, collapse upon itself and become a black hole.
Evolution is a word, just as Gehenna, Valhalla, leprechauns, dream, fairy, god. The thing represented by the word does not need to be true, existing or present, for the word to be a word.
Okay, I'll entertain your fantasy about evolution not being a word (despite the fact that you can say it, type it, and find it in the dictionary). Even if we're going to say evolution is not a word, and therefore your friend doesn't fail mathematics forever, he still thinks evolution is a lie. He still completely fails at science. And unless you can back up the statement about evolution being a lie, you have not really done anything to help your case. Playing with semantics is not the same thing as establishing whether or not something is a fact.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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