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Cake day: July 1st, 2025

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  • My guess is that it descended from “rascal”, or is closely related. I know a lot of French and some Spanish and Italian, and I don’t think “rascal” appears in those languages, so it can’t come from Latin/Greek. But, it doesn’t sound Anglo Saxon or Germanic, so I reckon it might be Shakespearian, he introduced loads of new words like this.

    Edit: I have just googled, I was mostly wrong. “Rascal” comes from Latin through old French, then “rapscallion” evolved in English in the 17th century to be able to add spoken emphasis. It’s just easier to contemptuously spit “you rapscallion” than “you rascal”.






  • The words you’re using have rules. I don’t mean this in an adversarial way, but you are wrong.
    Irrefutable evidence does not prove the claim, it just proves that you can’t refute the evidence. Video evidence can be misleading or fake. DNA evidence needs context to prove anything.
    Anyway, like I say, these things have rules. The only things in the entire human domain that can be positively proved are mathematical statements. This is why gravity remains a theory, even after 350 years. One single counterexample disproves it. There are numerous examples of this happening in the context of the death penalty, where a jury was so convinced of guilt they condemned someone who was later executed, then, later still, new information emerged which proved them to be innocent.
    Just by the pure first-principles of logic, the death sentence is a bad idea.