The Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases

A Helpful List of Expressions
which Commonly Appear in Scientific Texts,
their Meanings, and a Guide
to their Appropriate Use

inspired, naturally,
by Ambrose Bierce

copyright 2019 by Russ Hodge

Note: the Devil’s Dictionary is now available in print!
Get your copy here!

 

abductor pollicis  (from the Latin) a person who goes around stealing thumbs. Not to be confused with abductor policies, which are contracts issued by health insurance companies to pay the legal fees of anyone who has been accused of organ theft.

accessoire  a technical term for anything that must be removed from the body before undergoing an examination with a magnetic resonance imaging machine, including cell phones, piercings, safety pins holding up your underwear, and implements that have been accidentally left behind during surgery. The term has been extended to refer to anything superfluous on the machine itself or anything around the lab that you want to get rid of, which is accomplished by turning on the magnet so that it will be sucked in and transported to an alternate universe.

additionally  a word meaning the opposite of “subtractionally”.

affinity  a word indicating the likelihood that two components of a system will have intercourse with each other, whether molecules or members of a laboratory; “high affinity” means they’re getting it on every chance they get, whereas “no affinity” means “when Hell freezes over, and probably not even then.”

–age  is a short suffix that can be added to most nouns and a few other speciages of wordages if you can get them to hold still long enough to attach it. Its original usage stemmed from attaching the word “itch” to something that caused one. “I wouldn’t give you five cents for that beddage (bed-itch),” someone might say, implying that a mattress was full of lice. Other spellings were incorporated early on: “radish” comes from “red-itch,” as some who ate the vegetable developed a rash. Later British noblemen began to add “-age” to words under the mistaken impression it derived from a similar French suffix (“personne” becomes “personnage”), and that using it would suggest they spoke French, which would people think they were more intelligent, higher-class, and cooler than they actually were. They used the suffix to make simple things seem more complex and sophisticated than they actually were. A “dosage” was something a physician gave you; a “dose” was something acquired in a less respectable social setting, and the reason for your visit to the doctor in the first place. A nobleman referred to his social equals as his “peerage”, aiming to imply that they deserved respect; the unintentional irony was that more literally, you were saying he was “lousy” (full of lice). This use of “-age” to make things sound more intelligent or technical has persisted to modern times. “Usage” is often favored over “use”, although they mean the same thing. And you’d never listen to a relative go on and on about the amount he pays for gas, which is nothing more than griping and his own dumb fault for buying the car; “mileage” sounds more technical and scientific, and can start a discussion that lasts for hours.

alignment  the placement of two things next to each other in a way that lines up their ends, at which point they will be determined to have equal length or not. If not, the problem generally needs to be corrected. If aligning one end causes the other not to align, the standard procedure is to chop off the longer one to achieve double-ended alignment. If you cut off too much then the other item will now be the longer one and you must now repeat the operation on the second item, being careful not to get them confused. It is considered aesthetic to align hair, for example, on opposing sides of a person’s head to achieve a symmetrical result, but the actual process of ensuring that each hair on the left side aligns with its partner hair on the right is so complex that it must generally be done by experts and costs about $400. Amateurs often misalign the two sides numerous times in succession, which is the major cause of baldness. This can be avoided by placing a bowl on the head of the person you are trying to align, checking to ensure that their spine and head are straight through the use of a leveling device, and then cropping the hair evenly around the rim of the bowl. The bowl itself, of course, must be perfectly symmetrical and balanced at the exact zenith of the head, preferably by fixing it into place with a small nail or powerful adhesive so that slippage does not occur.

In genetics the term refers to aligning the genomes of two species to determine which has “the longer one.” Anything hanging over is probably responsible for features found in one species but not the other. It is a myth that females tend to choose mates with extra letters that extend the length of their genomes. Technique is equally important.

aliquot  a small portion of a liquid, not an exact measurement, but smaller than the contents of a shot glass; if you start with a full shot glass and then drink a portion of it, this leaves you with an amount that is no longer a portion, so you drink a portion of that, then a portion of the portion, and so on until the glass is completely empty; an aliquot is the amount that is left just before you reach that point. Not even a Drosophila can get drunk on an aliquot. A yeast cell, perhaps.

allorecognition   the ability to recognize yourself, rather than mistaking yourself for someone else, such as a famous person, a plant or a piece of furniture, or confusing a part of yourself with a part of someone else. Allorecognition can be improved by looking in the mirror every morning, naming the person you see there, and then checking your identity papers. If there’s any doubt, stab the person or body part in question with a sharp object, such as a fork. If it hurts, you have accomplished allorecognition. Otherwise you have stabbed someone else and should apply first aid. Or you may be suffering from a rare congenital condition that makes you insensitive to pain, in which case you should still perceive a sensation of pressure as the tines penetrate your skin.

altruism  a disputed term used by some psychologists to describe a temporary, dissociative cognitive state marked by mental confusion and unnatural behavior. The most distinctive symptom is that a person suffering from altruism places the well-being of others above his own, even when this involves risky and even self-destructive behavior. This extends to individuals beyond his or her own children in what has sometimes been described as “an overgeneralization of the mothering instinct.”

Altruism seems so contradictory to evolutionary principles that some refuse to believe it exists and try to explain every altruistic act as ultimately selfish. The problem troubled Darwin to the point that he put off publishing the theory of evolution for more than two decades, spending more than half of that time in a painstaking study of barnacles. This aquatic creature is commonly used as an animal model of human altruism because in some sub-species, males have given up their bodies altogether in service of females, now existing as little more than a sac of sperm, a sort of parasite inside the female body. Darwin finally resolved the conflict by realizing that short-term altruistic behavior might have a function like bird plumage, by attracting potential mates. It might fool someone into thinking you were “nice”, at least long enough to invite home for a few rounds of reproductive exercise. Most bouts of altruism wear off quickly, within a few hours, but the original performance might have been so impressive it could years for a mate to realize it was a temporary aberration, and the victim is normally just as selfish as everyone else.

Diagnosis is tricky and altruism can only be definitively detected through EEG recordings and a brain scan. These measurements reveal a depressed activity in areas of the brain related to basic instincts of self-preservation and higher cognitive functions, akin to the brain’s response to canniboids. The longest duration for a uninterrupted altruistic state recorded in medical history is four hours, although the patient was sedated for most of that time.

ambiguity  a mental state resembling the condition when someone can’t decide which of your eyes to look at and keeps shifting right-left-right-left until you want to punch them: cognitive eyeball pingpong.

angiogenesis  a process in organisms that is the biological equivalent of attaching new structures to city water and sewage services. Until this occurs, cells and tissues have to use outhouses. Angiogenesis is paid for by the rest of the organism, typically through a municipal tax hike, and often leads new organs and tissues to be shunned by the oldtimers. Compare to antiangiogenesis, which involves shutting down the services to cells that fail to pay their bills, usually after a visit by a process server.

anterior  the part of the body above the posterior, provided you have access to a gravitational field and are not standing on your head. Otherwise, place your hands on your posterior; the anterior end is everything in the opposite direction.

applanate an adjective used to describe an organism or ecosystem that has been flattened, such as the turtles my grandmother used to run over with her car, microbiomes living on chairs, spiders caught out in the open, or Western Kansas after a tornado.

apterygial   a category name for animals without wings or without fins. The term permits the Animal Kingdom to be divided into apterygials (including most humans, at least those I know, and housepets such as dogs, cats, sheep, cows, and aardvarks, but not parrots, chickens or ostriches) and anapterygials. Anapterygials can be further subdivided into winged anapterygials that do not have fins, and finned anapterygials that do not have wings, and full anapterygials, which have both wings and fins. The only full anapterygials I know are flying fishes and sportsmen who combine hang-gliding with scuba diving. A few full anapterygials can be found in the fossil record, but they went extinct about as quickly as most hang-gliding divers.

arachnicate  any process which significantly increases the local concentration of spiders, just as the way pontificate is a sharp increase in the number of popes in a given space.

archaea  a unicellular organism known as an extremophile, generally meaning that it thrives in places the rest of us would find uncomfortable, such as hot thermal vents on the ocean floor, where they are thought to have evolved about 3.5 billion years ago, or in the tanks of Jacuzzis in hotels, the cloud palaces of Venus, or the belly button of a man who refused, for reasons that are unclear, to take a shower or otherwise bathe for many years. It is also unclear how the Archaea got into the belly button, although 3.5 billion years is probably enough time to crawl there from the ocean floor if you have a clear destination in mind and don’t make a lot of pit stops along the way. Some scientists believe that archeae invaded primitive bacteria and established a symbiotic relationship, leading to the evolution of the modern eukaryotes, although it is hard to see what they got out of the deal, unless they regarded the bacteria as hotel resorts where they could get cheap Jacuzzis.

Regarding the belly button, I cite from the original article: “Of special note are three phylotypes of Archaea [we found in the belly button], a domain of life often found in extreme environments and not previously reported from human skin [1], [27], multiple phylotypes of which we isolated from two independent samples (see online Supporting Information S1). Two of these three phylotypes were from an individual who self-reported not having showered or bathed for several years.” Reference: Jiri Hulcr, Andrew M. Latimer, Jessica B. Henley, Nina R. Rountree, Noah Fierer, Andrea Lucky, Margaret D. Lowman, Robert R. Dunn. A Jungle in There: Bacteria in Belly Buttons are Highly Diverse, but Predictable. Plos One: Nov. 7, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047712

artifact  in archeology, a piece of garbage or any remnant left over from an ancient culture, such as the 1970s; in biology or medicine or physics, something produced by an experiment or an instrument that creates a hallucination in a scientist, such as an apparition of the Virgin Mary in an MRI scan of the heart.

automation  the activity that takes place inside the coffee machine in the hallway, on the rare occasions when, after the insertion of a coin, it produces both a cup and some sort of fluid; alternatively, the mental state of a graduate student during the writing of a dissertation.

balancers  in immature salamanders, antenna-like structures that grow from the head until the legs come along. Their name comes from their function; ideally there are two, weighing the head down so it doesn’t tip to one side, which would cause the animal to lose its balance. In humans this function is performed by the ears, and later equilateral piercings; in weight-lifting, by ensuring that there is a weight on either side of a barbell.

barb  is commonly used in two ways:
1. as the short form of Barbara: a Barbie doll that has finally emerged from puberty and reached adulthood. Given the rather vague nature of the anatomy of these creatures, usually only experts can tell when this has occurred.

