Lemmings, Alumin(i)um, and Lies

Did you ever hear the story about lemmings? You know, the one about how they commit mass suicide once a year by throwing themselves from a cliff into the ocean. It was a story that I’d heard or read so often, I was utterly convinced it must be a fact. I believed it to be true for most of my life.

But then, as we all know, the Internet happened, or more accurately, the World Wide Web was created to disseminate scientific literature, and over the course of a few years it became more and more widespread in its use. By the mid 1990s, the World Wide Web had become a sprawling, diverse community of geeks, academics, and folks that had grown up with electronic bulletin boards as a fact of life. The initial content of much of the web was an almost facsimile copy of the types of information that was common on bulletin boards: computer chat, video game chat, and of course, some weird and esoteric content that was only of interest to minor demographics. But it was growing fast. Outside of online pornography, which is arguably the first business case for the web, more and more businesses began eyeing it as a valuable income stream. By the time the problem of true Internet search had been solved, Pandora’s Box was well and truly open. A person could literally spend hours just clicking around, reading, and jumping from one strange site to another. The joke of people having reached “the end of the Internet” rapidly became a thing, but it was far from the truth.

Nobody could have predicted the rapid rise of social media. It didn’t exist, and then all at once it was everywhere. The promise of being able to reach out to thousands of people with shared interests was just too much to resist. At first it was music, games, movies – the kinds of things that young people love to share – but it spiraled ever outward to encompass, well literally everything.

English speakers probably take it for granted that they can converse with diverse people from all over the world. It is, after all, generally the most common language used internationally. (Yes, Chinese is technically more common through the fact of population, but English remains the “standard”.) (For now.) While that almost, kind of, sort of, solves the problem of being understood for many, it also can be a source of problems. English is too fine a term to describe a language that takes on different forms across nations. Within those nations there are also many dialects. Idioms from a small region of England are impenetrable by someone who hails from Florida. For the most part, we seem to have quietly agreed that we should all just stick with the formal language and avoid words and phrases that may confuse others. At the same time, not doing so can be a wonderful way of learning about a culture that otherwise seems to mirror our own. It can a source of delight, humor, intrigue, and sometimes the Internet’s version of mass murder. Horrendous arguments, fueled entirely by ignorance (the fact of not knowing; not the version that indicates that someone doesn’t pay too much attention) are a regular phenomenon.

We’re probably all aware of the phenomenon known as the “Grammar Nazi”. While that’s a horrible phrase, it’s not entirely inaccurate. I must confess to having been guilty of this from time to time. But I have also noticed that there are two (main) arguments that rage on daily.

American English, as seen from the perspective of (some) (British) people, is considered “wrong”, “naïve”, “broken”, “weird”, “stupid”, and so many more adjectives (some of which I won’t/can't repeat here). The main argument goes something like this: “English is our language. We invented it. You borrowed it and now claim it for yourself. And, by the way, there is no such thing as American and British English, there is only English.”

The opposing argument, which I see less often presumably because fewer people actually care, is that British English is quaint with all of its “extra letters” (read: redundant).

British people appear to be mostly unaware of Noah Webster and his partly successful campaign to simplify the English used in the Americas. (Some of his suggestions were just weird!) Webster wasn’t alone in the assertion that English was unnecessarily complicated in both spelling and grammar. A number of reformers seem to have come and gone. Since then, one only need listen to anyone who has learned English as a second language to understand the problem with homophones and why they are entirely confusing without context or having been raised speaking the language.

From the British side of things, the argument can get quite unnecessarily nasty. An element of stereotyping usually ensues, which follows the myth that “Americans are all stupid, fat, and… Donald Trump”. This leads to equally wrongheaded accusations which follow the path of “We won the war. Shut up.

I find this curious, mainly because I am an Anglo-American and I have lived on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than join one or the other camp (which I doubt I ever would have anyway), I tend towards facts. Certain words are almost always at the root of these arguments. British people will say that an American word is silly, and then I’ll find out that it is etymologically British in nature and was exported and forgotten at its source. The words “burgled” and “burglarized” are two such specimens. They both have their origins in the UK and the latter is actually the original. This information is lost to time, and not having read it or heard it anywhere but from the mouths of Americans, you can see where the confusion comes from.

