the.com/assertion
a claim wearing confidence as armor, hoping nobody checks the receipts underneath.
means A confident statement that something is true, made without necessarily offering proof.
from From Latin 'asserere,' to claim or declare — built from 'ad-' (to, toward) plus 'serere,' to join or bind together (the same root that braids into 'series' and 'sermon'). The literal old sense was to 'join oneself to' a cause, even to lay a hand on a slave to declare them free — a physical act of claiming. By the time it reached English through 'assertio,' the hand had become words, and the claiming was done with the voice alone.
- in code
- programmers use assertions to crash before disaster does
- vs evidence
- saying it loudly never made it more true
- assertiveness
- a whole skill industry built on saying no
- logic roots
- a proposition you offer up as fact
flat earth society — still-active organization claiming earth is flat, founded 1956, has thousands of members despite overwhelming scientific evidence
moon landing denial — persistent claim that apollo 11 in 1969 was faked, despite 382kg of moon rocks and independent verification
vaccines cause autism — andrew wakefield's 1998 fraudulent study asserting link between mmr vaccine and autism, retracted but claim persists