Talk:1898: October 2017
I'm so (too) old I don't even know that movie :-/ 108.162.229.208 09:59, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
Aren't factoids "fake facts"? Maybe there's an inside joke that the fact is incorrect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid 172.68.143.66 17:29, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
- "...or a true, but brief or trivial, item of news or information." 108.162.212.125 21:40, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
- Its USE has been to mean "tiny, usually insignificant, fact", but I've seen it pointed out many times that the "-oid" suffix means fake or not quite. Like a humanoid is something that appears human-like without being human. Thus "factoid" would mean "seems like a fact but isn't one". "A tomato is certainly a vegetable" would thus be a factoid. Or a statement that seems like fact but is actually debatable. However, while using "factoid" the way Randall is here would be inaccurate, I've never seen this word used any other way. It's used this way so often, I could see crowd-edited sources like Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary including this definition. NiceGuy1 (talk) 03:59, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
- The -oid suffix means 'having the form of'. By definition, a fact has the form of a fact, so must be factoid. However, non-facts could also be factoids if they have the form of a fact (for example, if they are commonly repeated as if true). When [1] complains (as he often does) that he will never understand humanoids, he doesn't mean to exclude humans - they too are humanoid. Of course, it's slightly odd that he uses this term at all - having 'grown up' on Bajor, you might expect him to be more inclined to consider them 'Bajoranoid'. One might argue that he is in fact saying 'Bajoranoid', and the universal translator is translating it as 'humanoid', but that would seem to suggest that it is playing fast and loose with the translation, since the accurate translation into English would be, er, 'Bajoranoid'. I may have spent too much time thinking about this.
162.158.155.32 12:49, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
The explanation is referring to 11 months ago for the election. However, the wording of the title text, "the start of the election", seems different. 11 months ago was one day long, seems weird to describe the election as "starting" then as the election ended that same day. I think Randall is referring to the start of campaigning. As an outsider I don't know specifically, but the time I'm thinking of would have been January, February, March 2016, something like that. Actually I feel like I've heard something about "primaries" and "April". NiceGuy1 (talk) 03:59, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
