proverbs

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: