Good morning~ I hope that you are all doing well, as we skid headfirst into the end of the week (somehow). I… did not leave my apartment yesterday because it was One Of Those Days, but today is better and tomorrow is the weekend and you, you all are lovely <3 so stay warm and stay beautiful, fuzzies!
Random musing, but:
I’d like a new phrase for second-order homonyms. My partner asked if “conspiracy theories” came out of the JFK era, which seems like a reasonable question. The OED has an attestation of “conspiracy theory” from 1909, but, like… “conspiracy” is a very old word, so “a theory that there was a conspiracy” is a phrase quite different from “JFK was assassinated by a meteorite carefully steered by Moon Nazis with the help of the AFL-CIO.”
I mentioned this when I mused about “rootin’, tootin’” a while back; it’s something that I think Internet etymologists can sometimes be too hasty about. That goes for me, too, obviously. But, words can have all the same letters (and phrases can have all the same words) without really being “related” or without one serving as the “origin” even if it’s older.
In any case, “conspiracy theory” in the sense you and I would understand it dates back before 1909 and into the 19th century, at least. As far as I can tell, the earliest presidential assassination for which there were ‘conspiracy theories’ identified as such and dismissed as such was Garfield and Charles Guiteau, about whom an article from July, 1881 says:
THE CONSPIRACY THEORY ABANDONED
WASHINGTON, July 4 — Chief Brooks, of the Secret Service Division, says he has followed up every clue and every theory of conspiracy, and has proven satisfactorily that there was none. He has reported to Secretary Windom that Gitteau had no confederate, not even a confidant; that he was alone in the assassination. The conspiracy theory has been abandoned by everybody.
But then, the Secret Service would want you to think that, wouldn’t they……….
