Would raman or ewewoman be better?
“Raman” sounds like a noodle dish, or a Rastafarian greeting to a male person. “Ewewoman” - Worst superheroine ever, or a sloppy way of gaining a female person’s attention.
I remember when it seemed like only four people I knew used the word “sheeple” back in the 1990s, and I was one of them; I thought it meant people who follow fads just because everyone they know follows them, without thinking for themselves. Seems like there’s a lot of folks out there like that nowadays, too. But it’s impolite to call them “sheeple” now?
Sorry. That, again, is properly used to refer to a group of people, not a single person.
Now wait just one damned second.
sheeple, as it is customarily used, is used by sheeple to describe other persons which the sheeple [erroneously] determines to be unenlightened.
The canonical (and original) use is by 9/11 Truthers to categorize non-9/11 Truthers (that is, rational people).
pfrt
Sorry, sorry, I’ll get it get right now.
rolls over hihihahahöhö
Uh, I think I’m done here.
Wait, so are you calling 9/11 truthers “sheeple?”
Because, by your own logic, you are now “a sheeple” (shudder) yourself, and your portrayal of them as unenlightened is now “erroneous.”
Wait, so am I now calling you a sheeple?
Does that make me a sheeple?
Wait, so am I now calling me a sheeple?
What does that make my own characterization of myself as unenlightened? Is it erroneous? Or is the erroneousness in error?
Or…
Or…
[SMALL EXPLOSION]
We’re sorry. The artificial intelligence that you are attempting to reach is not available. Please allow time for reboot and try to contact it again shortly. Thank you, and have a nice day.
Watch out there!
Before you yourself start using The Term That Must Not Be Used (T3MNBU), you need to enter a Gödelian meta-space, wherein a person using T3MNBU is not himself a T3MNBU. (Thankfully, no 9/11-Truthers have yet discovered this space.)
Again - as often appears to be the case here - the use appears to be contentious not because of what it means, but because some people consider it pejorative.
By definition, it is “people who are docile, compliant, or easily influenced : people likened to sheep”
Wait – is this not bad grammer?
Apple’s debuted a battery case …
Not necessarily…
In addition to the possessive and a contraction with “is”, 's can also be a contraction with “has,” e.g. “Greg’s got a shiny new car.”
If you read “Apple’s” as “Apple has,” then the sentence works grammatically.
It’s older than that; definitely remember it being used by poli-sci students in the 90s.
Kinda curious about its brief spike in popularity in the 40s.
ETA. Wish Ngram would label their damn axes
some nice looking border-leicester ewes there with what look like cross-breed lambs.
they are a great breed of sheep.
I really wish they’d use engineering notation for those tiny tiny numbers.
Currently, sheeple is skyrocketing at about 6 occurrences in a billion words and climbing. Before that, it had been clawing its way up from nothing since about 1975. But the weird part is that blip of about 1.5 occurrences per billion in the 40s and 50s. With numbers that small, it’s hard to gauge the actual number of occurrences, but it doesn’t look inconsequential, even compared to 2000. What happened there? Was it coined and then temporarily lost?
Also, what happened around 1910? Was that a typo? Did someone try to write steeple and miss?
Early Lovecraft rough drafts.
Half-man-half-sheep actually approaches Cthulhu in terms of terror.
Hmm. I’m getting different ngram results. I have sheeple at about 1.5 occurrences per billion words presently. There was also this weird blip around 1880, where it was about a third as common as it is now. What the hell was that about?
(The ngrams page was obviously designed by computer people and not data people, so we may never know the answer. Like, what is the context surrounding the words? What is the count as opposed to the frequency? Why the actual fuck is the y axis not in engineering notation?)
I did manage to find the 1945 blip. It was W R Anderson writing the following:
The simple truth is that you can get away with anything, in government. That covers almost all the evils of the time. Once in, nobody, apparently, can turn you out. The People, as ever (I spell it ‘Sheeple’), will stand anything.
And, of course, the demagogues and the shysters play on this weakness in the nature of “sheeple” and keep their promises shined and polished like the apples in a sidewalk fruit stand.
–Ernest Rogers, 1949
The very early occurrences vary widely in context. They range from a proper name, misspellings (e.g., steeple), OCR errors (Sheepshead, sheep leather, etc).
The Anderson and Rogers references were the oldest I could find in its current context.
Google books data error? I don’t use it regularly but I have used it and retrieved extremely unreliable results.
