It's not about scientific sense for that person, it's about presenting AI as being high-prestige and clever and sciency by putting it into something that is also high-prestige, clever, and sciency. They aren't thinking about E = mc^2 in any context other than it being a famous thing that the guy whose name is a synonym for "genius" wrote.
Well, duh, Einstein came up with E = mc^2, and science had decades of explosive growth. But he didn't invent science. If E = mc^2 was truly fundamental to our understanding of the relationship between matter and energy, we couldn't have done any science with them before that, which is clearly false. How would science have fared if scientists didn't have E = mc^2 to inspire and guide them? Exactly. Now we just gotta add AI to the scientific process; things will go into turbo mode. /s
I was gonna comment: of course his job title is tech management consultant and the guy replying has a PhD in physics from MIT.
I was thinking at first that it has to be satire but then realized that I personally have worked with consultbros with the level of Dunning-Kruger required to post something like that.
the first one is clearly a joke. the second is some bum doing shitty AAVE while also trying to prove how smart he is to someone making a joke. gurrrrl.
Which also means anyone carrying the virus becomes an incubator for it. We would have to kill 100% of infected people, rise the global temp to 132 for a minute and make sure there is nowhere airconditioned, or just cooler than the outside, because that area will also keep the virus alive.
I have to do this regularly with my mum. Earlier today she sent me an email with the subject "right ear" and it had photos of various people from the 1800s. Just replied "?"
yes although not a satisfactory one! she said the right ear of one of the men featured in the photographs reminded her of my 8 month old's ears lmao
Edit: just found out that one of the people in the photograph (there's about 30 people) is my great grandfather. My mum: "sorry I thought it was obvious"
Not exactly the same, but in the show BoJack Horseman there are a few examples of the phrase "....what?" used with chef's kiss PHENOMENAL comedic timing.
Very much in the spirit of this post, even if it's not exactly what you're asking for.
Listen to Epic the Musical on Spotify or any music app, or watch the musical together with any of like a billion fan made animatics on YouTube, you will not regret it.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a good rant about why as an atheist he still uses BC and AD. The Gregorian monks worked out a wildly accurate calendar, with appropriate leap days such that the 12 month calendar stays accurate over thousands of years. Yeah, they can get credit for that one.
The Catholic Church really wasn't anti science in any way. That idea is a relatively recent one for their loose association as being Christians who share a name with anti science evangelicals and stuff. You can disagree on ideological grounds, but they did love their scholarship.
As someone who saw this tweet live, Merriam Webster continued to explain when the dude doubled down. Worst part is that people genuinely were on the other dudes side saying āyou canāt cite yourself as a sourceā
I mean, they are at least correct about self-referencing as evidence. The correct reference would be some historical attestation or something. If any of those folks googled "goodbye etymology" they would find what they want but instead they're arguing with the damned dictionary.
The general rule of thumb is that a movie needs to make double its budget at the box office to be considered a success. Which isn't quite the same thing as breaking even, but also the budget usually doesn't include things like advertising, so you do have to exceed the listed budget by some amount to actually break even.
But the 2025 Superman movie had a budget of $225 million, so would need $450 million to be a success by the above metric, not $800 million. And its actual box office sales were $618 million.
I mean, as silly as it is to question the dictionary, it is a second hand source. Their job is to compile information, while they have researchers on staff the dictionary isn't the primary source, and definitely not the social media side. Probably not something a random person cares about, but eytomology is a real scientific study and needs evidence and primary sources to back it's claims.
Now, I decided to search to see where the dictionaries are getting their primary source from. Most of the sources just stated it as known fact, didn't attribute any source, or attributed the dictionary. The dictionaries I looked at didn't have a source listed either. Merriam-Webster only gives themselves as a citation.
So I did some looking into it, there was a book published in 1999 by Leslie K. Arnovick titled "Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development" which on page 99 and 100 contains a table showing examples of what they view as the same phrase altering from "god be with you" in the 1400s becoming "goodby" in the 1720s-1750s. However, while they cite a number of sources about the meaning of prayer, they don't give any citations for the table itself. Furthermore all of their citations are from other books written in the 1900s, no citations to works in the described times. So this source is yet again another secondhand source that isn't attributing the original research it supposedly is writing from.
They do go on to cite some sources from the 1600s a few pages later where within the same play different characters will use variations of expressions ranging from "god-b'w'y" and "Good b'we" which comes with a question. Why does the expression differ within the same text? And not just in one text, but across multiple different texts multiple variations in which both good and God are used, seemingly interchangeably as a generic parting phrase. Just because two expressions can be used interchangeably doesn't mean that one came from the other. On page 104 they speculate that good may have been intended as a secular variation of the same parting gesture.
Something that I'm curious about however is that the word "good" while being used interchangeably with the word "god" during the 1500s and 1600s, it appears to have been its own word during the 1200s with a similar meaning to what it has now. So purely as my own conjecture as a layperson, it seems reasonable that a highly religious population without a standardized pronunciation and spelling would partially combine the words good and God given that they had a favorable disposition of God and that good was a word with a positive meaning, and that "god be with you" meaning a message of positive departure, and "good be with you" as an alternative phrasing of the same thing wouldn't be entirely out there.
But in the end it's all speculation. I found another source, "Confusing Etymological Facts with Uncertainties" by Anna Faktorovich published in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal Volume 16 Issue 1, where she points out that a lot of eytomological research is based on flawed secondary sources. She mentions the "Richard Vertegans Restitution" published in 1673 which is available on internet archive in middle English, is a source for much of our understanding of middle English and that author regularly tried to use words he didn't understand or were straight up invented by Vertegans. That a lot of dictionaries just pull this guys research without attribution.
