Kiss Anyone, Just Not the Gunners Daughter

Kiss Anyone, Just Not the Gunners Daughter Kiss Anyone, Just Not the Gunners Daughter Kiss Anyone, Just Not the Gunners Daughter By Kate Evans A kiss is just a pleasant reminder that two heads are better than one. Unknown Kissing is a very ancient and widely spread means of greeting and showing affection. Kissing conjures up sweet images of romantic embraces or familial love. One imagines kissing a loved one, a child, a family member. Yet apparently, according to these often forgotten, helpful phrases, kissing a book, some dust, or even the foot of a small woodland creature can have a much deeper meaning. For example, a kiss-behind-the-garden-gate is a country name for a pansy. If you kiss the place to make it well, you are referring to the old custom of sucking the poison out of a wound. If you are kissing the dust, you are completely overwhelmed or humiliated. While kissing hands seems fairly straight forward, it harkens back to the tradition of kissing the hand of a sovereign or a saints statue. If the statue was placed too high to kiss directly, people would kiss their own hands and wave it in towards the saint. On a less romantic note, kissing the gunners daughter meant being flogged aboard a ship. Soldiers who were to be flogged were tied to the cannons breech. While there is perhaps less flogging going on these days, the phrase can still refer to a stiff punishment. And finally, if you kiss a hares foot then you are late. You have missed your appointment and the hare hopped by, leaving its footprint for you to see. While one should perhaps steer away from getting flogged, these other colloquialisms might just come in handy. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Expressions category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Writing a Reference Letter (With Examples)8 Proofreading Tips And Techniques20 Ways to Cry

Definition and Examples of Hasty Generalizations

Definition and Examples of Hasty Generalizations A hasty generalization is a  fallacy in which a conclusion is not logically justified by sufficient or unbiased evidence. Its also called an  insufficient sample, a converse accident, a faulty generalization, a biased generalization, jumping to a conclusion,  secundum quid, and a  neglect of qualifications. Author Robert B. Parker illustrates the concept via an excerpt from his novel Sixkill: It was a rainy day in Harvard Square, so the foot traffic through the atrium from Mass Ave to Mount Auburn Street was heavier than it might have been if the sun were out. A lot of people were carrying umbrellas, which most of them furled inside. I had always thought that Cambridge, in the vicinity of Harvard, might have had the most umbrellas per capita of any place in the world. People used them when it snowed. In my childhood, in Laramie, Wyoming, we used to think people who carried umbrellas were sissies. It was almost certainly a  hasty generalization, but I had never encountered a hard  argument  against it. (Sixkill. Putnam, 2011) A Too-Small Sample Size By definition, an  argument  based on a hasty generalization always proceeds from the particular to the general. It takes a small sample and tries to extrapolate an idea about that sample and apply it to a larger population, and it doesnt work.  T. Edward Damer explains: It is not uncommon for an arguer to draw a conclusion or generalization based on only a few instances of a phenomenon. In fact, a generalization is often drawn from a single piece of supporting data, an act that might be described as committing  the fallacy of the lonely fact....Some areas of inquiry have quite sophisticated guidelines for determining the sufficiency of a sample, such as in voter preference samples or television viewing samples. In many areas, however, there are no such guidelines to assist us in determining what would be sufficient grounds for the truth of a particular conclusion. (Attacking Faulty Reasoning, 4th ed. Wadsworth, 2001) Generalizations as a whole, hasty or not, are problematic at best, anyway, though a large sample size wont always get you off the hook. The sample that one wants to generalize needs to be representative of the population as a whole, and it should be random. For  example, the polls  prior to the 2016  presidential election missed segments of the population who would come out to vote for Donald Trump and thus underestimated his supporters and their potential impact on the election. Polls knew the race would be close, but by not having a representative sample to generalize the outcome, the polls got it wrong.   Ethical Ramifications Stereotypes come about from trying to make generalizations about people or groups of them. Doing it is at best a minefield and at worst, has ethical considerations. Julia T. Wood explains: A hasty generalization is a broad claim based on too-limited evidence. It is unethical to assert a broad claim when you have only anecdotal or isolated evidence or instances. Consider two examples of hasty generalizations based on inadequate data:- Three congressional representatives have had affairs. Therefore, members of Congress are adulterers.- An environmental group illegally blocked loggers and workers at a nuclear plant. Therefore, environmentalists are radicals who take the law into their own hands.In each case, the conclusion is based on limited evidence. In each case the conclusion is hasty and fallacious. (Communication in Our Lives, 6th ed. Wadsworth, 2012) Critical Thinking Is Key Overall, to avoid making, spreading, or believing hasty generalizations, take a step back, analyze the opinion, and consider the source. If a statement comes from a biased source, then the point of view behind it needs to highlight your understanding of the stated opinion, as it gives it context. Look for evidence, both supporting and opposing a statement, to find the truth, because, as the adage says, there are two sides to every story, and the truth often lies somewhere in the middle.