Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 6, 2024 is:
ad hominem • \ad-HAH-muh-num\ • adjective
Something described as ad hominem involves an attack on an opponent’s character rather than an answer to assertions or points that the opponent has made.
// The debate between the mayoral candidates was going smoothly until the ad hominem attacks began.
Examples:
“Ad hominem arguments are viewed, almost universally, as bad, bad, bad.... Students are taught to differentiate between their opponent and their opponent’s argument. The rationale for doing so makes perfect sense. In theory, a person’s merits are irrelevant to whether their argument makes logical sense. An argument depends on nothing more than whether its conclusion follows its premises; the speaker, you might say, is just the messenger.” — Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, 2023
Did you know?
Ad hominem literally means “to the person” in New Latin (Latin as used since the end of the medieval period). In centuries past, the term was used in the phrase “argument ad hominem” (or argumentum ad hominem, to use the full New Latin phrase) to refer to a valid method of persuasion by which one takes advantage of an opponent’s interests or feelings in a debate, instead of just sticking to general principles. What exactly came into play in such persuasions eventually expanded, and ad hominem came to describe an attack aimed at an opponent’s character rather than their ideas. It’s in this decidedly less civil application that ad hominem appears today. The hostile nature of such attacks has led to an understanding of the term as meaning “against the person,” rather than its original Latin meaning of “to the person.”