I'm going to completely humiliate myself here, but so be it. I cannot pull a word out of my memory right now and need your help.

When someone throws out statements without having facts to back them up, what do we call that? LOL I know it's used on this board a lot, so that's why I'm asking you guys. I keep wanting to say colloquial, which I know is not what I need. Please help this old lady with the aging brain.

Assertion?

Allegations?

Conjecture?

Good try, but we need to move in another direction. I know you guys use it on here when someone throws out a statement without supporting documents or evidence. For some reason the word "colloquial" is coming to mind and when I do that it usually means that it sounds similar or has the same number of syllables... or perhaps it just has an 'a' in it. LOL

I cannot for the life of me pull this word out of my memory. Come on, come on... wordy people to the rescue, please!

Supposition?

Assumption?

Speculation?

How about this.... when someone uses personal experience(s) or others' experiences and they they tout this as fact. That's when you would say, "That's ____. Can you support that statement?" Or, they would say, "My statement is purely _________, but I believe this to be true."

Does that help? I cannot believe what a fog I have. I can't even form a decent sentence to describe what I'm looking for here.

Anecdotes

We have a winner! Anecdotal. Bless you! Now I can rest.

(Colloquial... they both have four syllables! LOL)

What about 'conclusory statement' (i.e., a statement that makes the conclusion it was allegedly trying to prove logically) or 'circular reasoning'?

And they both have a hard 'c', and end in -al. I know how these kinds of issues work. :-)

circumstantial?

A lawsuit?

Conjecture/conjectural?

"You're assuming..."
They say it here like
"Correlation does not imply causation"
A lot.

It gets mixed up along with anecdotal as well.

I don't want to blame old age. I stole a phrase I read online, "my kids ate my brain". My son thinks it happened when they were in my belly.

an unsubstaniated claim

Ah, rats. I was going for "horse hockey".

My vocab-recall is identical! I can hear the cadence of a word and usually get a near-sounding word /phrase. My family thinks I'm crazy when I try to explain it. I STILL get made fun of for a highly-competetive game of Taboo circa 1995. In the rush to get my sister to say "race horse", I shouted out, "Never shoot a ______ _______ in the mouth!"

...I meant, "Never look a gift horse in the mouth." No one believed me that shoot and look are similar because of the double O's. Instead they held tight that I had indeed cheated in school.