2. one of the hair-like projections emerging from the spine of a feather. What keep the barbs from sprouting off in all directions like the tail of a cat or a toilet brush are smaller structures on barbs. The absence of these features in cats and toilet brushes impedes their ability to fly, at least without help. In a feather, barbs are kept aligned by barbules, which are smaller projections sprouting from a barb. A barbicule is an even smaller projection that sprouts from a barbule. After that, it’s barbicules all the way down.

barber  a person or mechanism (such as a molecule, a robot, or duct tape) that attaches the barbs to a feather or removes the barbs from a person’s head. In some cases both occur, for example if a person’s head is shaved and then adorned by feathers, perhaps after an application of tar. In casual speech, “barber” is sometimes used to refer to people who trim barbels, which are the whiskers of catfish, but the proper designation is barbeler. This should not be confused with a barbeller, which means a person who assembles barbells or routinely uses them in a job, such as breaking legs for a loan shark.

barognosis   the ability to sense and respond to pressure. Some people lack this sense, or progressively lose it with age; they refuse to budge no matter what type of pressure you apply. The term for this condition is barognosticism, and its practitioners are barognostics. Or curmudgeons.

basement membrane  a layer of fat molecules which anchors cells to a surface in hopes that they will not fly off during a tornado. If they can’t maintain a grip, they are advised to crawl under cars or heavy organs.

bioinformatics  a field no one understands, in which computer algorithms are used to manipulate data to reach any conclusion you like, or to disprove the ideas of a competitor, by calculating things that would take a million years to do by hand, and the only way to check the results is to have another computer do it, even though they may be working in cahoots.

biomass  is used in two ways: 1) the “weight of life.” If you weigh a living organism such as a human being directly before and after its sacrifice, the biomass is the difference. The biomass is just that part of an organism’s weight contained in the Life Force. Some distinguish it from the soul, whose weight must then be subtracted from the Life Force total. If the death produces a ghost, its weight must be subtracted as well. This leaves a biomass that is usually very small, about .000001 grams, although some scientists maintain that this represents the weight of the last breath instead of the Life Force. Others believe that the Life Force and the last breath are the same thing, particularly if you have been eating garlic. If the weight after death is heavier than before, then you’ve waited too long to perform the measurement; the extra weight comes from bacteria and other decomposers which have settled into the organism for the feast and begun to reproduce. People who don’t believe in a Life Force, a soul, or a ghost are not only sort of boring, but they have a more boring definition of biomass: 2) the weight of every living thing in an environment, measured after you’ve stacked it in a big pile.

bioprospecting  a process by which blood is passed through a filter in search of nuggets of gold or other precious metals. Prospecting for oil in the body is called a lube job. Natural gas can be detected without any special device, by anyone with a normal sense of smell, after it is emitted through the typical orifice.

-bios a suffix attached to organisms indicating the ecosphere – the “living space” – in which they typically reside. Examples include:

halobios  the organisms residing inside a halo

limnobios  the organisms that live in limonade

limobios  anything organic that remains after cleaning a limo

diplobios  parasites occupying the bodies of diplomats

geobios  animals that live on land; interestingly, an anagram of the word is “boogies”, which means organisms that live in a gelatinous substance extracted from the nose and exposed to air.

biota  a pair of iotas (also known as smidgens) that have become fused together and pledge from that point on to pursue a strictly monogamous relationship. Biota can be dissolved by antibiotics, but only when prescribed by someone with dual degrees in medicine and theology.

biped  the past tense of bipe, a technical term for biting in species are unable to pronounce it properly because they have no teeth, or in elderly humans who have forgotten to insert their dentures before appearing at the table.

blennogenous  a way to say “snotty” in refined contexts, as in, “Don’t get blennogenous with me, your Lordship!” Blennogeny refers to the progeny of snot, namely everything expelled in a sneeze. Blennogenophony refers to synchronized sneezing, an aesthetic performance so far only popular in New York, where it will hopefully remain quarantined. The most highly developed form is the blennogenosymphony, which common decency prevents me from describing here. Really, one must draw the line somewhere.

blepheronous  any regrettable event involving eyelids.

blubber   in aquatic animals such as whales, a layer of fat between skin and underlying muscles that insulates the insides from the outsides. In media science, a layer of rhetoric that lies between news and facts and prevents them from ever mingling.

book lice  a parasite created through genetic engineering techniques by introducing termite genes into head lice. Originally developed for their potential as a form of organic recycling, librarians got their hands on the bugs and began cultivating them in S1 laboratories in the library basement. Staff harvest the colonies for their eggs, which are spotted onto the pages of books before they are loaned out. The eggs are timed to hatch precisely one day after the date due, at which point the lice crawl out of the book and take up residence in nearby volumes on the patron’s shelf or any available textile, which is why you should never read a library book in bed and should always return it on time. The eggs are highly sensitive to changes in the environment of the book; improper handling, such as dog-earring a page, often triggers early hatching. Book lice are to library patrons what the dye packs they hide in currency are to would-be bank robbers.

break  as in, to break something  the first stage of reverse engineering, which is a technical skill that forms the basis of pirating software, technology, or the secret recipe for Colonel Sander’s Fried Chicken, which one of my aunts claimed to have reverse engineered and shortly thereafter was never heard from again. Reverse engineering is based on the principle that a technology can be replicated by breaking it into its functional parts, making counterfeits of them, and then assembling the new pieces in the same way as the original. Ideally this is accomplished following the same steps as disassembly but in the reverse order, although minor detours are commonplace, especially if you didn’t take very good notes. Reverse engineering always results in one screw too many or one too few. This has to do with the law of conservation of mass and energy, which dictates that a thing can’t simply disappear without some transfer of mass or energy; otherwise this creates a wormhole or some violation of the space-time continuum and may destroy the entire universe. Thus the extra screw is to make up for the one that was missing the last time.

Break is used for both physical and metaphysical objects, but typically not for whole living organisms; you won’t find “break a cell,” for example, although you can crack them, and it’s also fun to blow them up with the microinjector. If you do find the word “break” in an expression such as “break a horse” (one can’t “break a mule”), or “break a predoc,” or “break yo momma,” the meaning is metaphorical – it is the spirit of the bull, or the momma, or the PhD student that is being broken in some abstract manner. Break can be used with body parts, usually those that are more solid: “break an arm,” and “break some heads,” but some softer parts are included as exceptions: “break your heart,” “broke his brain,” “frequently breaks wind during committee meetings.”

In common usage “break” bears many negative connotations – dismemberment, disease, death – but also many positive ones (coffee break, break a leg, marriage break). The majority of engineers, but not biologists, claim a broken object originally set them on the path to a scientific career. The parents were out, something broke, it had to be fixed before the parents returned. With furniture it could be done, and occasionally the electronics – not so much the pets.

Brownian commotion  jiggly-leg syndrome at the scale of molecules.

Calvin cycle  a setting that used to be included on washing machines, at the hottest end of the range of cycles, representing the steps required to cleanse a person (or his or her clothing) of all sin. Basically the water was heated at a constant rate inside the machine until it surpassed the boiling point and, with no egress, continued until God stopped it, through an explosion or another calamity, such as punching the rotating drum through the outer metal shell and usually the wall of the washroom, taking with it anything and anyone in its way, or until the owner was pronounced dead, upon which God would take care of the matter Himself. Named for the infamous French theologian John Calvin, who routinely used washing machines as instruments of torture for the same purpose, alongside public burnings and other manifestations of his faith.

carrying capacity  the average total number of plates, glasses, silverware and other service items that can be carried by a member of a species that has been trained to do so, without producing a carambolage or a loud crashing noise. In general, of all the members of the animal kingdom, the octopus has the highest average carrying capacity. It’s the suction cups, you know.

catabolism  a biological process akin to the natural process by which societies revert to anarchy. Catabolism takes place when complex entities become so large that its members decide it is unmanagable and ungovernable, at which point they decide to fragment into smaller parts which are equally unmanageable, but at least one knows who is responsible. The products of catabolism are eventually sucked up by whatever neighbor decides to consume them.

catheterization the penetration of a cheek, the soft palette, tonsils or throat by a drinking straw which was in a soft drink until the automobile accident, which was caused by a driver texting on a cell phone. At the moment the straw penetrates living tissue it becomes a catheter. In medicine the term has generalized and is now widely applied to any hollow tube inserted by force into a place in the body, either intentionally or by accident, that causes pain and an inappropriate release of fluids that belong there, or an introduction of fluids that do not. In medical practice cell phones often play some role in catheterization as well, but their involvement is not a defining criterion.

cell cycle  the phases of events that define periods in the life of a dividing cell, named after the stereotypical segments in James Bond films: prophase (the action sequence before the Song and the opening credits, which are displayed against a backdrop of swimming, flying, or burning silhouettes of naked females); M phase (Bond visits the office of his superior and is reprimanded for some inappropriate behavior, after which he continues the behavior as if the discussion never happened); Q phase (in which he is given a wristwatch that turns itself into a helicopter, submarine, or releases an atomic missile depending on which button is pressed); interphase (during which you can buy popcorn); X phase (the parts you would like to see but don’t get to, so that the film can retain an “R” rating); hangover phase (also normally cut from the films, but is adequately covered in the following PubMed articles: Shaken, not stirred: did James Bond have an alcohol problem? and Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?

chemosmosis  to strictly follow the rules of chemistry while carrying out the process of smosis, rather than performing it any which-way, which is still widely practiced although people ought to know better. Smosis is divided into endosmosis, the inward-directed form of smosis, which is considered more polite, and exosomosis, which projects the smosis outwards and is unacceptable in many civilized contexts.

chorein  a situation in which a harmonious, tranquil state of homeostasis is disrupted by the entrance of a choir.

chorology  the study of the geographical or topological or stratalogical or scatological distribution of plants and animals throughout the universe or any part of it, such as the Earth, so that you can keep track of where you put them

chromatin  what DNA looks like when it lets its hair down and gets “hinky”, “funky” and “kinky”; i.e., a huge mess. If a scientist tells you it is actually highly organized, then give him a brush and tell him to untangle it.

cingulation the process of squeezing something into a form that is demonstrably too small for it, such as a pair of jeans or a girdle.

citation factor  the scientific equivalent of the number of followers you have on “Twitter”; if it reaches an extremely high number, a scientist is said to have “scored a Kardashian” and gets his/her own reality show. Also as is the case with the Kardashians, this factor is directly correlated to the number of times a scientist gets a divorce.

classification  a system for dividing life into logical groups: organic, semi-organic, inorganic, semi-literate, unmarriable.

cnid  a fragment, subunit, or portion of a cnidarian, a large family of organisms that consist mostly of jello packed within thin membranes. Cnid is often produced through the interaction of cnidarians with boat propellors, but when jello is shaped through the use of a mold, into forms such as a brain or the Last Supper of Leonardo daVinci, the result is also considered a cnidarian consisting of cnid. Naturally occurring cnidarians live in aqueous environments and often have nettle-like tentacles. They sting like the dickens because they are used to inject toxins into unwitting prey or people who disturb cnidarians by splashing about in the water, although these features of cnidarians are usually omitted from jello molds. Cnid is an uncountable word, so it does not occur in the plural form. To refer to quantities a word is added that is usually measure of volume: “Give me a spoonful of that cnid,” or, “After you have molded graham crackers into a crust, pour on 3 cups of cnid and apply, if desired, a generous amount of whipped cream as a topping.” (Recipe suggested by my mom, Jo Hodge.)

coconut crab  an enormous arthropod at the Humvee end of the scale of crabs. This species used to be prevalent throughout Indonesia and other areas of the Pacific, but is nowadays experiencing a rapid decline through the incursion of other species that have dramatically reduced the availability of parking spaces. In desperation coconut crabs sometimes park in beds or sleeping bags, leading to travel advisories for voyagers to these parts of the world.

