Idea of Critical Thinking

Idea of Critical Thinking The world is paining through a troublesome era. While a few are stubbornly fighting against the nearly intangible enemy that is terrorism, others are suffering. The question is whom should we trust, and who is doing the right thing? What about George W. Bush and his greedy friends? To be well-informed and capable of holding our own opinion in the middle of all this mischief comes down to one essential quality: critical thinking.Sometimes, we receive faulty or biased information. Thus, there needs to be a filter in our thinking that stops this bad information from affecting our judgment towards a manipulated opinion. To me, that filter is the essence of critical thinking. With the help of the knowledge and understanding of fallacies, someone is well-armed to overcome prejudice, illogic deductions and biased information. Critical thinking is to seek all the viewpoints of a given problem before coming to a conclusion.English: There are no symbols that represent skept...It is to require the original sources before assuming the truth of a statement or fact. Also, it consists of separating our immediate feelings from our thinking, in a way that will keep our reasoning to pure logic. Take for example the news media. In TV shows like 'Cops' and most crime news coverage, it has been proven that Africans Americans are seen as outlaws far more often than any other ethnicity. From seeing a majority of criminals being African American on television, people with weak critical thinking may falsely deduct that all of them are evil. The reasoning goes as follows: criminals are evil and most African Americans are criminals, so most African Americans are evil. A person with stronger critical thinking will be able to see the big picture, thus being conscious that not all criminals are Africans Americans and not all African Americans are criminals.In another perspective, creative thinking is an essential quality for good argumentation. It defines whether a statement is logical or i llogical. Sometimes, people tend to use easy arguments, which are nearly impossible to respond to, but that are not funded and illogical. Someone armed with a good sense of critical thinking will be able to use those statements as an asset. Take the example of the exploitation of the poor due to world trade. Someone with weak critical thinking may say: corporations exploit the poor countries and world trade is ruled by corporations, so world trade exploits the poor countries. An opponent with strong critical thinking may simply break the first premise by saying that some corporations exploit the poor countries while others are very human and offer great opportunities to workers from all over the world. Making a deduction from this would mean that world trade offers great opportunities, but once again this is an incomplete fallacy, since some corporations do exploit the poor countries.Finally, I think that being a critical thinker has a sense of self-discipline. People who think in a critical way seek the truth and expect more from themselves, so in my opinion they are the ones who tend to reach higher. Choosing the easy way just because it has no immediate consequences shows no critical thinking at all. On the other hand, to challenge ourselves constantly and be true to our goals is the best way to become a critical thinker. Critical thinking is more than knowing about fallacies; it's a philosophy and an attitude.

Definition and Examples of Doublets in English

Definition and Examples of Doublets in English In English grammar and morphology, doublets are two distinct words derived from the same source but by different routes of transmission, such as poison and potion (both from the Latin potio, a drink). Also known as  lexical doublets and  etymological twins.  When the two words are used together in a phrase  they are called  coupled synonyms or  binomial expressions. Three words of this kind are called triplets: e.g., place, plaza, and piazza (all from the Latin platea, a broad street). Examples and Observations English has many doublets from Latin sources. Usually, the earlier word came from Norman French and the later one came from central French . . . or directly from Latin. Occasionally we have three words, or a triplet, from the same source, as in cattle (from Norman French), chattel (from central French), and capital, all derived from the Latin capitalis, meaning of the head. Another example is hostel (from Old French), hospital (from Latin), and hotel (from modern French), all derived from the Latin hospitale.  Ã‚   (Katherine Barber, Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do With Pigs. Penguin, 2007)It is no coincidence that the basic meaning of adamant was diamond. The word diamond is a doublet of adamant, the two words having come ultimately from the same Greek source, adamantos.The present-day adjective, meaning unyielding, inflexible, usually in the phrase to be adamant, is first recorded in the 1930s. It was apparently an extended use of such earlier phrases as an adamant h eart (1677), meaning a heart of stone and adamant walls (1878) stone walls.  (Sol Steinmetz, Semantic Antics. Random House, 2008) Cadet, Caddie, Cad In Medieval Gascon French, a capdet was a little chief, little head, from the Late Latin capitellus, a diminutive form of Latin caput head. The term was originally applied specifically to a younger son of a nobleman, serving as a military officer at the French court, . . .. The term passed into Standard French in this Gascon sense, but later was generalized to mean younger (son, brother).In the 17th century, French cadet passed into English, which reworked the French meanings and, in the process, created the doublet form caddie. During the 17th and 18th centuries cadet was used to mean junior military officer, while caddie meant military trainee. The 18th century also saw the creation of the abbreviated form cad, which seems to have had a variety of senses, all of them suggesting assistant status: assistant to a coach-driver, wagoners helper, bricklayers mate, and the like.(L. G. Heller et al., The Private Lives of English Words. Taylor, 1984) Differences in Meaning and Form Doublets vary in closeness of meaning as well as form: guarantee/warranty are fairly close in form and have almost the same meaning; abbreviate/abridge are distant in form but close in meaning (though they serve distinct ends); costume/custom are fairly close in form but distant in meaning, but both relate to human activities; ditto/dictum share only di and t and a common reference to language; entire/integer are so far apart that their shared origin is of antiquarian interest only. (Tom McArthur, The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press, 1992) Doublets in Legal Language [David] Mellinkoff (1963: 121-2) indicates that many . . . legal terms appear in companythey are routinely used in sequences of two or three (doublets are also known as binomial expressions and binomials). . . . Everyday words can be transformed into legal formulae in this way. Melinkoff also points out that many doublets and triplets combine words of Old English/Germanic (OE), Latin and Norman French origins. Examples of doublets of sound mind (OE) and memory (L)give (OE) devise (F) and bequeath (OE)will (OE) and testament (F/L)goods (OE) and chattles (F)final (F) and conclusive (L)fit (OE) and proper (F)new (OE) and novel (F)save (F) and except (L)peace (F) and quiet (L)These expressions are mostly centuries old, and some date from a time when it was advisable to use words of various origins either to increase intelligibility for people from different language backgrounds, or more probably it was intended to encompass previous legal usage or legal documents from both early English and Norman French.  (John Gibbon, Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System. Blackwell, 2003)The non-exhaustive lists below present a selection of doublets and triplets still commonly found in legal documents:Doublets:aid and abet, all and sundry, attached and annexed, ask and to answer, deem and consider, each and all, fit and proper, have and hold, legal and valid, true and correct, totally null a nd void, peace and quiet, son and heir, terms and conditions, last will and testamentTriplets:cancel, annul, and set aside / ordered, adjudged, and decreed / signed, sealed, and delivered(Mia Ingels,  Legal English Communication Skills. Acco, 2006) Morphological Doublets [M]orphological doublets (rival forms) . . . are pairs of synonymous complex words which share the same base but involve distinct formatives, e.g. two different affixes (cf., for instance, the existence of attested doublets in -ness and -ity: prescriptiveness/prescriptivity, etc.). One may predict that this sort of formal fluctuation is not likely to persist for a long time; usually, one of the rival forms eventually takes over and becomes established (thus strengthening the derivational pattern it represents) while the other variant sinks into oblivion (or they acquire specialized meanings, as in historic / historical, economic / economical). (Bogdan Szymanek, The Latest Trends in English Word-Formation. Handbook of Word-Formation, ed. by Pavol Ã…  tekauer and Rochelle Lieber. Springer, 2005) Pronunciation: DUB-lit EtymologyFrom Latin duplus, two-fold