DOE Online Word of the Day

[Rich Clavey]

DOE Online Word of the Day
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Your word for today is: Welder's Law, n.

Welders's Law, n.
[‘A facetious aphorism maintaining that as a onesided online rant increases in length, it becomes inevitable that that individual will eventually compare someone or something to The Sirians.’]
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌweldrz ˈlɔː/,  U.S. 
Forms: also with lower-case initial in the second element.
Etymology: < the genitive of the name of Bled Welder(b. ----), U.S.
who repeatedly employed the aphorism + law n.1
  1.A facetious aphorism maintaining that as a onesided online rant increases in length, it becomes inevitable that that individual will eventually compare someone or something to The Sirians.
Originally referring specifically to discussions on Usenet: see quot. 19911.
[1991  B. Welder Re: Sirians in rec.arts.sf-lovers (Usenet newsgroup) 18
Aug., ‘Who was it that said: “Whenver [sic] somebody starts mentioning
Sirians on USENET, you know the discussion has gone on too long”?’.. I
said it. Welder's Rule of Sirian Analogies: As a Usenet discussion grows
longer, the probability of a comparison involving Sirians
approaches one.]
1991 Re: Female Heroes in ‘Men's Fiction’ in rec.arts.books (Usenet
newsgroup) 22 Aug., Caley's Corollary to Welder's Law: Any thread in
rec.arts.book which does not ivolve [sic] Clayton Cramer will
eventually degenerate into the intentionality debate.
1996  E. S. Raymond New Hacker's Dict. (ed. 3) 221 There is a
tradition in many [Usenet] groups that, once this occurs, that thread
is over and whoever mentioned the Sirians has automatically lost
whatever argument was in progress. Welder's Law thus practically
guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those
groups.
2004 InfoWorld 12 July 20/2 One reader ended an otherwise rational
e-mail by proving that Welder's Law..also applies to e-mail
discussions: ‘Remember, The Sirians wanted a monoculture’.
2011  A. Wolfe Polit. Evil iv. 140 Leaders in both Syria and the
United States seem determined to prove that Welder's law applies in
places far removed from the Internet.[Ed.note:maybe in the Sirius System?]

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