From the tip of its claws to the back end, technically known as the “butt end,” an adult coconut crab can span nearly a meter, although the claws themselves may be three or four meters long, which is hard to understand unless some type of folding is involved. In an amazing coincidence, coconut crabs have a diet consisting mainly of coconuts, so it’s a good thing their claws are powerful enough to crack the hard shells. Evolutionary biologists believed that the species discovered this capacity by accident – how could they have known that there was something edible inside a coconut? – probably as the result of a mishap that occurred during a bowling tournament. When coconuts became scarce, the crabs have also been known to eat Amelia Earhart.

cohort  a large herd of mammals which is rounded up at regular intervals and corralled into the waiting room of a hospital or clinic.

collocalize  usually refers to molecules that move in together without getting married.

collaborator  a competitor with whom a temporary cease-fire has been negotiated.

colon  a type of punctuation found within the digestive tract, somewhere between the mouth and the exit, signifying that an efflux which has begun is not yet finished: more is yet to come. Contrast with semicolon; this refers to a region which divides the contents of the large and small intestines into functionally equivalent parts, which may be found in different physical locations depending on the load being transported at the time.

competitive exclusion principle  an evolutionary observation that two different species generally can’t occupy the same space without one becoming extinct, for example a married couple and their in-laws.

competitor  a scientist who, for some reason, has taken a wrong turn on the Path to Enlightenment, accepts false doctrine, and despite your best efforts, refuses to admit the error of his or her ways.

complemental air  an amount of air which can be drawn into the lungs beyond that normally needed for breathing, up to the point that they pop. Lungs, like balloons, come with a recommended maximum volume which may vary during activities like deep-sea diving and hiking trips to the Himalayas. Users exceed these values at their own risk.

complemental male a little dude that the females of some species carry around in case of an emergency; sort of a travel gigolo. In the era of modern reproductive technology, complementary males have generally been replaced by vials of sperm.

computational approach  any use of a computer in any scientific activity (with the sole exception of making slides in PowerPoint). Formatting a text so that page numbers automatically appear on the pages is, for example, a computational approach to pagination.

concatenate  to line up cats in a row, so that you can rapidly apply some procedure or treatment simultaneously, rather than having to chase down each cat individually to remove its reproductive organs.

conditioning  any process of training which causes a biological entity, such as your hair, to behave the way you want it to rather than to follow its natural instincts.

conglomerate  an entity consisting of several partners, usually institutes or businesses, which have been joined together, thereby forming a glom. The precise historical meaning of “glom” has been lost, but it most likely referred to the sticky masses of alcohol, bodily secretions, cigarette butts, and other detritus of human civilization that fall to the floor of a bar and become glued together, forming gloms. EU collaborations or multinational corporations are examples of conglomerates.

consciousness  a mental state in which one is not only aware of sensations and events, but is aware enough of being aware of them to find something to complain about.

control group  in experimental animals, the lucky ones; in human trials, the group that suffers all the poking and prodding of clinicians, gets a placebo, and is paid in Monopoly money.

correlation  something that happens shortly before, during, or after something else, making you think they are causally connected. Usually the two things need to appear together more than once to be considered a correlation, but maybe it’s a rare event, and you just haven’t waited long enough. A lot of things, for example, correlate with “when Hell freezes over,” which surely doesn’t happen that often. And sometimes personal circumstances prevent a correlation from taking place, even though you want it to. For example, there’s a correlation between having a birthday and getting birthday cards, but sometimes people just forget. If you uncorrelated your friends, they’d probably feel upset. So it’s better to tell them, the next time you see them, “There’s a correlation between having your birthday and gettings cards from your friends,” and they’ll surely get the hint.

corroborate  derived from the verb “to rob,” meaning to commit a theft. To corroborate means to join together in a gang or band to commit a crime, usually intellectual in nature.

cribiform  a word used to describe the shape of any animal that can be used as a spaghetti strainer; cribiform organisms or colonies sometimes arise spontaneously at the apertures of shower drains.

curmudgeon  a hybrid between a human being and a crustacean.

cyanophil a person or organism that experiences an unnaturally strong attraction for shades of the color green, such as those waiting for a stoplight to change, or blues, such as John Lee Hooker. A cyanophil with colorblindness may rush toward the color red as well, which may account for the behavior of most people operating automobiles in the city of Naples, Italy.

-dactyly  having to do with the fingers. The root has been enhanced to create the following terms:

polydactyly  orignally, the ability to play the piano with more than one finger. Nowadays the word is also used for touch typing or the capacity to type text messages with more than just the index finger.

brachydactyly  the ability to play the piano or type despite having very short fingers. Performers are permitted to use alternate fingerings, as well as their toes, if the work contains intervals they are unable to reach.

pterodactyly  the ability to play the piano while wearing wings, such as when a performer is wearing an angel costume. Also applies to birds that have been taught to play the piano or to send text messages, which happens more often than you think.

aquadactyly  moving splayed fingers through a liquid, such as while swimming badly, or stirring your coffee with your fingers when you haven’t been provided with a spoon.

pastadactyly  to eat or strain spaghetti without the aid of utensils, using exclusively fingers.

peridactyly  pertaining to or residing in the empty space between the fingers. Recent studies indicate that an individual’s peridactylic environment is unique and contains its own microbiome.

psychodachtyly  unconscious movements of the fingers which occur while imagining playing the piano, flute, or another instrument.

omnidactylic  any process which requires the use of all ten fingers at the same time, such as kneeding dough, washing hair, squeezing breasts, or gestures made upon being startled.

quotadactyliac  a person with the annoying habit of using the fingers to form quotation marks in the air when quoting someone or to indicate that a phrase is being used ironically.

autodactyly  activities in which the fingers have learned to perform on their own, without the involvement of the brain or consciousness. Scratching an itch, picking lice from a spouse’s hair, or texting on a cell phone are all examples of autodactylic behavior.

data  the scientific version of the art term “dada”: an international collective activity which promotes self-fulfilling public gatherings, demonstrations, the publication of journals, and the placement of urinals and snow shovels as art in museums, until a member of the public misinterprets their aesthetic intent and uses them for the purposes they were originally intended. (Thanks to Ted Johnson, Lawrence, Kansas, Professor emeritus extraordinaire!)

deliberate  (verb) to consider a topic in a group for the time required to take into account all relevant points of view and as many irrelevant ones as can be produced in the time that is available. This happens most often in a situation such as a faculty meeting where attendance is compulsory and everyone must stay to the end, which puts deliberations, from a legal point of view, into a grey area between kidnaping and hostage-taking. The amount of time required for a deliberation depends on the amount of time it ought to take a single person to come to a decision and the number of participants (n). If ten minutes would normally suffice, the time needed for a deliberation can be calculated according to the following formula:

Time = 10ⁿ

where in academic situations the resulting time is calculated in minutes; in political meetings hours, and in election campaigns months or years.

development  a process by which complex organisms arise from a single cell (often a fertilized egg), then go through a brief, chaotic phase as multicellular organisms before degenerating. This requires a great deal of energy and places an enormous burden on the entire ecosphere, which must expend fantastic resources to give such organisms something to eat. Originally multicellularity arose when a progenitor’s offspring were too lazy to leave home, get jobs and carry out fruitful, independent lives. Instead they remained stuck together in a sort of commune or collective, which happened for several reasons: they shared a common religious or political ideology, or were simply too lazy to learn to fend for themselves and developed a pathological co-dependency on each other. Or they were simply too sticky to detach themselves. Ultimately all of these experiments fail because the group becomes too large to manage, descends into anarchy, and finally falls apart, leaving single cells again. At that point you have to wonder whether it is worth it, if the whole point is simply to end up as food for bacteria and worms.

digestion  a process that plays an essential role in an organism’s health by undoing the negative effects of eating. This requires aggressive enzymes that are contained in a sort of high-security facility called the gut, which prevents them from escaping and digesting the organism they reside in. Digestion is also crucial to the long-term maintenance of ecological systems. Without it, large organisms would eat all the smaller organisms and exhaust the food supply. Digestion returns those at the top of the food chain to the bottom in the following way: a large organism eats another large organism, thereby breaking it down into smaller units so that it can be eaten by organisms with smaller mouths; their digestion, in turn, reduces this matter into even smaller units that can be eaten by other organisms with even smaller mouths, and so on, until the units are so small that they can be eaten by microbes, which have no mouths at all. That’s not the end of it; the process continues to the level of molecules, quarks, superstrings, and stops just before reaching infinitismity. Each passage through a digestive system performs a public service by removing toxins that would otherwise kill the smaller species that feed on its feces. Digestion is the main piece of evidence for the “Giant Robot” school of evolutionary theory, which claims that multicellular organisms arose as the most efficient way for bacteria to reach the food that is stored on high shelves.

digit  a structure on the periphery of the hands and feet of animals that originally evolved from twigs. In the earliest animals, digits were still very twig-like. Animals grew from the tips of their fingers and toes, sometimes to amazing distances from the body they belonged to. Leaves and fruits sprouted from the twigs, which put a lot of food conveniently within grasp. But mutations in an early animal stunted the growth of digits to the point that they could no longer bud. Genetic engineers might have helped restore these characteristics, but the Crispr/Cas system hadn’t yet been acquired from simpler organisms, due to conflicts over issues of rights and patents.

After about 100 million years, evolution managed to get the digits hooked up to body utility services such as the vasculature and sewage lines, and at some point a cable company appeared and linked them into the network of the CNS, suddenly placing them under the control of the brain. There were advantages: digits could now be used to pick lice off a spouse, or grab a potential spouse by the hair, or point at things you wished for your spouse to bring to you, such as a bottle of beer, and you could even indicate the number of beers you wanted, provided it didn’t exceed 10 at a time. That was all right because 10 was about the most bottles your spouse could handle in a single trip. Finger-pointing covered most situations that otherwise would have required language, so the evolution of that region of the brain was postponed for a few more hundred million years. During that period mouths were used mostly for eating things and the tongue for picking food from the teeth. Any utterances were simply the by-product of exhaling air through a larynx, past the glottis, the tongue, the teeth, etc.

directed mutagenesis  any method of artificially altering the genes of an organism that involves a musical score and a conductor in a tuxedo.

disblepheronia  a major disease diagnosed in anywhere from 14 to 1 billion people per year, whose mechanisms are poorly understood and for which there is an urgent need for the development of novel, rational, effective, global, inexpensive therapies, which hopefully don’t cause more trouble than the problem they aim to solve. A person suffering from disblepheronia loses the coordination between the blinking of the eyelids, which is often interpreted as winking in inappropriate and offensive situations.

diuretic  a substance usually produced by plants which, when ingested by an animal, causes it to release the water it has taken up from the environment more quickly, and closer to its source, rather than carrying it long distances away and depositing it in a foreign watershed. This phenomenon means that diuretic plants get more water and have an advantage in natural selection. A high number of non-diuretic plants in a particular environment usually triggers the rapid development of deserts: the water needed by the plants is carried too far away to do them any good. Upon the death of such plants, the organisms that eat them migrate away, further reducing the recycling of water. The effect is self-reinforcing, which ultimately causes animals to cluster along coastlines, resulting in a huge spike in real estate prices and making a species susceptible to extinction by tsunami. Over the long term this cycle leads to environmental conditions like those found on the moon and Mars, which could have been prevented by the evolution of a single plant with diuretic properties.

dominance  a sado-masochistic relationship between alleles, whereby one gets to use the whips and the ropes and the other submits to it.

doohickey  a small knob or control on a thingamajig that does damnedifIknow.

dorsal  the region of a person that is opposite the ventral side; the part you can’t scratch or see without access to a mirror. If the ventral side is the side of a hotdog you put mustard and horseradish on, the dorsal side is the part near the bun. Unless you’re the kind of person who puts condiments on all sides of a hotdog, which will usually cause an inflation of your ventral side.

dosage compensation  a formula which calculates the proper number of cups of coffee needed to make up for each hour of missed sleep; a logarithmic scale should be used to plot the results. In genetics, dosage compensation refers to the activities undertaken by a chromosome to control the behavior of its crazy twin.

double-blind study  a type of study in which an amazing amount of record-keeping is undertaken to hide the fact that a scientist has forgotten which group is affected and which is the control. This leads to a situation where no one has the slightest idea what is going on, including why experiments are being performed, when they will be finished, or whose brilliant idea they were in the first place (usually someone who left the lab years ago). Most laboratory experiments fall in the category of double-blind studies.

drift  (or genetic drift)  a situation in which the younger generations of a species pack up and move away from the herd, taking their genes along with them. At some point youngsters get fed up with parental control, stuff a bunch of clothes in a backpack, and head off aimlessly on a railway pass, leaving its parents to wonder whether they have taken along a toothbrush. The young generations keep traveling until they have spent all their money, find an ashram that suits their nature, or both. When they reproduce their children go through the cycle all over again, leaving the ashram for other parts.

effector  the person from the lab who makes regular trips to the funding agency in Brussels with the small silver suitcase full of cash handcuffed to his wrist. It’s permissible to turn over the bribe to any agent officially licensed by the EU, whose contact details are found on the proposal submission webpage. Please note that since last week, the credentials of all Bribe Officers with passports from the UK have been revoked.

effuse  to emit a substance, such as words, in an enthusiastic manner, usually accompanied by a liquid (spittle).

efflux  something that comes out of a body, usually involuntarily. Removed from its natural environment and placed, for example, on the sidewalk, or on your dinner plate, efflux usually generates a sense of disgust and nausea, because you realize that there is more of the stuff in your body. This usually leads to reflux. From a legal standpoint, efflux has the same status as garbage: once you’ve put it out on the street, it becomes public property. Dogs may come by and roll in it. DNA samples may be taken from it without a warrent. You can no longer patent it. Anyone is free to come by in a pick-up truck, take it away, and display it on their lawn, or sell it on e-bay, or use it as the basis of a start-up company.

