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February 9th, 2026 (Permalink)
How to Lie With Notes 5: Death by Footnote1
The conspiracists work hard to give their written evidence the veneer of scholarship. The approach has been described as death by footnote2.
I take the title of this entry from the above passage from David Aaronovitch's book on conspiracy theories. Ironically and frustratingly, the second sentence is not noted, that is, there is no citation to a source, so there's no way to tell who described this "approach" as "death by footnote", which I would dearly like to know. Moreover, it's not as if the book has no notes―it has endnotes―so this is a ghost note of the second type, that is, a missing one3. Of course, Aaronovitch probably just couldn't remember where he heard or read the phrase, but he could have at least added a note explaining that.
In a magazine article published shortly before the book, and perhaps drawing on it, Aaronovitch wrote:
[Conspiracy theories] share certain features that make them work. These include…the use of apparently scholarly ways of laying out arguments (or "death by footnote")…. These characteristics help them to convince intelligent people of deeply unintelligent things.4
It's hard to tell from these two brief mentions what exactly Aaronovitch or his unnamed source meant by "death by footnote", though it's clear that it has something to do with conspiracy theorists (CTists) making a pretense to scholarship. There are many ways that pseudo-scholarship apes actual scholarship but, in this entry, I'll use the phrase "death by footnote" to refer to one particular practice, namely, loading up on notes. So, "death by footnote" is the opposite of ghost notes, that is, instead of too few notes there are too many.
Though Aaronovitch's topic in both the article and book is CTists, they're not the only guilty parties. For instance, the philosopher Roger Scruton describes a pseudo-philosophical book as follows: "Abundant footnotes, referring to out-of-the-way works in political theory, anthropology, biology, musicology, particle physics, etc., serve further to intimidate the reader, and the undergraduate, faced with the resulting text at the top of his reading list, is given no alternative but to parrot its terms….5"
While ghost notes and death by footnote seem mutually exclusive, they're not completely so. It's true that the first type of ghost notes―non-existent ones―are incompatible with excessive notes, since a work with no notes at all certainly can't have too many. However, the other type―missing notes, that is, notes that should be there but aren't―is compatible with an excess of notes. In fact, one way of concealing that a note is missing is to include so many other notes that it won't be noticed.
A good rule of thumb for scholarly works with notes is that the word count in the notes should never exceed that of the work itself. While such note bloat is not necessarily death by footnote, it's bad practice. If the notes are longer than the body of the work, then some of the material in the notes should either be incorporated into the text or made into a separate work. So, if you look at a page―assuming that you're looking at an old-fashioned paper book or journal article with footnotes―and more than half the page is taken up by notes, that's too many. However, death by footnote is not just a matter of having too many notes, but of using notes as a defense mechanism against criticism.
Notes:
- ↑ For previous entries in this series, see:
- Introduction, 10/23/2025
- Latin Abbreviations, 11/15/2025
- Anatomy of a Citation, 12/6/2025
- Ghost Notes, 1/3/2026
- ↑ David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (2010), p. 13.
- ↑ See the previous entry in this series, that is, number IV, above.
- ↑ David Aaronovitch, "A Conspiracy-Theory Theory", The Wall Street Journal, 12/19/2009.
- ↑ Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015), p. 190. The book that Scruton is describing is: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (3rd edition, 1996). Cited by Scruton, in footnote 50, p. 189. I haven't read it and, from Scruton's description, I don't want to.
February 4th, 2026 (Permalink)
No Smoking in Pubic Places
"When I was only three, and still named Belle Miriam Silverman, I sang my first aria in pubic." Thus read the first sentence of the first printing of the first edition of an autobiographical work by the late opera singer, Beverly Sills1.
As I suspect you know, the word "pubic" refers to the part of the human body where the sexual organs are located2. "Pubic" is always an adjective, so the example sentence is ungrammatical, since the preposition "in" should be followed by a noun.
"Public" is both a noun and an adjective3. As a noun, it can refer to people as a whole, or the common people, as in the phrase "the public", or to those spaces that are open to the public, that is, places that are "in public". As an adjective, it modifies nouns that refer to public spaces, including physical places such as public parks as well as abstract spaces, such as public opinion.
Obviously, Sills meant that she sang in public. The typographical error was corrected in subsequent printings.
