A Venn diagram of woo and bollocks

March 22, 2013 • 1:57 am

by Matthew Cobb

Crispian Jago has a blog (not a website) called The Reason Stick. The other day he posted this excellent Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense., with four fields: Religious Bollocks, Quackery Bollocks, Pseudoscientific Bollocks and Paranormal Bollocks. At its heart, like a malevolent spider (sorry, spiders!) sits Scientology… Click to enbiggen and find your favourite woo!

woo

h/t @SLSingh

58 thoughts on “A Venn diagram of woo and bollocks”

    1. I don’t think adherents to mainstream religions are supposed to believe in ghosts. E.g. in Christianity souls go to heaven or hell.

        1. And this is evidence for the existence of ghosts, against the existence of ghosts, or for the gullibility of humans?

  3. What a very neat and proper use of the term ‘bollocks’. When the Sex Pistols released their album ‘Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols’ The Metropolitan Police hauled them into court on obscenity charges. The word ‘bollocks’ originally was used to describe a preacher and as such talking bollocks was akin to preaching. Nowadays the popular interpretation (gonads) is the order of the day. (Check it out on Wikipedia)

    1. Re preacher; that’s unsupported by my Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

      Btw, it is one of Prof. Brian Cox’s favourite expressions of contempt.

      /@

        1. I agree that the court case is well known, but of the two sources for this claim, one is behind a paywall (The Times) and the other is anecdotal evidence from Richard Branson in an interview. Branson mentions the professor of linguistics who was also a priest, but doesn’t name him. So: Wikipedia is hardly authoritative here.

          But I have found an article which is clearer: “Professor [James] Kinsley told the court that the word had been used in records dating back to 1,000 AD and meant ‘small ball’ in Anglo Saxon times. He said it appeared in medieval bibles and veterinary books to describe small things of an appropriate shape. The word was used colloquially for centuries and as a nickname for clergymen who talked ‘nonsense’ in their sermons.”

          So, it was indeed used to refer to preachers, but only because the “nonsense” sense was already established. Hence, it’s wrong to say, “The word ‘bollocks’ originally was used to describe a preacher…” [my emphasis]

          /@

          1. Well thanks for your effort I must admit that I always assumed the ‘gonads’ version until I read the court case summary. Just goes to show that the jury accepted the Sex Pisols bollocks 🙂

    2. This definition is not in the OED. It is an urban myth, no matter how much Wikipedia might believe it. The testicle definition of bollock goes back to the 14th century. “Bollocks” as in rubbish or as a verb are both 20th century, according to the OED.

      1. It wasn’t just Wikipedia there was the court case which vindicated the use as I described. Nevertheless, thanks for putting me right all issues of bollocks 😉

        1. I bet you wish you’d never mentioned it!

          HTOED>/i>:
          = testicles, from 1744 (earlier bullock OE-1579, bullock-stone           c1460)
          = a bungle, from 1950 (but earlier bollix/bollux 1935-57 – seems to be a polite form)
          = instance of absurdity, from 1919 (Australian)
          = nonsense, rubbish, from 1969 [!!!] (but balls, 1890; ballocks, 1939)

          So… what did Kinsley actually say in court… ?

          /@

          2. Not at all Ant ‘Evolutiuon is True’ applies to words and meanings also. There is so much to know in words and meanings of. I appreciate being put right. I have been reading Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language and it gives some excellent examples of word evolution. Likewise the OED is a tremendous asset to our language. I certainly have no issues with the etymology you have highlighted and I never meant to spout so much bollocks on the origins of bollocks. (Purely as joke here) Even Shakespear gave a mention “What kind of men are these that shroud their nuts in parenthesise’ Sorry about the bollocks everybody.:-(

    3. You should read that more carefully.

      Bollocks originally meant testicles. It became a slang term for “preacher” in the 17th century.

  4. I always enjoy Crispian Jago’s satire. He’s hilarious! His homeopathy video had me giggling for days.

  7. One could spend hours harmlessly arguing over the correct placement of some of these! Personally I reckon all the Quackery Bollocks items should be in an intersection with one or more of the other categories. Homeopathy, for example, should be in the intersection with Pseudoscience.

  8. I couldn’t understand the need to break down “Religious Bollocks” into subdivisions. “Religion” comprises the totality of “Religious Bollocks”.

      1. Try this: open your OED to the ENB page and see how many words are there. My guess is not very many. Then turn to the EMB page and see how many words are there. I’m quite sure there will be lots (embalm, embankment, embargo, and so on).

        Same goes for EMP v. ENP, IMB v. INB, and IMP v. INP. Labial consonants call for em- or im-, not en- or in-.

          1. Not really, since “l” isn’t a labial (specifically, bilabial) consonant.

            The prefix “en-” (“in-”) mutates to “em-” (“im-” before the bilabial stops, “m”, “p” and “b”. (And to “in-” to “ir-” before “r”.)

            But not in front of “f” or “v” (labiodental fricatives) – or any non-labial consonants, of course.

            /@

  10. OK… I expect much laughter at this question… but do/don’t ear candles work? Never tried it and never will, but does the warmth from the candle have any beneficial effects at all?

    3. Ear candles! Now there’s some woo.

      My mother used to use these things until one day I finally insisted on an experiment.

      I set one aflame and held it in my hand until it burned down to the usual point. Sure enough, the bottom of the “candle” was full of all the brown wax that she had been convinced was “pulled up” from her ears.

      She is also into homeopathic woo. Sigh.

    1. oh just ignore me. I see the periodic table was done by the same brilliant reason stick guy. sorry.

  12. I’ve never even heard of Rolfing.

    It sounds like a bizarre sexual practice involving Two Little Boys.

    (Apologies – even I’m offended by that).

  14. I don’t think you can unequivocally call acupuncture “bollocks.” It’s true that the individual acupuncture points are very likely to have no meaning (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769056/) , but the jury is still out as to whether its palliative effects are merely placebo.
    See:
    http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n7/full/nn.2562.html
    archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=414934

  15. Actually, we can call acupuncture bollocks.

    It has no plausible method of working.

    It has never been shown to work better than a placebo. And there have been many trials.

    Finally, “fake” acupuncture; acupuncture with toothpicks randomly taped down which don’t puncture the skin, has show equivalent effectiveness to “real” acupuncture.

    So the jury really isn’t out. It’s just that every time another study fails to provide any evidence for efficiency, proponents repeat that more studies need to be conducted.

  16. Scientologists must be proud to be at the center of all bollocks – as it has been for tens of trillions of years.

  18. Crispian also has a splendid Period Table of Irrational Nonsense at http://crispian-jago.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/periodic-table-of-irrational-nonsense.html. And for those of us (mainly in the UK I guess) who fondly remember Ladybird Books from childhood, he’s also produced the Ladybird Book of Atheist Buses (http://crispian-jago.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Atheist%20Bus%20Campaign) and a couple about homeopathy and chiropractors (http://crispian-jago.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Ladybird%20Books). Wouldn’t it have been great if Ladybird really had produced a “Quacks and Shysters Series”?

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