Heroes

The English language is often abused, but every so often a particularly egregious offense is worth highlighting. To a media where abuse is torture, terrorists are activists, math is now “heroic.”

They’re so used to hyping and editorializing that even in a non-political article like this one, they can’t just report the facts.  They have to make a “story” of it; they need some kind of narrative.  Sure, it’s nitpicking to leap on this one adjective, but it’s a small part of the larger picture.  I’m sick of it, especially because there have been hundreds – probably thousands – of stories of real heroism in Iraq and Afghanistan and the media stubbornly refuses to report them.

Yahoo News featured an interesting short report issued by Agence France-Presse on November 20. In it we discover that a consortium of French, German and Hungarian mathematicians are claiming to have proven that Einstein’s famous equation, e=mc2, is correct. The report is all good except for one very small aspect. They call the effort of these mathematicians “heroic” in contradiction to the root meaning of the word. Mathematics isn’t “heroic” and it is a degradation of true heroics to say it is.