Add Homonym Attacks! #48
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
Ten Useful Facts for Flag Day!
All of the following facts are true. None of these are jokes. Most are taken from Richard Shenkman’s book “I love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not.”
1. The bill that established our flag consisted of a single sentence:
Resolved, that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.
2. Being that this bill excelled in brevity, early flags varied quite a bit. For instance, the stars were sometimes placed in rows; other times they were placed in circles. Stars also varied between 5 and 6 points.
3. Betsy Ross did not sew the first American flag. That was a story made up by her grandson. Congress credits Francis Hopkinson for the flag’s design, but his contributions are also somewhat suspect.
4. At one point the flag over the capitol had eighteen stripes.
Why?
They just didn’t care.
5. Ben Franklin and John Adams once described the flag’s stripes as “alternately red, white and blue” in a letter to the king of Naples.
6. American soldiers didn’t fight under the flag until the Mexican-American war.
7. Schools weren’t required to fly the flag until 1890.
8. Our earliest “pledge of allegiance” to the flag was in 1892.
9. It wasn’t until 1898 that Americans began saluting the flag. The “right hand over the heart” salute wasn’t adopted until World War II. It replaced our original salute which was deemed “too Nazi-ish.”
10. The flag code did not become part of federal law until 1976.