I don't really know what my main takeaway from all of this is. I was expecting to find a source that either confirmed or denied the connection. Instead I found speculation with some weird inconsistencies, which I shouldn't be surprised by given that the only primary sources are over 400 years old and didn't have the kind of scientific rigor that I would prefer. I kinda wish that Merriam-Webster would explain the uncertainty of the connection rather than presenting it as certain fact, and I would definitely prefer that they make it known what primary research and sources they pull from, if not on their social media posts then on their actual website and dictionary. I dunno, I guess I just feel a little disappointed with the field of eytomology.
I mean, you shouldn't trust reddit comments as a source, this is a tertiary source at best. Its why I included the sources I read from so that people interested could read for themselves and make up their own minds about it.
The reason why you're "disappointed with the field of etymology" is because, as you acknowledge, you're a layman in the field of etymology. So you bring in glancingly related secondary sources to incorrectly undermine the question at hand, and since you don't understand foundational elements of the field you think that there are uncertainties behind totally straightforward phenomena.
For a latter example, you say "within the same play different characters will use variations of expressions ranging from "god-b'w'y" and "Good b'we" which comes with a question. Why does the expression differ within the same text?" In reality, this is totally unsurprising and very common. Since spelling was still being standardized at the time period, different spellings for the same phrase -- yes, in the same text, by the same author -- are totally normall and expected. This does not raise any notable questions.
For a former example, you use a minor journal's review of a pop-humanities book, which briefly mentions the "goodbye" etymology, to cast doubt on that etymology -- based on a claim that the field as a whole is gullibly using one problematic source to motivate this etymological claim. But field as a whole is not resting on the Verstegen source. Critical analyses of this and other sources is the central basis of the field.
The etymology of "goodbye -> god be with you" is frankly totally uncontroversial. It is based on multiple strands of evidence, from extensive historical examples (the OED has many longstanding examples and the editors are not just mindlessly citing these examples but instead using decades of research as a basis), to parallel formations in other words and other languages (just off hand, consider gospel and adieu, but there are more).
"But in the end it's all speculation" -- yes, if you think all of historical study is speculation, then it's all speculation. But when you don't know what you don't know, that's where you end up.
Merriam Webster is a popular dictionary. It is not sensible for a commercial product like this to spend thousands of words backing up the etymology of each phrase it includes. Instead, it is efficiently presenting the critical consensus on facts like this in order to better inform readers. If that's not what you want, don't read Merriam Webster. Instead, you can make a career change and get a PhD in historical linguistics.
I need to tell you thank you for this comment. As I get further into my own education, I realize both how little I know, but even moreso how little most redditors know. You've put it perfectly in this comment the issue with most laymen on this siteĀ
For the commenter you are responding to, this paper has some good discussion on the etymology of the word goodbye, and provides a good demonstration of the strategies linguists need to use when determining a word's etymology.
They seem to think they should be able to find a smoking gun, a primary source where someone in 1600 writes "Boy I'm glad we aren't using that clunky old god be with ye phrase any more, goodbye is where it's at!". But for the vast majority of words in any language, people aren't talking about them like that.
Instead linguists have to use tools like:
reconstruction of transitional forms
language trends
analogous constructions
phonetic analysis
A layperson almost certainly isn't going to find a satisfactory explanation just by looking at old documents. And dictionaries are going to continue their business of being descriptive by citing the occurrence/usage of words, but they certainly aren't going to go into all the business above. They are simply going to report the common consensus from the people who do go into all of that.
If they think that's speculation...well, sure, I guess? But in that case, so is any fact reconstructed on the basis of evidence rather than direct observation.
For what it's worth, Merriam-Webster is the authority on American English. If I'm writing a paper and cite them, the professor wouldn't ask for a better or more primary source. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but the understanding is that if Merriam-Webster prints it, it means they did the research to back it up; and, if another dictionary disagrees with them, they probably (but not definitely) didn't do the same level of research.
While it's fair to say it's speculation, it's informed speculation. Like when a physicist tells you that some particle probably behaves a certain way but it hasn't been confirmed, it's still safe for you to assume that's how it will be.
While questioning the first half is reasonable (though a sufficient expaination wouldn't fit in a twitter post), I think the deadpan "what" is in response to the second half. The origins of "goodbye" may be ambiguous, but "good morning", etc... aren't shortened forms of anything and have incredibly straightforward etymology. It's just wishing someone have, well, a good morning.
I think your expectations of what you wanted to find to satisfy yourself were not completely realistic.
Etymology is the study of how all words being spoken by the entire population of speakers have changed across all of time.
It is exceedingly rare that you would ever have a single event to document when words universally change for the whole population, in the same moment.
You seem to have been expecting a scenario where there was a single day in the past when a single person announced that there was a new spelling for a phrase, and that everyone switched over. Goodbye doesn't have a moment like that, but there's more substantive evidence for the god-be-with-ye than any other theory. That's not "it's all speculative and every theory is just a guess". That kind of conclusion shows less scientific rigor, not more.
It's even a little like the creationists who think that it's somehow damning that people who study evolution can't point to a single photograph of apes becoming humans, and that it somehow means there's no way that evolution has scientific rigor.
I think you are dismissing academic work without understanding its value.
"It's a good general theory with academic support, but I won't be convinced without a single moment of undeniable evidence that will convince a casual non-academic. Where's the Smoking Goon?"
Well I think the reaction here is less about them questioning the second hand source and more about the logic of asking whatĀ "good evening" and the like is an alteration of...because it's sorta self explanatory lol.Ā
AFAIK bye is simply a shortened form of goodbye. I think the dude questioning the dictionary doesn't understand that. If you interpret bye as its own standalone word, then it's easy to think "good evening" might be related.
They're wrong, but I can see where the logic lies.
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u/PyramidicContainment thoroughly enjoys mugs 1d ago