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Nope, It Was Always Already Wrong

https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/n...eady_wrong

Please, please, please, tell me, that you were out sick that day in grammar school when......

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Late Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French conspiracie, alteration of Old French conspiration, based on Latin conspirare ‘agree, plot’

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No? Then somewhere along the checkered way of what passed for your formal education, surely?

So, no. The CIA did not invent the word “conspiracy theorist.” But this made me wonder how far back I could push the use of a term like “conspiracy theory.” Using the OED to date vocabulary is a dodgy proposition. The oldest example you are likely to find in an OED definition is unlikely to be the first time the word was used. It might not even be the first time that the word was written down. It just happens to be the oldest example that the dictionary’s lexicographers have found.

Nonetheless, we’ll use the OED as a starting point and just be confident that the word has to be at least as old as the first example found there.

The earliest appearance of “conspiracy theory’ in the OED goes as far back as 1909 to an article from the American Historical Review:

Amer. Hist. Rev. 14 836 The claim that Atchison was the originator of the repeal may be termed a recrudescence of the conspiracy theory first asserted by Colonel John A. Parker of Virginia in 1880.

This sentence appears in Allen Johnson’s review of P. Ormon Ray’s The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise: Its Origin and Authorship. The sentence that follows it makes quite clear that the phrase is being used in the modern sense: “No new manuscript material has been found to support the theory, but the available bits of evidence have been collated carefully in this volume” (836).



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https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/n...eady_wrong

Robert Blaskiewicz
August 8, 2013

Recently, the claim that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was popularized in the 1960s by the CIA to discredit those who dared to question the Warren Commission has been popping up in the conspiracy-o-sphere. From the original PsyOp, so the story goes, the application of the phrase spread to encompass all sorts of nefarious doings, and now people reflexively think that all conspiracy theorists are crazy. The first version that I heard, in fact, was the claim that the term was actually invented in the 1960s, and that grabbed my attention. Really? Never appeared before the 1960s?

An infuriating feature of conspiracy theory is its propensity to take the standard of evidence that skeptics value so highly and turn it on its head: extraordinary claims no longer require extraordinary evidence; rather an extraordinary lack of evidence is thought to validate the extraordinariness of the conspiracy. It is thinking just gone wrong.

Worse still, disconfirming evidence becomes evidence in favor of the conspiracy. I strongly suspect that the “the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ was invented by the CIA” gambit is a fairly radical extension of this tendency, that the mere fact that so many people recognize that conspiracy theorizing is a futile and intellectually unproductive exercise is only more proof to the conspiracy theorists that they are really onto something.


So, no. The CIA did not invent the word “conspiracy theorist.” But this made me wonder how far back I could push the use of a term like “conspiracy theory.” Using the OED to date vocabulary is a dodgy proposition. The oldest example you are likely to find in an OED definition is unlikely to be the first time the word was used. It might not even be the first time that the word was written down. It just happens to be the oldest example that the dictionary’s lexicographers have found. Nonetheless, we’ll use the OED as a starting point and just be confident that the word has to be at least as old as the first example found there.

The earliest appearance of “conspiracy theory’ in the OED goes as far back as 1909 to an article from the American Historical Review:

Amer. Hist. Rev. 14 836 The claim that Atchison was the originator of the repeal may be termed a recrudescence of the conspiracy theory first asserted by Colonel John A. Parker of Virginia in 1880.

This sentence appears in Allen Johnson’s review of P. Ormon Ray’s The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise: Its Origin and Authorship. The sentence that follows it makes quite clear that the phrase is being used in the modern sense: “No new manuscript material has been found to support the theory, but the available bits of evidence have been collated carefully in this volume” (836).



This use of conspiracy theory, I think, is recognizable with our contemporary understanding.

What is clear is that “conspiracy theory” has always been a disparaging term. While proponents of alternative knowledge are correct in asserting that it is possible to unfairly discredit someone by calling them a “conspiracy theorist,” they must also remember that just because you are called a conspiracy theorist doesn’t mean you aren’t one.

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