RE: The universe appears "old", but it is still less than 10,000 years old
December 4, 2013 at 11:54 am
(December 2, 2013 at 8:17 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Actually I could not tell what he meant. I have heard of the slang term "bafoon" (UrbanDictionary.com) so that is what I assumed he meant. Either way he needs to get his act together before trying to insult others because it just makes him look like a....well....buffoon.I had never heard the word "bafoon." I thought it might be a slang version of "buffoon" but the definitions seem to diverge somewhat. Either can mean a fool or foolish person, but buffoon implies a clown (a person who is being deliberately silly) while baffoon seems to imply a person who is ignorant (speaking knowledgeably about topics he knows little about).
I see that some sites claim that bafoon is a variant of buffoon based on a misspelling (or more likely, a mispronunciation?). It sounds funny to me.
This week's etymology lesson brought to you by Google and by the words buffoon and bafoon.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
