# Gish gallop

*Also called: Proof by verbosity, spreading*

- **Cluster:** Distraction and distortion — Moving the argument somewhere easier to win
- **Page:** https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/gish-gallop/
- **In Arabic:** https://fallacy.wiki/ar/fallacy/gish-gallop.md
- **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

## What it is

Burying the other side under many weak claims at once so none can be answered properly.

## In the wild

> Here are thirty objections, refute all of them or I win.

## How to answer it

Pick the strongest two, answer them fully, and say why volume is not strength.

## Origin and naming

Coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after the creationist debater Duane Gish and his habit of sprinting through dozens of weak claims faster than anyone could answer one. The metaphor is the sprint, not the strength, that wins.

## More places it shows up

- On a live panel, a guest fires off twelve statistics about crime, the border, schools and taxes in ninety seconds; the moderator has time to fact-check none of them.
- A colleague replies to a code review with a 40-bullet comment dump, half of them misreading the diff, and declares the change 'clearly unready'.
- A viral video lists fifty 'questions they don't want you to ask' in five minutes — each one a full research project on its own.
- In a family argument, one person rattles off every grievance since 2019 — the borrowed car, the forgotten birthday, the group-chat snub — before anyone can address the first.

## How to spot it

- Notice when the pace of claims outruns any possibility of checking one.
- Notice when the speaker treats an unanswered item — any item — as proof they won.
- Notice when correcting one claim gets no reply, because the speaker has already moved to claim nine.

## Nearby

- [Argumentum ad nauseam](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/ad-nauseam.md)
- [Red herring](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/red-herring.md)
- [Kettle logic](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/kettle-logic.md)

## Read more

- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop)

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From fallacy.wiki — a bilingual field guide to 91 logical fallacies, published by phi holdings. Licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse freely with attribution to fallacy.wiki.