The stereotyping and near Jingoism is unnecessary, but national pride seems to be only part of the equation.

Possibly the most common, famous, and joked about word is “aluminum”. I’ve witnessed this in both US and UK media, television and in movies. The etymology of the word is fascinating. Needless to say, “alumium”, “aluminum”, and “aluminium” were all words coined by Sir Humphry Davy from 1808 onwards. Rather than use the common term “alumina” (are you dizzy yet?), he decided to go with his own invention. The problem was that he just couldn’t settle on one word, and he managed to evolve the term over several years. He finally settled on “aluminium”, but the Americas were happily using “aluminum”, and why not? How long before Davy was to fashion some new term for the metal? Well, he didn’t, but you get the point.

And so, here we are today. The web is a mixed bag of fact and fiction. Sometimes it’s easy to be fooled, and difficult to determine what is truth. It’s a wholly unique problem. I highly doubt that anyone would walk into a public library and declare that half (or more) of the volumes on the shelves were full of half-truths, disputable facts, and outright lies. But that’s what you get when absolutely anyone can create content. Whether their motives are intentional or whether their product comes from ignorance (that word again), is not important. We, as consumers of this content, must be wary and do and be better at discerning which is fact and fiction.

But both books and television programming (and by way of reasoning, documentaries) are also not immune to this problem. I’ve witnessed several television shows that have fallen prey to this particular deception. America’s Secret Slang, a show on the… ahem… History Channel, caught my eye a number of years ago. It purported to tell the story of several common idioms and phrases in the American lexicon. I was intrigued, excited, and wanted to know more. But then I was hit by the growing feeling that I was witnessing nonsense. Many of the sources cited for words and phrases just didn’t ring true. Seconds of “research” later, and I’d uncovered the truth about several of them. A few more minutes of reading uncovered the total horror. The general assertion was that many of the American slang expressions we commonly use actually have their origins in Irish (or Gaelic) The major source for research seems to have been a controversial (some would argue, debunked) book on the contributions of Irish immigrants to American English called How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads written by Daniel Cassidy. There is no danger of libel here. This is commonly referenced across the web and in other places. As an example, the word “baloney” (basically meaning “full of hot air”) was being claimed to have its origins in the Gaelic “bealonna” (beal meaning “mouth”, and onna meaning “foolish”). The main issue seems to be that Gaelic experts entirely dispute that the word “bealonna” even exists. In fact, the only references for it seem to be in that book and on that television show. They both claim that the word has absolutely no link with the cured sausage, “Bologna”.

While the Internet holds the promise of infinite information, all carefully curated, fact-checked to the letter, and as accurate as anyone could know given the whatever current standards are applicable, it also lends itself to accidental inaccuracies and out-and-out abuse. The experiment is still running and only time can tell whether it will be a total success or the source of new, unanticipated horrors.

It’s especially important to be wary, whether you’re just conversing on social media or creating that next great piece of content or writing a book. Especially the latter. You wouldn’t want to have your accidental falsehoods disseminated on television, would you?

And if you didn’t already know, the lemmings’ tale was pure fantasy. White Wilderness was created as part of Disney’s True Life Adventure series, some of the first wildlife documentaries ever created. (Still not libel here; this is all true.) But the lemmings were forced from the cliff by clever filmmakers into a river. A final shot shows the ocean awash with lemming corpses. Disney executives got the idea from somewhere, purely based on actual lemming activity, that lemmings do this to alleviate overpopulation. In fact, lemmings tend to disperse in all directions in a rather haphazard and rapid fashion, which occasionally leads to accidental drowning for a small number. This is a far cry from the mass suicide depicted by Disney. And so, just like that, an urban legend was born.

It’s easy to be fooled, and it can happens to the best of us (and me), but we can and should take steps to arm ourselves with knowledge by using and citing reputable sources. The only task remaining is to figure out which ones are reputable, and which only claim to be.