voodoo poll

voodoo poll
 n.β€” Β«β€œVoodoo polls” is a term coined by Sir Bob Worcester to refer to phone-in, click-on or “press-the-red-button” polls, the sort of thing you see on Sky News, the AOL homepage or in the tabloid press. These polls have no statistical validity whatsover, they do not attempt to be representative of the population, they are entirely self-selecting and they are spectacularly easy to fix by getting partisan supporters to repeatedly ring them. No one should mistake them for a worthwhile indication of public opinion.Β» β€”β€œVoodoo Polling Corner” by Anthony Wells UK Polling Report Feb. 24, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Further reading

It’s All in a Dezzick

The word dezzick is defined in an 1875 dictionary of the Sussex dialect as β€œa day’s work.” This is part of a complete episode.

Related

Sleepy Winks (episode #1584)

It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...

Recent posts