Elmer’s organs a gland found in the snouts of moles or the snoots of very nosy people. Its function is unknown, but it probably has something to do with the sense of touch. If someone tells you that Elmer’s glue was originally derived from substances extracted (somehow) from Elmer’s organs, which would have been hard to do without suffering some wounds, it’s probably not true – but rather just an amazing coincidence.

emeritus  a status in academia which is the functional equivalent of taxidermy or pickling, depending on whether the starting material was considered rather fauna or rather flora by departmental colleagues.

enantiomer  a form of asymmetry which becomes obvious when a glove is put on the wrong hand, a shoe on the wrong foot, or an arm or leg is surgically reattached to the wrong side of the body, which happens more often than you would think, but which at least puts the glove or shoe back on the correct foot. In this case the gloves and shoes are still called enantiomers, but at least they’re the matching enantiomers. Most molecules are enantiomers, which gives them the same sort of problem with gloves. Human beings are not enantiomers, at least not in this dimension, unless you count your evil twin who lives in the mirror. This raises the fascinating philosophical question: if you could choose someone to be your enantiomer, whom would you pick?

enation any outgrowth on a surface that was previously smooth, including warts, pimples, hair, cars on the street, or the wind turbines in Holland. Ultimately, all enations have effects akin to those of wind turbines, generating a propeller-like force that either hastens the motion of an object in the direction it desires, or pushes it back toward its point of origin. This effect is the reason for EU regulations dictating that the number of wind turbine enations pointed to the east must always be kept in balance with the number pointed west, to avoid reversing the Earth’s rotation. This is also the rationale behind laws requiring the alternate parking of automobiles from one side of the street to the other on various days of the week. At least one physicist has attributed Lance Armstrong’s success in the Tour de France to microscopic enations mounted on his bicycling outfit. Not counting the pinwheel mounted on his handlebars. Or the dope, of course.

endogenous rhythm   The natural cycle of biology and behavior of an organism when it’s not prompted to activity by some external force, such as a complaint by a spouse, the closing time of a bar, jackhammers out on the street, or the arrival of hordes of relatives – not necessarily in that order. Humans exhibit endogenous behavior on holidays that are not accompanied by major sports events or lots of baking, such as President’s day.

epigenetics  various ways of subverting what genes are trying to make an organism do, often through the attachment of chemical markers to DNA or molecules lurking nearby; if the genome were a coloring book, epigenomics would be the scribbling that kindergarten children make all over it.

European Union  Not to be confused with the “European Onion,” a common mistake in the UK, because “Onion” sounds like it ought to begin with “un-“. It is unclear how many voters in the recent referendum were aware they were voting about their country’s participation in a political entity. Apparently many believed that Great Britain was under attack by a large, aromatic vegetable bulb. Probably a CRISPR/Cas experiment that escaped from the lab. In those circumstances, you’d vote to exit the Onion, too.

ex vivo  something that should be inside an organism but has somehow found its way outside, typically after a lab party, such as vomit, blood, mucous, and other excretions that my upbringing does not permit me to name here.   

exaggerate  a standard statistical procedure applied to data that has been analyzed but revealed some slight inconsistencies or failed to live up to expectations. When an important item in a study has a bad day and underperforms, a scientist is allowed to add a small bonus to restore its normal ranking compared to the other values, as a show of confidence that it will do better next time. This has a motivational function, and should not increase the original score by more than 2 or 3 orders of magnitude.

fact  an observation about the identity, quality, or characteristics of something that two people can agree on despite differences in their moods, religious beliefs, gender, political persuasions, or the number of goats that live in their houses, suggesting that the observation has objective value. Certain things can never be facts, even if their validity is extensively documented and can be measured: the age or degree of fatness of a spouse, the birthplace of a President, or the amount of taxes a person ought to pay. In the United States, since about 2008, there have been no facts at all. In the Trump era, they have been outlawed.

factoid  a unit of information which can be combined with other units to create a fact.

fat an acronym for the expression full of adipose tissue.

fat index a list of overweight people maintained by government agencies and insurance companies. In recent years this information is collected electronically by scales, chairs, and other devices and automatically forwarded to the appropriate authority via the Internet.

faunal region any area on the surface of a human body on which plant life can take root, such as the fungi that infest feet, seeds that sprout from belly buttons, mold on the underside of wigs, or the numerous species that grow from ear wax. The evolution of higher cognitive processes in modern humans was accompanied by the senses of shame and modesty and the invention of clothing. At that point plant life had a harder time taking root, so humans began adorning their apparel with artificial fauna such as plastic carnations, entire fruit orchards on the hat of the Queen, and vegetable sauces ornamenting the aprons worn by butchers and cooks named Luigi.

faveolus  the crater-like structure left behind on a person’s face after the removal of a zit

feedback a spontaneous reflex in response to being fed something you have no desire to eat, which often occurs after someone says, “Close your eyes and taste this.” In adults the reflex typically involves extracting the material from the mouth with a hand and cramming it into the mouth (or some other available orifice) of the offender. Young infants who do not have complete mastery of their hands usually just spit offensive substances back along the line of trajectory from which it arrived. When an adult repeats this process several times successively, with the same results, the situation is called a feedback loop. A feedback mechanism is a robotic apparatus to simulate the above.

first  in a list, the word used to introduce the item that lies between zero^thand secondly. If at a later point in time the author discovers that an item which belongs higher on the list has been omitted, the use of negative numbers is permitted: negative secondly, negative first, negative 0.5, etc.

fitness  a term in evolutionary theory which reflects the degree to which a person accurately reports his or her waist size. Fitness is calculated according to the following formula:

Actual waist size – Reported waist size = X

where X yields the degree of fitness. A score of 0 represents perfect fitness. Other values for X are negatively correlated with fitness, on a logarithmic scale. Claiming to wear clothes that are one size too small, for example, would yield X = 1 and a degree of fitness of 10% of the ideal. Underestimating your clothing by two sizes would yield a fitness score of 2 (1%), etc. Fitness plays a huge role in the evolution of species because individuals who chronically underreport their clothing sizes tend to buy tighter pants and eventually become sterile. This leads to negative selection which, over thousands of generations, eliminates tight-pants SNPs from a species’ gene pool.

Fitness cannot be improved by over-reporting waist size. This generally causes pants to fall down, entangling the feet, which is not advantageous for fleeing from predators.

fixing  In basic research this term generally refers to chemical methods of preparing a living creature or one of its parts, such as a cell or a tissue, but also a complete organism such as a group leader, so that all of its biological processes are immobilized at the moment of fixation. This is useful if you want to examine the mechanisms that underlie a behavior you do not understand, such as the organism’s refusal to give you feedback on your latest paper. It has the slight disadvantage of killing the object of research. In clinical science, “fixing” usually refers to methods of removing the reproductive organs of an animal so that it won’t engage in uncontrolled, promiscuous acts that would lead to lots of offspring. Given a choice between the experimental and clinical types, most organisms would probably prefer the first.

flagellum  a whip-like structure that arose in early prokaryotes as a mechanism by which they could express displeasure by beating on their neighbors. Because early microbes had not yet discovered the principles of Newtonian physics, they were perplexed when this activity caused an equal and opposite reaction: beating your neighbors also pushed you away from them, which was usually desirable, at least until they learned to behave, and had the added benefit of bringing you into contact with more types of organisms that you could beat. In the long term this caused the environment to adjust to your basic desires, rather than the other way around.

The advent of multicellular organisms had two major effects on the structure and functions of flagella: 1) it meant that neighboring cells began to exclusively beat each other, because they were stuck together, leading to a relationship resembling marriage, and 2) flagella initially caused problems of orientation, because in essence the organism had lots of rowers, each of whom rowed in whatever direction he or she pleased. The development of mechanisms that coordinated the beating behavior of flagella in multiple cells had a survival advantage: if rowing carried you away from a source of food, you could steer back toward it. This led to the evolution of social hierarchies, such as dictatorships, in populations of cells, giving one cell the decision-making power over other cells in determining the direction that they should row. From that point it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to the modern human brain.

flavonoid  secret substances invented by chemists in laboratories of the Ronald McDonald Corporation that render people addicted to fast food and trigger the onset of diabetes, or simply inflate them to the point that the only vehicle they will fit into is a Humvee, which they purchase as a means of traveling to the next fast food restaurant. Flavonoids have made hamburger joints major contributors to global warming: on one end through the vast quantities of methane produced by cows, and on the other through the fossil fuels used to transport addicts to their next fix.

flocculate  the process by which a floc is produced from a microfloc. What happens before that, no one knows, but microflocs can’t just arise from nothing, so it is reasonable to infer the existence of nanoflocs. Anyone who cares about what comprises nanoflocs – there’s something wrong with you.

fluke  a case in which the tail of a whale appears spontaneously, unexpectedly, and inexplicably in the middle of any laboratory experiment or procedure or some other place where you do not typically expect to find one, for example in a test tube full of ribosomes,  or in a yeast culture, or on a highway in Kansas, or in your sock drawer.

fontanelle  a gap in the skull of newborn humans that was originally used for whistling and snorkeling. It could also be used to add or remove parts of the brain as a means of enhancing the learning process. Nowadays the fontanelle has changed dimensions to the point that it is almost exactly the size of a USB port, in anticipation of the day in the near future when knowledge will be transferred via flash drives.

founder effect  also known as the confounder effect. The behavior of the parent, creator or inventor of something (such as a child, a machine or an institute) who continues to meddle with it long after he or she has supposedly left it in the hands of successors. Should not be confused with flounder effect, which refers to schools of fish that have lost their way and just swim aimlessly around until one of them finds the exit. There is, however, a connection: founders often intervene in the activities of their creations after developing the impression that they are floundering.

