Crank

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For the drug, see Methamphetamine, for the exceptionally silly movie, you need to be elsewhere.

Crank is a pejorative term applied to someone who holds extremely unorthodox views on a subject and is often very vocal about these opinions. A crank will usually maintain their viewpoint despite, or perhaps because of, evidence to the contrary. The crank is usually an amateur in the field they are arguing against, but sometimes individuals with expertise in that field will become a 'crank' (often medical or psychological changes can be traced to coincide with the point where an expert became a crank, such as strokes, nervous breakdowns or the onset of schizophrenia).

Cranks emerge in all fields of study and hold a wide variety of inaccurate or unorthodox views, from being able to square the circle with a pencil and a compass, to Biblical literalists in the creationism movement.

Synonyms include kook and crackpot (the latter of which has led to the creation of the term "psychoceramics" as the name for the study of such people). Cranks who believe a lot of nutty things at once are sometimes said to suffer from crank magnetism.

Contents

[edit] Famous cranks

Well known cranks and their ideas include:

[edit] Other uses

A crank is also a type of mechanical device for converting rotary motion to linear or vice versa, consisting of a handle or arm attached at right angles to a shaft, usually involving many types of gears, pinions, and if you're lucky, cams.

[edit] External links

[edit] See also

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