Spectrum

Psychology (Humanities), 1948

Fashionable way to describe something which has variations similar to a colour chart despite there being no objective evidence it exists. Makes you sound “scientific” and intellectual™.

The electromagnetic spectrum quantitively measures the frequencies of light, radio/audio, and other phenomena. Kinsey’s research into sexual behaviour in 1948 led to sociologists misappropriating the nice colours of electromagnetic spectrographs to suggest a “spectrum” of human sexuality (1980, Michael Storm EROS scale) and “gender identity” (no legitimate sources, but widely discussed).

• https://oed.com/view/Entry/186105
• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=spectrum
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=spectrum
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale
• http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Theories_of_sexual_orientation.pdf