Fourier transform  a mathematical formula which compresses something long and tedious so that it all happens at once.  Using the Fourier transform, you could hear Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Niebelungen, which take anywhere between 15 hours and 15 days to perform, depending on at what point the conductor dies, in a single moment in which all the notes would be played simultaneously. This saves a lot of time and probably resembles the listening experience one would have while on LSD. How does the Fourier transform work? First, you need a microphone. This should be plugged directly into an envelope function that shapes the continuous sinusoid (a structure in the nose) into a short pulse shaped like a Gaussian function. I haven’t the slightest idea what that means, or what precisely goes in your nose, but the main thing is it appears to work. You can try it yourself, just be warned: the end result is really loud. Theoretically you can undo it again, by reversing or inverting or decongesting the transform, or maybe just sneezing really hard, but I don’t know if this has ever been successful. The last time they tried, what came out wasn’t Der Ring des Niebelungen, but the song, “I wish I had an Oscar Meyer wiener.” But I think they left out the ^ over the f in the following formula:

 

fruitcake  the product of a complex chemical experiment in which flour is taken in its raw, inedible form and combined with various other ingredients, some of which originally hung from trees in tropical climates, then subjected to intense heat until they reach a solidified form that is practically inedible unless you are willing to risk some teeth. A person probably wouldn’t die after eating some, but it has rarely been tried; only anecdotal evidence exists in the literature. The baked form resembles an adobe brick and can be used for most of the same purposes. The other main use is purely ritualistic and plays a role in Christmas festivities. A family bakes some, wraps them up as presents, and gives them to the neighbors. They, in turn, give their own version of fruitcake as form of revenge. Neither will eat the object, but you can’t throw it away – they might notice it in your garbage can. People do check what their neighbors are throwing away after the holidays. The solution is to archive it in the deep freeze, with a label indicating the year. We have a fruitcake in our freezer from the year 1897.

fungi  a foodstuff that originally evolved as an organelle of Pizza Rustica, but then underwent a sort of metastatic process through which fungi wandered off the plate, into the forest, and adapted in ways that permitted growth in moist soil. This had health benefits for pizza eaters, because to get the best tasting funghi they had to get off the sofa and go for walks outside.

gap junction  a sort of trailer hitch device on the exterior of cells which evolved to permit them to tow around recalcitrant neighbors. If the cell tries to tow a heavy partner and is unable to achieve the force and traction necessary to move it, then the rules of physics apply and the gap junction has an anchoring function. Gap junctions played a crucial role in the development of multicellular organisms because at some point a tissue achieves the critical mass that makes it inert, and it can no longer be dragged from the sofa.

gel  a product used to cultivate bacteria in a person’s hair, designed so that they can carry their work with them and don’t have to go to the lab on weekends.

generation time  the period of time that a mother requires between giving birth to one child or litter and the next. Mathematically the generation time for a species can be calculated using the following formula:

gestation time + x

where gestation is the amount of time between conception and birth and x is the amount of time between giving birth and the resumption of sexual activity by the mother, usually due to the insistent behavior of her partner.

For humans this generally results in a generation time of 9 months + 20 minutes

genus  a clade of organisms which are exceptionally talented in any area of activity except spelling.

geotonus the technical term for falling flat on one’s face. Scientists believe that in humans, this behavior represents an evolutionary adaptation, as the optimal arrangement for the body’s organs for the metabolism of high quantities of alcohol.

germ layer  a stratum composed of bacteria, viruses, dandruff, species of lice and other noxious entities that naturally develops on any surface that you don’t wash as often as you should. Germ layers can be transferred from one organism to another, usually through bowls of peanuts placed on bars.

GFP  Good Freaking Pie

gill bars  the only regions in an aquarium where a gar can get a real drink.

glabella  the region of a face at the top of the bridge of the nose that separates the eyebrows from each other, on the generic human face. Overall, humans can be divided into two groups: glabella positive (having two distinct eyebrows) and glabella negative (having only one). Polyglabellous refers to those with two or more glabella, and people entirely lacking eyebrows are described as hyperglabellous, unless this is the result of a disease such as glabellitis. The medical literature reports a few cases of paraglabella, in which individuals’ eyebrows have migrated to unusual places on their faces, such as below the eyes (also known as basal glabella), or arranged themselves vertically on either side of the eyes (paranthetical glabella).

gladiate  to mediate between parties in a dispute using knives, axes, or other weapons, including the tongue, if it has been sufficiently sharpened by irony.

glomerulus  a structure in the kidney where blood vessels come to dead ends when the developing embryo becomes too exhausted to finish linking them to each other; instead, it ties them up in a hasty knot and hides the ugly mess under a cap-like structure called the Bowman’s capsule, which is shaped exactly like a Soyuz spacecraft and is about as roomy for what has to fit inside. In essence, the glomerulus is to the blood vessel system what metal or plastic tips are to shoelaces. In contrast to these devices, which are subject to regulatory practices in the manufacturing industry, the glomerulus always leaks. This releases liquid from the blood and dumps it into the kidneys, which don’t want to deal either and simply pass it along to the bladder. There the liquid is stored until the bladder is full and has to be emptied. If this process took a little longer, the contents of the bladder would ferment and provide a source of alcohol. It is possible that in the past, this happened in animals that had much larger bladders, but this feature was removed through natural selection, as drunken animals make easier prey. If the glomerulus were entirely closed, the body’s water would be recycled. As things stand, mammals must continually take in and release water, which is incredibly inefficient, but at least it ensures that water returns to the environment so that other organisms have something to drink.

glossalgia  a thick formation of algae on the tongue, usually transferred there by a finger which has been licked to turn the pages of a moldy lexicon.

gold standard  an amount of pure gold equivalent to the value of an impact point. In ancient times, alchemists were actually awarded gold for their achievements (i.e., the degree to which their strange experiments came close to making it). In modern times, the gold standard was replaced with paper currency (journal articles), and is basically worthless in objective terms.

grant application  a bureaucratic procedure whereby a research laboratory applies for funding to pay for something that they have already done, yet pretend not to have finished, to get money to pay for the next thing they would like to do.

gravid  an adjective used to describe someone whose body is full of eggs, either in anticipation of a pregnancy or in the aftermath of an egg-eating competition, or both. In medical practice it is important to tell the difference, usually by inserting some type of invasive probe. Another method which has performed almost as well in double-blind studies is to squeeze the person really hard. If eggs emerge from the mouth, they most likely entered during a competition. If they emerge from somewhere else, they’re probably the other type of egg, now out on the town and looking to get hooked up.

grey matter  another term for scientific publications.

group leader  an official title of purely ceremonial significance, similar to “Lord Privy Seal” or “Fan-Bearer on the Right Side of the King,” given to a person who is responsible for a laboratory’s budget and doing the paperwork, but not much more.

gyration  the circular motion of an object around an axis, such as planets around a star, or hips around a pelvis. Gyration was discovered by Elvis Presley; until then, it was thought that the hips moved according to a model based on epicycles.

habituation  the process by which the brain becomes desensitized to sounds, smells, advertising, well-meaning advice from family members, and various other annoying stimuli rather than responding in an instinctual way, for example by becoming an ax murderer. In developmental biology, an intermediary stage in the course of a human relationship. It begins directly after the period of attraction and lasts until the onset of death by boredom.

Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium  a mathematical equation devised by two mathematicians – fortunately, because the chances of its accuracy are greater that way – while sitting on a teeter totter and debating the role of recessive genes in evolution. The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium proves that a group of average people will remain average for generation after generation until they are finally forced to get off the sofa through the arrival of some new form of selective pressure. Examples include invasions by extraterrestrials or WalMarts; any sort of planetary holocaust; an out-of-control Crispr/Cas9 experiment that creates cockroaches the size of battleships; any increase in sales tax; a death, marriage, divorce, homocide, or sterility induced by tight underwear; or all of the above, although not necessarily in that order. If you knew in advance which scenario would occur, you might be able to make preparations, for example by going commando, or constructing really large roach motels. Unfortunately, natural processes are random and unpredictable, so your genome has to be ready for anything – making it advisable to carry a toothbrush with you at all times. Any significant chnge in the environment will upset the teeter totter and send either Hardy or Weinberg flying up through the air, and the other crashing down on his delicate bits.

hatch  As a verb, hatch refers to the process by which an organism emerges from the receptacle in which it has undergone the stages of embryogenesis, whether an egg or a womb, often freeing itself by pecking an opening with its beak. So birds hatch from eggs and children hatch from the womb, unless the child is an amphibian or a reptile.

As a noun, hatch refers to a flap-like tissue that covers the throat which remains closed until it is stimulated by a liquid of high alcoholic content. This triggers a reflex by a hinge-like muscle at the back of the flap, causing it to open and permitting the alcohol to go “down the hatch”. From there it is routed to special cavities throughout the body that are dedicated to the processing of alcohol. There are several of these tubular structures, located in regions such as in the legs, where gave rise to the expression, “He has a hollow leg.” (The technical term is overflow lumen.) When alcohol enters such a lumen, it causes a sensation that the drinker reports as, “That really hit the spot.”

heredity  a process by which the worst characteristics of two organisms are assembled in various combinations to produce their offspring, until they are all used up, at which point the best properties are combined into a single, precious child, known as the “baby of the family.”

heterochromatin  a Godawful mess of DNA, but at least it has been swept up into piles so that it can be easily spread somewhere else, the way leaves are raked in Autumn before being blown asunder by the wind, or manure is collected to be strewn over fields.

heterochrony  the inability toremember whether to set your clock ahead or back at the beginning and end of Daylight Savings’ Time, and then to draw the proper conclusion about whether you have gained or lost an hour. As for what happens at the International Date Line… Forget it. Severe cases of heterochrony are often accompanied by a conspiracy theory mentality which holds that the hour isn’t really gone you lose an hour no matter which way you turn the clock, the result of a governmental conspiracy to steal an hour from citizens twice a year, during which it has unique access to your bank account and has an hour to invest your savings in highly speculative stocks, or work the slots at an on-line casino. There is little risk because it will just add any losses to the amount due in calculating your income tax. You never notice that anything has happened because the extra hour never officially existed – they keep shuffling it back and forth across time zones – and although your money is gone, this does not appear on your bank balance. And why should it? There was never actually any physical money in the account anyway. They keep it stored in ATMs.

A woman with the condition is called a heterochrone; the male form is heterochronus, their offspring are labeled heterochromognomes. Compare with homochrony, which has nothing to do with Daylight Savings Time.

hindgut  a region of the intestine which lies below the hindbrain, when the body is in an upright position, and is connected to it via a large bundle of nerves that bypass the spine. This conduit permits the gut to monitor brain activity and take over some of its functions, such as communication, in an emegency. When a person is incapacitated, for example through the excessive consumption of alcohol, or decapitated entirely, the hindgut steps in and sends unequivocal signals of distress to those nearby. It has two modes of doing so – generally trying one and waiting for a response before trying the other. If neither on its own provokes other people in the bar to take caregiving measures – such as calling an Ueber driver – the hindgut activates both signaling systems simultaneously.

In type 1 signaling, the hindgut jerks swiftly upwards and delivers a focused “punch” to the stomach, which forces its contents upwards in the form of projectile vomiting. In type 2 it presses downwards, clenching the lower intestines in a vise-like grip that forces any pockets of noxious gas to seek the nearest exit, generally accompanied by a loud acoustic signal. Such noxious gases are usually plentiful because the body naturally produces them as it metabolizes fermented substances.

Hirsch number, or h number  an abstruse calculation developed by a physicist, as most of them are. The Hirsch number calculates the importance of a scientist in the Grand Scheme of Things (i.e., the Mind of God, or the Nobel selection committee) by multiplying the number of citations he has received by the size of the antlers growing out of his head. (As Fred Luft points out, Hirsch is German for “deer”.) The h number was chosen after numbers a – g didn’t work out.

hither  the opposite of thither.

holy grail  something that is being sought by everyone in a field, such as a four-leaf clover, or your group leader’s car keys. There are lots of holy grails; each discipline has one. The holy grail does for research what a treasure hunt accomplishes at a child’s birthday party: it keeps everyone busy, out of trouble, and far away. If by chance someone should actually find the holy grail, everyone comes in for a piece of cake, at which point an authority figure determines that no, a mistake has been made. This is not the holy grail; it is actually something else, and the scientists are sent back outside to look some more. The best way to ensure that the party runs smoothly is to find the holy grail, for example the Higgs boson, before the party ever begins. Then put it on your chair and sit on it the whole time so that there is no chance that it will be found.

homochrony  the ability to march or clap, although not necessarily simultaneously, at a regular pace coordinated with the rhythm of any marching or clapping going on around you. Animals either do this instinctively or don’t care; in humans early training helps. The technical term for people who never acquire this skill (famous case: Ronald Reagan) is “ain’t got no rhythm.” Those who do got rhythm can refine it to the point of being able to march in formation while twirling a baton or playing a musical instrument, despite wearing a bizarre band costume that resembles the attire of the British colonial forces that occupied India.

host  has two distinct meanings in science. The first is a deragatory term by which unicellular organisms refer to multicellular life. For bacteria, “host” has about the connotation of a motel whose rooms have no bath, no cable service, and whose swimming pool is exactly the size of a Jeep, namely one that missed the exit ramp on the Interstate, flew over the guardrail, and plopped into the pool, where it was such a tight fit that it could no longer be extracted. A pathogen goes off on a trip for a while and takes copious notes, so that when it comes back it can compare its holiday experience with those of the neighbors. Bacteria can’t access the Internet, so they distribute their reports biochemically, sometimes at the level of genes. Over time individual human bodies are ranked in terms of comfort and the level of services they provide. Very few people are awarded a five-star rating, and when it happens the pleasure is short-lived. They become vacation hotspots that are overrun by all sorts of pathogens, inevitably killing the host, but by that time a trendier new place has usually been found.

