Pseudo-controversy
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Something falsely presented as a controversy.
"gradualism: The doctrine that evolutionary change is gradual and does not go in jumps. In modern palaeontology it is the subject of an interesting controversy over whether the gaps in the fossil record are artefactual or real (see Chapter 6). Journalists have blown this up into a pseudo-controversy over the validity of Darwinism, which they say is a gradualist theory. […]"
Example
More examples"gradualism: The doctrine that evolutionary change is gradual and does not go in jumps. In modern palaeontology it is the subject of an interesting controversy over whether the gaps in the fossil record are artefactual or real (see Chapter 6). Journalists have blown this up into a pseudo-controversy over the validity of Darwinism, which they say is a gradualist theory. […]"
Etymology
From pseudo- + controversy.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.