I give up. Today's experience shows me that DU has gone fully into anti-science mode.

[Ghost Dog]

18. Has to do with the anti-British strand

in the history of US culture, I conjecture.

It is not part of the scientific process, in the Popperian sense, for a scientist to 'believe' any theory, I'd like to emphasise. A theory is a philosophical mental construct which a scientist might consider useful in her or his attempts to understand Nature. And the only way for a scientist to properly defend a theory is by doing his or her best to prove it flawed, by forming hypotheses that make predictions under the theory and putting them to the test, as stressfully as can be devised, under both experimental and real-world conditions.

I myself have imagined a theory, which I have not tested but continue to observe, which suggests a causal relationship between much mental confusion and the apparently pandemic carelessness, maleducation in and outright manipulation of the English language in most of the native English-speaking world.