Sunday, March 11, 2007

Do You Think I Meant Country Matters?

Better fix this right away.
Posted by olvlzl.
Pedia-failure? Ah, I see what you ..... No, it doesn’t refer to that. Maybe you suspect that I was calling attention to the fact that Andy Schlafly has spared no expense in putting together a crack team of home-schoolers to produce his encyclopedia, a pedipedia, as it were. Maybe you thought that this could be an indication that an ideologically based encyclopedia produced by a bunch of home-schooled moppets might just flop? Ok. Well, that wasn’t my intention, though it’s not bad, now that I think of it. But I can’t claim that was my intention.

Your mistake is, perhaps, a result of shoddy research, of folk etymology or, as we call it sometimes, jumping to a lazy-assed conclusion.

If you looked up “encyclopedia” in a real reference work, you would see that “-pedia” is a corruption of the Greek “paideia” or education. An encyclopedia is an attempt to provide material that would be useful in producing a well-rounded education. What knowledgeable persons call a “liberal education”. Looking at the Conservapedia, that doesn’t seem to be something being risked. Noting the “articles” I linked to, one on as vital a right-wing subject as “capitalism”, I think that a fair evaluation would be that it’s a collection of badly written stubs, as they are called elsewhere. I was calling attention to the fact that the thing might appear to be useless for learning anything.

It began in an attempt to make a pun on the name of Andy’s dam, though that wasn’t a success either.