Word of the Day

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Today's Word: polemic

This week's theme: Argument and Controversy.

polemic

(noun, adjective)
[pah-LEM-ik]

noun

1. a controversial argument refuting or attacking the opinions or principles of another: "The editor's polemic on the role of the church in local politics might cost him his job."

2. one who writes in support of one opinion, doctrine, or system, in opposition to another; one skilled in polemics; a controversialist; a disputant

adjective

3. of or pertaining to controversy; controversial; disputative; as, a polemic discourse or essay; polemic theology

also: polemical
adverb form: polemically

Origin

Approximately 1638; from Middle French, 'polemique': controversial; from Greek, 'polemikos': warlike, belligerent, hostile, from 'polemos': war.

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"The conventional wisdom regarding technology is that it is enormously destructive to life on Earth. Harvard Professor Edward O. Wilson, for example, recently wrote that human intelligence is 'a misfortune for the living world,' and a chart accompanying his New York Times Magazine article adds that 'scientists fear that species are being eradicated at thousands of times the pace that new ones are created.'

Whether or not this fear is justied, it misses the point. Technology is more than pollution and the cutting down of rain forests; it is also bio- engineering, and the possibility of actually reclaiming living organisms lost to the Earth long before the appearance of people and technology.

Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park explores this possibility, but from the negative perspective of monstrous dinosaurs brought back to life from fossilized DNA. This negativity is not surprising - science fiction has by and large turned its back on the sunny side of the future. And much polemic writing about genetic engineering - such as Jeremy Rifkin's Algeny - has painted scenarios of killer bacteria emerging from profit-hungry gene labs to ravage an unsuspecting population. But clearly the same genetic reconstruction that could bring back dangerous creatures could also retrieve the sweetest flower that blushed unseen and died eons ago, as long as enough of its DNA survived."

Paul Levinson. "The Extinction of Extinction," Wired Magazine (September/October 1993).

"The central thesis of Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington's book, 'Who Are We?,' is his claim that 'the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives.'...

Huntington's polemic is the latest expression in a long history of alarms about immigration to the United States. As successive waves of immigrants arrived in the United States over two centuries - Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Germans, Eastern Europeans and many others - they were always greeted by nativist protests targeted against the different languages, appearances, religions and lifestyles, and against the workplace competitiveness of the new arrivals. Europeans today are familiar with the anger and fear directed at immigrants in various continental countries."

Steve Benson. "Immigrants help give America its identity, not its identity crisis," [Book Review: 'Who Are We?' by Samuel Huntington] The Arizona Republic (July 11, 2004).

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