"In public" is not the only common phrase that may be transmogrified by a missing "l". A recent newspaper article displayed a photograph with the following caption: "Legislation to ban marijuana smoking and vaping in pubic places was approved by the Senate Regulated Industries Committee on Tuesday.4" I, too, approve of that legislation, though it reminds me of an old joke: "Do you smoke after sex?" "I don't know, I never looked."5
In addition to "pubic places", another frequent offender is "pubic library", which sounds as if it's a collection of pornography. A search of Google Books turns up a large number of occurrences of this phrase, surprisingly, from publications for professional librarians. For instance, an issue of The Library World includes a reference to the "Kettering Pubic Library"6. I suspect that library journals are more prone to this particular misspelling only because they more frequently refer to public libraries than other publications.
Most of the easily confused word pairs examined in these entries are soundalikes, but "pubic" and "public" are lookalikes. I doubt that anyone would ever mistakenly say "pubic" when "public" is meant, or vice versa, but when proofreading it may be easy to miss the difference. At a passing glance, the two words look the same, perhaps because the "l" in "public" is next to the "b" and each have a long upward stroke.
I've seen "pubic" in place of "public" on more than one occasion prior to stumbling over the above example, but I don't recall ever seeing "public" in place of "pubic", so this appears to be a one-way error. Of course, it's possible that this asymmetry is due to the fact that "public" is a more common word than "pubic". Also, some omissions of the "l" are pubescent puns, and others may be prurient pranks. Perhaps Sills was the victim of a proofreader with an adolescent sense of humor.
None of my reference books lists "pubic" as a common misspelling of "public", which could be because it's uncommon or perhaps just that the authors of such works are squeamish or prudish.
Notes:
- ↑ Beverly Sills, Bubbles: A Self-Portrait (1976), p. 12; quoted by Rudolf Flesch in Lite English: Popular Words That Are OK to Use (1983), p. 72.
- ↑ "Pubic", The Britannica Dictionary, accessed: 2/1/2026.
- ↑ "Public", The Britannica Dictionary, accessed: 2/1/2026.
- ↑ Christine Sexton, "Smoking marijuana in public places is banned under a bill moving in the Florida Senate", The Apopka Voice, 1/20/2026.
- ↑ I mentioned this joke once previously; see: "Do you smoke after sex?", 2/14/2021.
- ↑ The Library World, Vol. VII, No. 73 (July, 1904), p. 10.
February 1st, 2026 (Permalink)
Spyhunters Vs. Spy
A spy has infiltrated the Agency for Counter-Terrorism (ACT). According to the agency's definition, a spy is someone who knows everyone in the agency by name but is known by name to no one else. An internal investigation by the agency's spyhunters has narrowed the suspects down to eight agents whom I will call only A through H to protect the seven innocent suspects.
The spyhunters interrogated the eight suspects in pairs, asking only whether they knew the other agent's name. While under interrogation, the agents were monitored by the most advanced deception-detection equipment available―equipment that is still classified as top secret―according to which each suspect interrogated told the truth.
Here are the answers elicited from the pairs of suspects when asked whether they knew each other's names:
A: "Yes"; B: "Yes".
C: "Yes"; D: "No".
E: "No"; F: "Yes".
G: "No"; H: "No".
Finally, after a short conference, the investigators called back into the interview room two of the agents, C and F, for further questioning. Asked if they knew each other's names, each replied:
C: "No"; F: "Yes".
Which suspect is the spy?
Extra Credit: Could there be more than one spy in the ACT? If not, why not?
F is the spy.
Explanation: If agent X knows agent Y's name, then Y cannot be a spy, since no one else knows a spy's name. So, based on the first round of questioning and the fact that the answers given by the suspect's are true, we can rule out A, B, D and E as spies.
If agent X doesn't know agent Y's name, then X is not a spy, because spies know the names of every other agent. This rules out agents G and H, who didn't know each other's names.
So, the first round of questioning narrowed the suspects down to C and F, which is why those two were called back in for additional questioning. Since C didn't know F's name but F knew C's, F is the spy.
Extra Credit Solution: No, there can be at most one spy in an organization. Suppose there were two spies, X and Y: given that X is a spy, no other person knows X's name, yet since Y is also a spy, Y knows X's name, which is impossible. Therefore, two or more spies in the agency is not possible.
Disclaimer & Disclosure: The above puzzle is fictitious. The ACT is so top secret that it officially doesn't exist.
The puzzle is a variation on the Celebrity Problem*, and a spy is the opposite of a celebrity: a celebrity is someone whose name everyone else knows but who does not know the name of anyone else. Celebrities can be discovered in the same fashion as spies, except that the effect of the questions is the opposite: if X knows Y's name or Y does not know X's name, then X is not a celebrity. Similarly, there can only be one celebrity in a group.
* ↑ See: Anany & Maria Levitin, Algorithmic Puzzles (2011), pp. 8-9.