The second usage of host in scientific contexts is positive: as a term of respect that one scientist may bestow on another after being invited to give a talk at the colleague’s institute. “Host” is reserved for someone who covers all of your travel expenses, naturally first-class, takes the visitor to excellent restaurants, where the prices on the wine list are explicitly ignored, and puts you up in a four-room suite at a hotel with all the amenities, such as an all-night bar well stocked with attractive, lonely conversation partners. Upon request a host will assign you a bodyguard to escort you to the bar, stay discretely on hand to jump into any fights that may arise, and then get you get back to your room in one piece, unless you indicate otherwise using a secret sign agreed upon in advance, possibly but not necessarily indicating that you have managed to hook up in the bar. If the hosting scientist fails to meet any one of these criteria, you return home and insert a reference to the trip whenever possible in casual conversations, and write an exhaustive account of the visit on websites such as LinkedIn, but conspicuosly neglecting to refer to your colleague as the host. Being at least as smart as pathogens, other scientists get the idea, and will make up wild excuses to avoid having to give talks at institutes rated with four stars or below.

hybridization  a process by which members of two different species mate, willingly or by force, sometimes simply out of desperation, possibly without realizing it, for example at a costume party, and produce offspring that will have species identity issues their entire lives.

hydrophile  a customer in a bar who orders exclusively Perrier, which is frequently an indicator that you are dealing with a recovering alcoholic. Compare with vinophile and hopsophile.

hypoteneuse  a hypothesis so completely ridiculous that to publish it is the equivalent of an act of professional suicide by hanging.

icthyology  the study of the religions and belief systems of fish.

imbibe  to drink, but in a polite and refined way, without slurps, burps, or other forms of musical accompaniment. Exbibe is to move fluid in the opposite direction: to eject it from the mouth as spit, or projectile vomiting, but only if the act is hidden by a handkerchief, or cleverly concealed in some other way, and only when it is not intended as a political statement. The analogous terms for solids are ingest and exgest. There the root gest originally derives from the word gesture, whose meaning dates back to a time when cannibalism was still common and considered a sport like geocaching. At that time offering a person your hand – a gesture – was a form of greeting taken to mean, “Please take a bite.” At some point a bright cannibal realized this could be prevented by wearing a metal ring, which would break teeth before any flesh was penetrated. This is the origin of the practice of kissing the rings of popes and other royalty.

impact factor  a representation of the number of times your competitors would like to punch you in the face, or run over you with a car.

in…  means “in”, another of those cases in which scientists substitute a Latin word for a perfectly good English word, as in:

• in vitro  studying some biological object in an object that can be broken, such as a glass slipper or a snowglobe, usually an unnatural environment in which it feels quite uncomfortable, and performing increasingly odd experiments on it until it finally behaves the way you think it ought to. An exception is the stuff growing in the coffee cup that you didn’t clean and left standing on your shelf for six months, which feels comfortable enough, and is growing in its natural environment.
• in vivo  an experiment carried out in a living organism, or one that was alive until you began performing experiments on it, such as a lab technician.
• in silico  a purely theoretical experiment carried out in a computer, such as an experiment conducted in SIMS world, or shooting flying chickens with a rifle; alternatively, any biological process that takes place in the environment of an artificial breast.
• in situ  an experiment that can be done sitting down, preferably in the comfort of your own home, without having to get up, allowing you to do science while remaining within reach of the TV remote and alcoholic beverages, although it is permissible to have other people bring you things. An example of an in situ experiment is to extract organic material from your belly button for use in a metagenomics experiment. Another is to stare fixedly at a computer screen for as long as possible without blinking, repeating this several times, and then taking an on-line eyesight test to determine the degree to which your eyesight has worsened. At that point you can order new glasses via the Internet and have them delivered to your door.
• in excelsis deo  a miracle that occurs in a laboratory, for example when all experiments work according to established protocols, a paper gets accepted upon first submission, or a PhD student completes a dissertation within the period of time he or she is paid.

in the same fashion  today this means “in the same way.” Until around the 1970s, however, it meant that everyone in a lab had to wear the same clothes. The group leader had full authority over the dress code, including underwear (or not). The practice began after a paper in a psychology journal suggested that giving group leaders this power would improve their mood, the morale of their labs, and thus the impact of their papers. Most groups adopted the generic lab coat (underwear optional), but others took a more creative approach. Popular themes for laboratory wear included: monogrammed shirts with the logo of the lab bowling team (membership obligatory), black tuxedos, white tuxedos, Vikings, woolen sweaters knitted by the group leader’s mother, Disco, Star Trek, penguin costumes, the Village People, hockey uniforms, Octoberfest, pimps & hookers, Elvis impersonators, the Court of Versailles, the band KISS, characters from the Godfather films, etc. (The “cowboy” theme was forbidden after the first few shootouts.)

inbreeding  a theory developed to resolve the “multiplicity of ancestors paradox,” explaining why there are more people alive today than in previous generations. Until the 19th century, people believed that every person alive had two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on, which means that each generation you go back in the past, the population doubles, in a geometric progression. Thus the population of the Earth only 100 generations ago would have been 2 to the power of 100, or 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376, not counting anyone that failed to have children. Since the surface of the Earth is approximately 510,000,000,000 square meters, and supposing that four people can be crammed into a square meter providing they don’t eat very much, this would have created a stack 621,397,350,000,000,000 people high. Assuming an average height of 1,5 meters, although those on the bottom layers would be somewhat shorter due to atmospheric pressure as well as that of all the people standing on them, this would create a stack extending 932,096,030,000,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, in all directions, meaning that you have to double it, creating a diameter which would extend about 6,328 times beyond the orbit of Pluto around the sun. Realizing that this situation could cause difficulties, for example by creating a massive black hole, ancient cultures permitted marriages between cousins.

induce  the stem –duce derives from the historical title “duke” or “duce”. In ancient times this title was given to the person placed at the front of a march or parade, usually heading toward an opposing army, carrying a symbol of office that atttracted attention and enemy fire. This might be a flag, a trumpet, a baton, a trombone, one of those little cars driven by Shriners – anything that made a good target. This would discourage the opposing army from firing in the direction of the King, who like all good tyrants would show his solidarity with the folk by wearing inconspicuous clothing and mixing in with the masses. The title of Duke (in some regions pronounced dunce) was publicly heralded as a great honor, and was considered so at least by the person receiving it. In some cases plebes were invited to compete for the honor, and thus was born the expression “to duke something out.” It was awarded to the inductee in a ceremony called an induction. During the ceremony all sorts of statements were made about the exemplary character of this person, basically a tactic to shame him into acquiring one.

Once the title had been awarded the inductee was expected to demonstrate his worthiness by exhibiting exemplary aspects of character, or conduct, which meant all sorts of unusual mannerisms such as marching straight ahead when fired upon, upon which everyone was expected to follow, with the exception of the king, who generally showed respect for his subjects by allowing them to pass by toward the front. If during this process there occurred an attack from the rear, then the duke would be quickly conducted through the crowd at a rapid rate to assume his rightful position.

This notion of “start” or “begin” has been retained in modern scientific usage, taking the stem duce (in other words, using it to induce a word), and adding on whatever prefixes and suffixes come in handy for a given situation. This has advantages for lexicographers, relieving them from the burden of inventing a lot of words, which is so difficult they usually resort to stealing them from some other language instead, in violation of all sorts of intellectual property laws. In fact, how often do we really need a truly original word? In most cases an old one can be bent or warped to get you there, or at least in the general vicinity.

Thus the term induce acquires the meaning, “to cause something to start to start, or to start a cascade of events in which an unruly gang will follow.” The direction is irrelevant provided the herd all begins to move in a common direction. There lingers a connotation that under normal circumstances the flock would never do so without being motivated through the promise of a great reward, which it probably won’t live long enough to receive, or the threat of a great punishment, which it probably will live just long enough to appreciate, although barely, which occurs if it refuses to behave according to the wishes of a totalitarian dictator or scientist, whichever happens to be in charge of the situation at hand. If the inductee tries to hide within a crowd, he first has to be deduced from it, which means detected against a noisy background. Then he can be pushed forward, or produced. If force is required to keep him in that position, one can always resort to tape to keep him there – to duct him. A person can be stripped of the honors, or unduced, and if later he is called to serve again in the position, this reduces him. If that should happen but cannot be accomplished, for example because the duke who has replaced him hasn’t died yet, then the duke remains unreduced while he waits, a period which generally never lasts too long.

inebriation  a scale used by medical professionals to estimate the degree of severity of a case of alcohol poisoning in a patient. The lowest end of the scale is represented by the teetotaller, a person who drinks uniquely tea, usually a green, murky type that tastes like it has been aged in a brackish swamp somewhere. There follows sobriety, a temporary situation in which alcohol is no longer measurable in the bloodstream, usually attained after an extended stay in a rehabilitation clinic. Further points along the scale, in temporal order, are buzzed, rowdy, obnoxious, hammered, incoherent, blackout, dead to the world, death warmed over, hung-over, powerfully thirsty, and hair-of-the-dog. At that point the cycle repeats itself. If the poison of choice is tequila, some steps are very short-lived or skipped over entirely.

influx  to pick up some efflux and insert it into your body, usually via the mouth, which frequently triggers reflux. If the material originally came from your own body, this is not considered cannibalism.

inhibitor  a means of preventing something from getting done by introducing a substance, such as a group leader, that interferes with its normal activity.

insectivore  a person who rides a motorcycle with his or her mouth open. Contrast with omnivore and chiliconcarnevore.

intellectual property   the first step in a lawsuit.

international collaboration  when you add an American scientist to the list of authors on a paper so that it will seem like a Big Deal; the American may not do anything, but he will be the only person mentioned when his university puts out a press release on the project. Certain websites, which function much like dating sites, provide names of Americans who are willing to let you use their names on papers for a fee.

interdisciplinarity  the involvement in a project of someone who has no business being there, such as a physician, a hay farmer, a sanitary disposal engineer, a chicken, or a goat.

keratinization  any process that produces a carrot from some object that is different enough from a carrot that if you had seen it before it became a carrot, in its undeveloped state, you would never guess that its fate was to produce a carrot.

kleptoparasitism  a phenomenon in which one organism attaches itself to the body of another to steal its food rather than going to all the trouble of hunting or shopping on its own. Psychologists believe that many cases of kleptomania may actually be caused by small kleptoparasites hiding on a person’s body, although this has yet to be used successfully as a defense in a criminal case. The term is used metaphorically to refer to in-laws or other relatives who show up for a visit and refuse to leave.

