"For years, [Tchiya] Amet had been trying to make the world listen to her account of a powerful man [Neil deGrasse Tyson] who had once assaulted her and derailed her life."

"Mainstream publications, including BuzzFeed News, were unable to adequately corroborate the events from so long ago, and did not publish her allegations. And internet commenters assailed her character and New Age lifestyle. Her claims may have stayed buried forever, if not for the women who saw in Amet’s story a shadow of their own. 'I saw that her credibility was being questioned in a way that honestly had a lot of racist and sexist and anti-religious undertones,' Allers said. 'I kinda figured if I had any credibility to lend to that so that she’s taken more seriously, I should do that.'"

From "Nobody Believed Neil deGrasse Tyson's First Accuser. Now There Are Three More/No one believed Tchiya Amet when she said Tyson had raped her in the 1980s. Now, three other women tell BuzzFeed News that he harassed them, including one who’s sharing her story publicly for the first time" (BuzzFeed).

What was the New Age religion that that seems to some people to discredit Amet? We're told that after the time of the alleged rape...

Amet would never return to science (though she tried, twice, to reenroll in graduate school, with a focus on historical African astronomy). She got married, homeschooled her two kids, moved into a small one-story house on an Indian reservation in Northern California, and then got divorced. She sang in a reggae band, and fully adopted a New Age way of thinking about the universe — rooted in energy, astrology, and ancient teachings, rather than science.

In 1995, as part of what she calls her spiritual healing, she changed her name to Tchiya Amet — which means “rebirth” and “truth” in Hebrew. “I did not want to identify with Staci — I wanted her to be dead,” Amet said.

Amet "wrote a rambling blog post, as fragmented and disjointed as her memories of the incident, titled “I Survived RAPE by Neil de Grasse Tyson; The Blue Lotus Speaks!”

From Neil de Grasse Tyson's own response:

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life [30 years later], long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, [Amet] was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd....

When does religion discredit a complainant? I don't think the answer should be when it seems flaky to people who would be deferential to a member of a mainstream, traditional religion. When a person adopts a new religion, it says something about what's been going on in that person's life, and a shift from centering in astrophysics to obviously unscientific ideas about planets and energy looks very significant, but which way is it significant? It could mean this person doesn't adhere to real-world facts, but can also raise inferences that something terrible happened to her and changed the course of her life. Whether the terrible something was Neil de Grasse Tyson is another matter.

"How is that a haunting question? Of course they would."

Said Freeman Hunt, reacting to the headline "Neil deGrasse Tyson Has A Haunting Question About Bears,"* blogged here yesterday.

I said, "The word 'haunt' is way overused. I should do a post about that." So this is that post.

The first thing I see is that 14 years ago, in the early months of this blog, I wrote a substantial post about the word "haunted" and the way it is overused.**

Next, I see that the verb "to haunt" did not begin as a powerful, ghost-related word. It simply referred to frequency and habit, such as going to a particular place. The OED has very old quotes — as old as the 13th century — that speak of ships haunting harbors and people haunting taverns.

In the 16th century, there was talk of thoughts, memories, and feelings that frequently occurred and thus "haunted" a person. Shakespeare wrote: "Your beauty which did haunt me in my sleepe: To vndertake the death of all the world" ("Richard III" 1597). And Shakespeare used the word to speak of the habitual visits of ghosts:

1597 Shakespeare Richard II iii. ii. 154 Some haunted by the ghosts they haue deposed.
1600 Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream iii. i. 99 O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted. Pray masters: fly masters: helpe.

Reading the OED makes the word feel much weaker to me. A "haunting question" is nothing more than a question that keeps coming back to you, not necessarily anything spooky. Is it no different from a "nagging question"?

But I see ghosts in "haunting." Are there horses in "nagging"? No, "nag" (the verb) comes from Scandinavia — "nagga" — to gnaw, irritate, grumble. "Nag" the horse comes from Dutch — "negge" —  a small horse. Oh! And I see that in this horse lineage, "nag" was once a slang word for "penis":

1598 J. Marston Scourge of Villanie B2 Hence lewd nags away, Goe read each poast,..Then to Priapus gardens.
1655 Mercurius Fumigosus xxxvi. 284 He by his Eloquence Converted her Gleab into pasture, and put his Nagg to grasse in her Coppice.
1707 in H. Playford Wit & Mirth (new ed.) III. 56 What is this so stiff and warm... 'Tis Ball my Nag he will do you no harm.

Goe read each poast... that's what I always say.
__________________

* Freeman Hunt continued, riffing on deGrasse Tyson's tweet, "If Bears were in charge, after they hunted us to near-extinction, I wonder if they’d invent a candy called Gummy Human":

"If Bears were in charge..."

If Bears were in charge, after they hunted us to near-extinction, I wonder if they’d invent a candy called Gummy Humans.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 21, 2018

I found that because I was intrigued by the HuffPo headline "Neil deGrasse Tyson Has A Haunting Question About Bears." It's worth clicking on that link if only to make sure the quip you're about to make hasn't already been done. For example:

Also: Why did he capitalize "Bears"? I wasted time thinking about the football team.