Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.

As a former prospective linguistics major, I’m entitled to submit my input on this topic: “Opinion” sounds too much like the word “onion” to be substantial, significant or even relevant. Perhaps you’ve wondered why you cry whenever you’re exposed to an opinion. Perhaps you’ve wondered why you expect to see layers when you hear an opinion. Perhaps you’ve wondered why presidents and prime ministers get opinions from Cabinets and Onions from cabinets. Here’s why: “Opinions” and “onions” are categorically the same thing, and what they are is fundamentally irrelevant. 

Stay with me, now, because the plot thickens. “Opinions” looks like “onions,” while “facts” looks like “faces.” Why? Picture somebody’s face: your mom, your roommate, your ex-boyfriend with the doting black eyes and the lush brown hair with a little mole on the left side of his cleft chin. When you meet someone, sure, you’re shaking their hand and learning their name. Yet you don’t memorize the feel of their coarse skin folds against your palm, nor do you always remember their name when you stare lustfully at them in the dining halls. When you picture them, you picture their face. And you stare because you remember their face (and their coal-black pupils, their chocolate-colored cowlick and their mole sitting like a perfectly placed pineapple slice on a pizza). 

In the same way that our animal human instincts draw our attention to our species’ members’ faces, the media-industrial complex wants to draw your attention to only the facts. Faces, facts. Facts, faces. That thing is called that thing for a reason.

Think about this: Would you rather have a face or an onion? That’s right; a face. You can’t help not to look at them. Meanwhile… onions? They brand your opinions smelly, and dreary by associating them with onions. Meanwhile, they will bury you in their facts of “history,” and “science,” and “agreements from nine out of 10 dentists.” Since the dawn of time, when the first fish crawled out of the water and spoke in Shakespeare’s English, the elitist news mob spearheaded by Merriam-Webster’s Dorktionary and Wokepedia devalued your ability to wake up and decide what you believe without any critical thought or empirical evidence.

Friends, is this the world we want to live in? Is it not our birthright that we can hold opinions about entire populations we’ve never met, or conspiracies that insurmountable research have refuted? Is it not our birthright to hold the onions of entire populations either? No: We must defend ourselves against these tempestuous gatekeepers of legitimacy.

But I did not grab your ear just to whine: I propose a solution. See, the word “opinion” came about by jamming π (pi) after the first vowel in the disgusting word “onion.” It’s simple math. Thus, we can replace “opinion” by sticking π into another word; this time, we shall choose a cooler, stronger word. What word, you ask? Stud. Nothing screams “cool” and “strong” like the word “stud,” and it even sounds like “study” to show how smart our opinions can be. Now we take our π, placing it after the first vowel, and we make stuπd. So, friends, I offer the new term for opinion: stupi… oh. Wait a second…