Do you all love reading scientific texts?
Me neither.
There are few legitimate reasons to read a scientific text: you may be a student forced to memorize words until you cease to understand them, you may be an actual scientist and truly care what the texts are about, or you may have a quirky mental disorder that Hollywood hasn’t yet made a movie about.
Most of us avoid scientific lingo. We want our information summarized and simplified. We have too many Tweets and Facebook updates to go through. Who has the time to actually learn anything?
The key to being a good scientific writer is to:
a) Know your stuff
b) Be able to encrypt this stuff into unreadable and almost undecipherable strings of words
This wiki article on “verbosity” gives a great example of how a simple sentence:
Doctors say the best way to lose weight is to eat less.
Can be turned into this unnecessarily complex statement:
The medical community indicates that a program of downsizing average total daily caloric intake is maximally efficacious in the field of proactive weight-reduction methodologies.
I can’t wait to get my appendages on this multi-layered, nutrient-supplying organic entity.
Who talks like that? Do you talk like that? Who rocks the party that rocks the body? You rock the…I digress.
So we agree that scientific language is something we unanimously hate. Now, because making you read stuff you hate is what I’m all about, I’ll be adding a flavour of science to some popular proverbs.
I’ve already done something like this previously, when I haikuified (haikuinated? haikutinised?) ten proverbs. Now I do the same…with science!
As an added bonus I won’t provide the original proverbs, but they should still be recognisable. The person to guess all ten proverbs correctly will get…I don’t know…a virtual hug or something.
- Inhabitants of dwellings composed primarily of silica and sodium oxide are strongly discouraged from hurling rock-based projectiles.
- Excessive inquisitiveness is a widespread cause of premature termination of biological lifecycle among the feline species.
- It is inadvisable to obtain direct visuals of the incisors, molars and premolars of an equine that was obtained via transfer of ownership unaccompanied by exchange of financial means.
- Physical manifestations of intent are typically assigned more weight than verbal declarations thereof.
- An object that is assigned zero intrinsic value by one party has the potential to be assigned a significantly higher value by an unrelated second party.
- The estimated worth of an avian specimen is inversely proportionate to its distance from its owner’s metacarpus.
- Successful preparation of crustless quiche necessitates damaging the structural integrity of a certain quantity of eggs.
- The quality of a paper-bound piece of written work cannot be accurately ascertained via a visual inspection of its outer carapace.
- Graminoid plants appear to have a more pronounced green hue and chroma when located on the opposite side of a socially constructed boundary from the observer.
- Hand-held devices for inscribing symbols onto paper carry a higher potency than long-bladed, hilted weapons of medieval warfare.
Congratulations, you have completed your training. You now officially hate words and letters. For a more advanced level of hatred, please complete our “rocket scientist lingo” tutorial.
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For more on proverbs, idioms, words in general, check out:
Nest Expressed 
This is really funny. I think I got them all. Your posts are so good, I look forward to them. Sometimes I have trouble leaving comments so hope this works.
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Thanks Lynn, glad you like it. No worries at all, I know I’m not very good at visiting and leaving comments myself. Hope all is well!
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Great post, Daniel. With verbosity like this you should be a politician.
I struggled the most with number 10 – doesn’t auger well for someone striving to be a writer!
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Thanks, sir. Although, as established earlier, politics isn’t exactly my cup of tea. In fact, politics isn’t tea at all!
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Aw, NO! I was going to write number nine right here, for your entertainment! Now what can I say? Brilliant post, as always, Daniel! 🙂
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Thanks Ella, and sorry for ruining your number 9. There are plenty of other proverbs – so feel free to have a go at them!
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My husband loved this one! He guessed them all, but he says No, thank you to the virtual hug…he isn’t a huggy kinda guy with guys even when it is the virtual kind. A virtual high five would be in okay or even better a virtual bag of Doritos.
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It’s a deal. Virtual Doritos have been shipped via Yahoo Mail. Stand by!
Glad he enjoyed it. This was a bit different, but doing random nonsense is what I do best.
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Yes, you are true genius at it.
I figured out a couple of them, but he got them all.
I’ll let him know the Doritos are on the way. 😉
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I think I decoded most of them, but my brain froze up near the end. That’s a LOT of words!
When someone writes like that for a living, it must become addictive in a way. It’s makes you sound so officious and important. Impressive use of words there sir!
And now I need to go lie down.
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Indeed. After all that reading of insane texts going to lie down is the best option.
Maybe I have a bright future career in writing scientific stuff? I hope not!
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I’m on vacation, so my brain had trouble keeping up. But I DO know I want you to co-author my next scientific paper with me. You have the lingo down perfectly. In fact, you should be lead author. Perhaps an article on cat-scratch disease. It’s spread by kittens, so given your daily encounters with Django and Pebbles, you may even develop it. Talk about inside knowledge…
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Surface skin injuries inflicted by felines are typically the result of one being in close proximity to the aforementioned felines. I think it could work!
Hope you’re enjoying your time away, looking forward to have you back! Thanks for dropping by.
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Have you ever read a Supreme Court opinion before? A legal brief of any sort? I think it’s worse than science and I have to read it. All. Day. Long.
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Well I certainly don’t envy you, then. At. All!
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