Friday, January 11, 2019

2019 - Day 11/354 - Friday...Eristic...

I have come to the conclusion, as of yesterday, that I need to lead a more interesting life. Perhaps I just need to remember to take photos of the things I do and see on a daily basis. Or maybe I just need to steal other peoples photos of the things that I find to be interesting. Whichever one is the actual case, I found again today that I had not taken a photo all day long, even though I did a few interesting things (to me), but if I were pressed to prove same, I would be sadly unable to. As a fall-back, I went through my photo files (back to 2011), and found nothing on this day all those years back that I wanted to share with you. I then asked Mrs. Google to search for interesting photos. I then refined the search to locate interesting public domain photos. There were lots, but I chose this one to share with you this evening. It seemed kind of appropriate, but now I am questioning my decision. Perhaps Mrs. Google would have been forthcoming if I had asked for interesting public domain photos January 11, fill in the blank for the year. But I didn't, so this is what you are stuck with.

Eristic - Adjective: characterized by disputatious and often subtle and specious reasoning. The defense attorney tried to convince the jury that the prosecution was using eristic arguments to place her client at the scene of the crime.

Did You Know? Eristic means "argumentative" as well as "logically invalid." Someone prone to eristic arguments probably causes a fair amount of strife amongst his or her conversational partners. (I know that person, and it is a him.) It's no surprise, then, that the word traces its ancestry back to the Greek word for "strife." Eristic and the variant eristical come from the Greek word eristikos, meaning "fond of wrangling," from erizein, "to wrangle," and ultimately from eris, which means "strife." The noun eristic refers either to a person who is skilled at debates based on formal logic or to the art or practice of argument. (It's the latter.)

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