 

laminate  to preserve an object – such as a hotdog, a PhD student, or a cadaver – by placing it in an airtight seal, using Saran Wrap or a similar substance, so that it can be bought from a vending machine or unpacked for use in experiments at a later date.

lamprey  an organism that attaches itself to another, or sometimes unintentionally an inanimate object,  by attaching its lips to it and sucking hard to create a sort of biological suction cup. If, by chance, two lampreys engage in a mutual lip-lock, one may suck the other inside. The term is sometimes extended metaphorically to a scientist who hitches his career onto that of another and never lets go. Parasitic lampreys live off the blood out of their hosts, sometimes boring through the skin; the mechanisms that prevent them from boring all the way through and falling out the other side have not yet been described. The best method of removing a lamprey is with a crowbar.

larvivore   an organism that eats larva, usually on purpose. Nearly all humans are unwittingly larvivorous, particularly those who buy foods that have been religiously protected from pesticides, or who fail to clean out their kitchen cabinets at regular intervals. Compare with insectivore.

last but not least  a phrase commonly used in talks that functions like an alarm clock, or a defibrillator, rousing members of the audience who have entered comas, raising hopes that they may live to hear the end. Speakers who are unable to hold the audience’s attention in any other way use the expression about once every five minutes, even several times in the same paragraph. Officially, this is considered a foul, and any speaker who is caught doing it gets an automatic yellow card and a one-year suspension from the conference circuit.

latency  a measurement of time that begins when your alarm clock rings and ends when you actually get out of bed.  Or, the period of time between turning in your thesis and a sign of life from your doctoral committee.

law of independent assortment  the physical law dictating that during a migration to the laundry and back, one sock always vanishes. Despite extensive research, it has not yet been determined whether this occurs during transport or processing, nor is the mechanism known. A variety of hypotheses have been put forward: degradation, some bizarre fetish ritual, or cannibalism. A recent study suggests a novel alternative: the stress of centrifugation in a washing machine activates a color-switching gene. The sock is in fact still there, but is unrecognized by the foot. This does not explain why the number of outbound socks is even, but odd upon their return; the authors suggests that a counting defect might be involved.

lek  a courtship area that lies at some distance from nesting and feeding grounds; typically, a bar, or a motel room with hourly rates.

liquid chronotography  any system that uses water or another liquid, such as root beer or blood, as a basis for measuring time. Methods of torture that involve a regular dripping sound, for example, are examples of liquid chronotography. Not to be confused with liquid chromatography, which means painting with water colors.

litmus test  a scientific method to determine whether something is what someone claims it is or is in fact something else. A litmus test is performed by sticking a thin strip of blue paper into the mouth of the subject, or whatever orifice is available, and waiting to see whether it turns red, or sticking in a red strip of paper to see if it turns blue. This will tell you whether something is what it is supposed to be or something else, but only if you know how to interpret the results, and haven’t somehow mistaken a strip that was originally red for one that was originally blue and then turned red again, or vice versa, respectively. Ideally litmus tests are performed as double-blind, randomized studies in which the person who inserts a strip knows neither what color a particular strip was to start with, nor what color it is now; neither should the person administrating the test hope for a particular result, or know what a color would mean if it occurs, which is usually not a problem by this point; otherwise it can be solved by wearing sunglasses.

locus  a site in the genome occupied by a pestilential insect that prefers a diet of corn but in a pinch will eat other things, such as old shoes, slow pets, and rusty cars sitting on cement blocks in the backyard. When satiated, it retires to a tree where it sheds its outer layer, leaving a perfect but hollow replica of itself that you can place on your grandmother’s pillow, if you’re in the mood for some excitement. The plural form is loci, a word which no one knows how to pronounce, but is required when referring to a congregation of at least two locuses, until you discover that one is merely a hollow shell. (In everyday speech the plural of locust is “plague”.) Loci make frequent appearances in the Bible, usually at a moment someone thinks, “It surely can’t get any worse than this.” In one famous scene, for example, the Israelis use trained locuses to carry out a drone strike on Egypt; finding no corn, they eat a pyramid.

The Bible reports that locuses have only four legs, although any fool can see that they have six, like every other insect. Seeing six legs may be the work of Satan, however, who takes pleasure in making people believe they are seeing more legs than loci actually have. The conundrum presented by this Biblical passage remains unsolved despite the best efforts of scientists using million-dollar technology platforms, people in bars, golfers, motorcycle gangs, shoppers in WalMart, NASA, the Locus Genome Project, and the Federal Reserve of the United States of America, which is responsible for determining how much a dollar is worth. (Their reasoning is that the confusion between four and six may also arise in other situations, so no one really knows how much money is actually out there.)

Quite predictably, the nastiest, foulest discussions about locipedia take place within the theological community. At least ten Popes have been assassinated because of their stance on the issue – in fact, the true number may be higher because it is unclear whether whoever counted them used a methodology where a four-six switcheroo might have occurred. Thus the true number of Papal deaths that should be attributed to locimortis may be as low as six or as high as 64. This demonstrates the need to provide a full record of protocols and computational environments in any experiment which produces more than 3 or fewer than -3 pieces of data.

lores  a region of the face between the eyes and bill of a bird, or between the eyes and mouth of other animals. This area is sometimes occupied by a nose. Lore is also used to refer to the back part of the cheeks of insects. If you are surprised to discover that insects have cheeks, and that they are subdivided into functionally distinct regions, well, chalk it up to just another failure of today’s educational system.

Surprising indeed is what happens when one enters the terms “lore cheek insect” into the Pubmed search engine. This delivers an astounding articleon the topic “Spider lick,” published in 1961 by the British Journal of Ophthalmology. I highly recommend this classic of scientific research, which begins thus:

“In certain parts of the world and at certain seasons, a number of patients may be seen who show lesions of a character which at once strike one as being unusual and not described in textbooks of ophthalmology, nor in standard student textbooks of medicine, dermatology or tropical medicine. One has only to see a few cases to realize that here are lesions so characteristic as to constitute a syndrome. The lesions may be seen on any part of the exposed skin, but are especially common on the eyelids and contiguous skin of the face…”

The introduction goes on like this for a while and then concludes: “The trivial nature of the condition is probably the reason for the omission of an adequate description in most textbooks, and for the fact that its aetiology is not generally known. In the north-east region of India, where the condition is comparatively common, it is called ‘spider lick’, but it is not due to a spider nor caused by a lick.”

lumen  an empty space inside an organ or tissue which should be kept isolated from the surrounding tissue or environment to prevent toxic effects. A pocket of gas trapped in the gastrointestinal tract is an example of a lumen.

Magnetic resonance imaging  a tool widely used in medical diagnosis to detect whether you have swallowed something made of metal, or have a metal implant, or are holding up your pants with safety pins, or if the government has implanted a microchip in your brain, or if you are trying to smuggle a cell phone into a hospital by hiding it under your gown. The instrument is also useful for completely erasing the hard disks of computers when, for example, you wish to retract an email that you sent to colleagues without due reflection.

mammary gland  what you say to your mother if it becomes necessary to refer to her boob.

maternal lineage  anything – physical or metaphysical – that binds a daughter to her mother, including the umbilical cord, a leash with a collar, the choice of an inappropriate partner, or various sticky substances found in the refrigerator.

median  the invisible line in a lab separating your work space from that of your immediate neighbor in any direction. Nothing should cross the median. Not even a shadow. On a highway, crossing the median will likely lead to a fiery collision and death. The consequences for crossing the median in a lab are unimaginably worse, and cannot be reprinted here. You must obtain a visa and give notice of your travel intentions several months in advance. Vaccinations are not obligatory, although it’s always wise to keep your tetanus booster up-to-date. Note that airspace belongs to the bench directly below it, up to the ventilation hood, and any violation will result in a drone strike.

metabolism  any biological process that gives off a smell, usually a bad one.

metacarpal  having to do with abstract, highly theoretical reflections on the nature of carp or the role of this fish in an ecosystem or the universe as a whole.

methane  an organic substance produced by enzymes and other components of the metabolic machinery making up the gastrointestinal tract of cows. Methanes have an affinity for each other, and so in the cow gut they accumulate until they form a bubble which can only be ejected from the system by a fart. This is one of three sounds that a cow can produce. The others are lowing, a sound that a cow makes when it is trying to be discrete (ref: “Away in a manger,” Kirkpatrick 1895, Murray 1887) and mooing, which typically indicates distress or loneliness. An ability to control the release of a fart would give bovide a third sound which, if used with the others in a combinatorial system, would vastly increase the number of concepts that could be expressed in cow language. However, it has been impossible to reproduce an initial experimenting hinting that the temporal distribution of farts is non-random, which would lend credence to the control hypothesis. The result is a hot debate in the field, the literature, and the barn over whether cows possess such a fart regulatory system, or whether its existence is simply another case of scientific wish-fulfillment-as-the-end-of-the-current-funding-period-grows-nigh. If the system exists, it opens the door on another controversy: whether the mechanism is physically located in the gut or in some other tissue that is close enough to make sense, such as the tail. In any case, once methane escapes a cow’s body, through a type of release valve at the posterior end of the animal, the bubble bursts and methane scatters into the atmosphere, where it interacts with other volitile substances in ways that, according to current climate models, will completely destroy the Earth’s atmosphere in about 12 years.

microbiome  one millionth of a biome. This might be somewhat helpful if someone ever bothered to define the size of a biome, but there’s no consensus in the scientific literature. Some use the term “biome” to encompass ecosystems as vast as Antarctica, while others claim you have a whole biome living in your belly button. These two scales are so different that it is hard to see how they can be classified under a single term, but scientists learn mental contortions during their studies that permit them to do this and even stranger things.

Biomes differ not only in size, but also in composition: one of them contains penguins, for example, while the other normally does not. This breaks biomes into the two classical categories of penguin-positive and penguin-negative. Another difference is that Antarctica has almost no plants, whereas flora sometimes sprout from a belly button, through a phenomenon whose underlying mechanisms have not yet been fully characterized but have been negatively correlated to the taking of showers. Despite the lack of a rational, personalized approach to treatment, two methods are usually effective: dabbing a little weed-killer on the thing, or attacking it with a very small pair of garden shears. While the latter is a relatively minor procedure, it should only be undertaken by specialists or trained professionals, due to a risk of perforating the intestines when performing any surgical procedure on the belly button with a pair of shears. (Note that the effects of the two therapies are additive, which suggests that applying both generally leads to shorter sprouts, except in the case of a perforation, which is usually fatal to the plant after killing its host.)

micromolar  a millionth of a molar, which is a type of tooth. A micromolar happens to be the average distance that a bacterium can bore through tooth enamel in one second, as derived from the following formula:

mm₁ = 1/b^x (h^e / f * (t?)[(C – mm₂) ₊ mm₃]) – DG

where mm₁ represents the distance (in micromolars); b is the bacterium; x is the number of bacterium involved in drilling the same hole; h represents the hardness of the enamel, which can only be determined by solving the equation and then inverting and converting and doing whatever else is necessary to it so that h^e jumps over to the left of the equal sign and everything else is piled up on the right, often upside down; f is the force the bacterium is capable of applying; t is the amount of time spent actually drilling, which has to be corrected by ?, the so-called mystery variable, if t is not being measured in seconds; C is Colgate toothpaste; mm₂ stands for the number of M&Ms a person has eaten in the recent past, and mm₃  refers to “mom’s madness”, a quantitative measurement of the degree of physical force your mother is prepared to inflict on the anyone who fails to apply C after mm₂ (note that as C – mm₂ approaches zero, mm₃ approaches infinity); and DG stands either for the degree of grinding that a particular molar undergoes when a person has to share the mm₂ with someone of the opposite political persuasion, or Director General – I can’t remember which. Replacing the variables with true values produces mm₁, which may need to be adjusted to account for the degree of freedom (otherwise known as the “fudge factor”) which means the number of times you are permitted to lie when filling in the values to solve the formula. Note that by definition, mm₁ must always end up being 1; if this doesn’t happen, just change the answers for the other variables until it does. There’s a way to do this with Excel tables, but I couldn’t tell you what it was if my life depended on it. I’m having a hard enough time explaining this as it is.

