Friday, December 11, 2009

Great Newish Words

Couple of cool new words from the Word Spy:

warmist: n. A person who believes that the current global warming trend is the result of man-made factors. Also: global warmist. —adj.

The road to Copenhagen has proved to be a rocky one. This past fortnight, ahead of the climate-change summit that starts in the Danish capital on Monday, the air has been thick with pejorative cries of "warmist" and "denier". The former are those who subscribe to the view that the increase in the Earth's temperature in recent decades is the fault of man's profligate use of the planet's fossil fuels; the latter may or may not dispute that the temperature is rising, or that it is in some way man's fault, but are certainly not convinced that dramatic remedial action is required.
—"Copenhagen climate summit: A time for ingenuity and political leadership," The Daily Telegraph, December 5, 2009

dysrationalia: n. The tendency to think or act irrationally in certain situations, despite having sufficient intelligence.
—dysrational adj.

In 1994, Stanovich began comparing people's scores on rationality tests with their scores on conventional intelligence tests. What he found is that they don't have a lot to do with one another. On some tasks, there is almost a complete dissociation between rational thinking and intelligence. You might, for example, think more rationally than someone much smarter than you. Likewise, a person with dysrationalia is almost as likely to have higher than average intelligence as he or she is to have lower than average intelligence.
—Kurt Kleiner, "Why Smart People Do Stupid Things," University of Toronto Magazine, June 1, 2009

No comments: