DOE Online Word of the Day

[John Bailey]

*stands up and applauds*

I laughed out loud, as the kids say.

*sits back down and farts and thinks of Dante*

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 8:54 PM, Rich Clavey <antizoyd at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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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