Nostrum

Word of the Day by James Somers:

nostrum, n. This is a word I wish I knew better and used more -- hence today's entry, which ought to lay some new synapses or however it works. Here's an excellent usage, from a recent article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus [1]:

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have reacted to the news cycle by coming out and reiterating all the stuff they’ve been saying for ages: progress has not slowed down, soon one A.I. will autonomously supervise the development of a more capable successor, and within perhaps three years we will reckon with the emergence of an artificial superintelligence we neither understand nor govern. The articulation of this scenario is not a “marketing stunt” to advertise the awesome power of the models, as many skeptics have argued. And, contrary to President Donald Trump’s studied assessment, it’s not a “HOAX.” (The crowd that repeats these nostrums, for whatever reason, seems immune to any new evidence on offer: as the writer Zvi Mowshowitz has put it, “They are a rock with these lines written on it.”)

That is a very good paragraph, both substantively and in style, and it deploys "nostrums" in a way that makes it perfectly clear what the word means from context. Makes the reader feel smart.

A nostrum, per Webster's old dictionary, was originally "a medicine, the ingredients of which are kept secret for the purpose of restricting the profits of sale to the inventor or proprietor; a quack medicine." The OED adds a more general, figurative sense: "a pet scheme or favourite remedy, esp. for bringing about some social or political reform or improvement." And the Cambridge dictionary adds my favorite definition of the bunch, for its plainness: "an idea for solving a problem, especially one that is not very good."