the.com/effect
every cause's loud receipt, proof the universe keeps score and never forgives a nudge
means The result or change produced by a cause, or the state of being in operation (as in 'the rule takes effect').
from From Latin 'effectus,' meaning 'an accomplishment or performance,' the noun form of 'efficere,' 'to work out, bring about' — built from 'ex-' (out) plus 'facere' (to make or do). So at its root, an effect is literally what gets 'made out' of an action. It reached English in the late Middle Ages by way of Old French, carrying that same sense of something brought to completion.
- butterfly origin
- Lorenz coined it after a 1961 weather rounding error
- placebo power
- sugar pills heal real symptoms in real bodies
- domino reach
- each topples one 1.5x bigger than itself
- word confusion
- affect acts, effect results, grammarians die on this hill
- special effects
- King Kong used a 22-inch puppet
butterfly effect — chaos theory concept where small changes in initial conditions produce vastly different outcomes, popularized by edward lorenz's 1961 weather prediction model
placebo effect — medical phenomenon where patients improve after receiving inert treatment, demonstrated across thousands of clinical trials since the 1950s
halo effect — cognitive bias where overall impression of a person influences judgment of individual traits, studied extensively in psychology since solomon asch's 1946 experi