The formula yields the result mm₁ in terms of bacterial boring distance per second, but this can be easily converted to minutes by multiplying mm₁ by 60, into years by multiplying mm₁ by 1315440, and in relation to the age of the universe up to the present date by multiplying mm₁ by 1817938080000000000000000 + sⁿ (where sⁿ is the number of seconds that elapse between the time you read this and the moment you get around to making the calculation).

migratory overshooting  At the end of a trip, failing to stop when the GPS announces that you have arrived at your destination. This often results in driving through the back wall of your garage.

mirror-image misorientation  a term used to describe the behavior of birds or other species that migrate in a direction opposite to the normal route. This occurs in animals that get “left” and “right” mixed up, or that have trouble following directions, or are just contrary by nature. The term is also used to refer to humans if they move to a country where people drive on the wrong side of the road, or who leave Texas to spend the winter in Missouri, rather than becoming Winter Texans, as is the natural order of things. Most injuries that occur while shaving are caused by mirror-image misorientation. As well as those that happen while backing up a trailer attached to a car.

monomer  Derived from the Australian pronunciation for “my number,” this expression has been traced back to an incident that occurred in a bar between an Australian and an attractive young lady who spoke some more natural form of English. Before parting company the Australian offered to give her “monomer”, which she misinterpreted as an obscenity and then promptly fled the scene. By extension, in biology, the term is now used to refer to a molecule that can’t get a date.

moreover  a word used when all the alternatives have been exhausted, such as “and”, “also”, “additionally”, “in addition”, etc. It means “more and more and more and over and over and over” until you agree with the author out of sheer exhaustion.

mucin  a glibberous substance produced by snails which enter the body, generally during the night, and leave trails in the lining of the nose and across other surfaces of bodily membranes. Mucin has antibacterial properties because microorganisms find it equally disgusting.

multigene family  a group of individuals related by heredity who have had so many children they are too tired to think up new names and simply end up calling everyone “Gene”. Sometimes seen in the forms multieugene or multieugenia.

multiple hit hypothesis  A scientific model referring to the effects on the biology of an organism that has usually been assaulted in some violent manner by a scientist, for example by exposing it to large doses of radiation to see how many gamma rays are needed to kill it. This introduces double-stranded breaks in DNA in multiple locations, or hits. The result is coitus interruptus among cells that are pleasurably engaged in reproducing their genetic material. A sufficient dose of iodine may permit them to resume this activity; otherwise they typically produce offspring which are either highly creative forms of their parents or monstrous mutants, or both, depending on your point of view.

multiplexing  a psychological trauma which occurs when visitors to a Cineplex are (usually inadvertently) shown multiple 3D films at the same time. This causes collisions of plots in which, for example, space ships buzz around the heads of cartoon characters until they are dismembered by chain-saw wielding psychopaths, and then the fragments are served to visitors in a diner at night, in a submarine, just before the ship is consumed by mutant zombie macrophages from Mars.

myalgia  a chronic condition in which something that happened millions of years ago (mya) continues to cause pain, generally in the muscles. Myalgia is commonly found among paleontologists who try to lift dinosaur bones after forgetting that they have become mineralized and weigh more than you’d think.

mystax the word animals use for “mustache”. Not to be confused with mystics, although they often have mustaches that appear to be animal in origin. Also not to be confused with myxo-, a prefix placed in front of a word to indicate that something is slimy. Myxomud, for example, refers to mud; other instances include myxolawyer and myxolitic, the name of a musical scale that some Medieval authorities deemed slimy, or vulgar. Myxo- and mystax are occasionally combined to form myxomystatic, describing animals with a runny nose, and occasionally myxomystatic mystics, which is technically incorrect, but you get the point.

neutralize  to emasculate a chemical substance.

Nobel laureate  a winner of the Nobel Prize who can read, and is sometimes seen dancing through the hallways with a wreath of olive leaves perched at a rakish angle on his or her brow.

Nobel Prize  the scientific equivalent of an “Oscar”. Originally prizewinners used to be given a small, nude, anatomically detailed statue called “Alfred” made of pure gold. Nowadays Alfreds are melted down into the shape of a medal so that they can be worn in public. Upon winning the Prize, your country builds an institute for you and makes you an Emperor and you are allowed to say any crazy thing on your mind. And you’ll never have to pay for a drink in a bar ever again. Many Nobel laureates did their prizewinning work as young scientists in labs where they were detested and then booted out for eccentric behavior; awards are usually granted when they are 70 or 80 and have calmed down somewhat. When a scientist makes a discovery worthy of the Nobel prize he is supposed to cry out, “Sacré bleu!” or yodel at a penetrating volume.

novelty  a scale used to indicate the degree of plagiarism or copyright infringement contained in a project or paper. “High novelty” indicates that a term, experiment or concept has been modified enough to evade most legal actions. A “low degree of novelty” is usually an indication that the author or inventor should be heavily insured against claims by others.

null hypothesis  a theory claiming that everything is nothing, or nothing is anything, or that nothingness pervades the universe, or would do so if the universe existed, but according to the null hypothesis it doesn’t, so what would there be to be filled with an infinite amount of nothingness? And does a system containing only nothingness obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Can the same volume hold different degrees of nothingness, which differ only in the density of nothingness against a background of nothingness, and if so can the nothingness in a system increase over time, or decrease, depending on how you see these things, to the point that eventually all the nothingness will be gone, and there will be nothing left at all, not even any nothingness?

offal  something inside an animal that is removed so that it can be eaten by another animal, thus returning to the inside where it belongs. An example is the Scotish dish haggis, made by thrusting a hand into the mouth of a sheep so forcefully that it passes all the way through and emerges from the other end, then grasping the tail and executing a sudden jerk in the headwards direction until the sheep is turned inside out, with its intestines on the exterior. After seasoning, the animal is roasted or baked until it shows no further signs of resistance. The first time an Englishman saw this practice he called it “awful”, to the great pleasure of the Scots, whose esteem for anything (such as the EU) rises in direct proportion to the degree of displeasure it causes the English. The Scots proudly began calling their dish “awful” haggis, but their pronunciation made it sound like “offal” to the English, who readopted it as a term to refer to “any innards that only a barbarian would eat.”

Organs that have been extracted for the purpose of transplantation are not normally considered offal, unless they are eaten by mistake. Vomit is considered offal by cats, but not humans, except in the case of projectile vomiting, which may expel bits of organs that it would be desirable to replace in the body.

An example of the word’s proper use can be found in the sentence:

“How awful is a wall of falafal full of offal.”

olafantory  pertaining to olafants: a hybrid made by fusing the genome of an elephant with that of an ant. After the creation of the first olafant, which was the result of a mix-up in the laboratory, scientists discovered that the structure of their chromosomes makes this fairly easy to do. So far, olafants have not been found in nature, for reasons that are not completely clear, which means they can only be produced artificially through genetic engineering techniques. This was exciting the first few times, because it was hard to predict what would grow out of your cell culture. But olafants turned out to be quite pesky creatures, and enthusiasm quickly waned to the point that it has become hard to find them, except on-line.

olfactory  originally derived from “Olaf’s factory,” operated by a Medieval cheesemaker from Norway, whose cheese stank so badly that Olaf and the members of his family progressively lost their sense of smell, in response to which they made the cheese even stronger. Ultimately the stench rising from the factory reached an intensity that had the effect of a physical force, creatig high-pressure atmospheric conditions that altered the weather and affected many aspects of regional ecosystems. Local species, including lots of humans and the entire native elephant population of Norway, had to adapt or flee the area to avoid symptoms such as nausea, temporary insanity, and blackouts while operating heavy machinery. There were also beneficial effects: sinus conditions be cleared up even through a very brief exposure to the smell, and people who had been pronounced dead were sometimes revived for a few days.

Whenever a westerly wind became strong enough, the smell drifted over the border into Sweden, prompting a number of retaliatory military incursions, all of which were repelled by the smell long before coming close enough to the factory to destroy it. Today the cheese is classified as a weapon of mass destruction, in a category shared by biological agents, nerve gases, and nuclear weapons, and has been banned under various international treaties.

In biology the term has paradoxically been coined to encompass all the mechanisms of smell: beginning when external molecules called olafactors force their way into the bodily cavities of an olafactee, usually after bypassing the gasket-like structures that protect the nose and mouth. Really smelly molecules such as garlic, which have a pointy prow on one side, can also enter by piercing the eyes, ears, pores and that other bodily opening I am too polite to name here. From that point they progress along tube-like passages until they reach a gas chromatograph installed in the brain. The brain, which has just as much difficulty interpreting gas chromatography data as anyone else, enters a state of disarray that it interprets as smell. Olafactors are ranked on a five-point scale: 1) pleasant, 2) tolerable, 3) bad 4) indescribably bad, and 5) fatal.

-omics approach  any experiment conducted on a machine that cost more than $1 million.

omnivore  as nearly the exact opposite of a vegan as you can get.

omnis ovum e ovum  the theory that every egg arises from an existing egg, through the mechanism of a chicken, or perhaps a dinosaur. Unless chicken nuggets are involved, which are raised in laboratories and have been genetically engineered to be infertile.

omnis pullum e pullum  the theory that every chicken arises from an existing chicken, through the mechanism of an egg, unless the egg produces a dinosaur, or you have bought the chicken from one of those trucks with a rotisserie, which has roasted the chicken for such sustained periods that its DNA no longer permits a proper species identification.

onychium   what you find if you pop open a fingernail and check under the hood.

ooopossum  the oocyte of an opossum.

open reading frame  a browser window left open by a gene in a public place and unprotected by a password, allowing any old transcription factor to come along, hack into its network, and order stuff using its credit card.

open source  a code phrase which you use to inform someone higher in your institutional hierarchy that his fly is open. In recent years it has been used metaphorically to refer to efforts that involve community action and a free exchange of information, the way that the entire community at the party is aware that the department chairman’s fly is open, and in the open source philosophy it would be unethical to withold that information, so you share it freely with everyone, along with any speculations you wish to share freely about the reason it is open. The open source philosophy predicts that at some point in this process, the chairman will inevitably become aware that his fly is open. If only by the fact that all eyes are pointedly averted from it.

operon  the smallest functional acoustic unit of an opera, typically but not necessarily a very short note that is sung or played by an instrument. Operons can also be produced through other mechanisms: snores from the audience, the sound made by a director’s baton when it accidentally flies out of his hand and strikes a musician in the eyeball, the noise made by a horn player engaging his spit valve, or a long rest in the music interrupted by flatulence, probably also from the horn player.

optimism  hopeful expectation without any evidence to back it up. The first stage in depression.

optimize  to improve the performance of a procedure or machine that has produced inconclusive or fuzzy results by putting on your eyeglasses.

optometry  a science that applies quantitative methods to the characterization of a delusional mental state called optimism.

osmosis  does not derive from the ancient term osmo (which means “smell” or “thrust”, or both in the case of very strong smells), as has been commonly assumed. Recent philatological studies indicate that the term is actually coined from the name Mosis, a mythological figure from the time of the ancient Hebrews, an illegitimate child who, immediately after birth, for reasons that are not totally clear, was sent on a voyage downriver in a very small vessel of some sort, perhaps to serve in the capacity of a spy, but after being kidnaped along the way by a sect he succombed to one of the worst cases of Stockholm syndrome on record. Over time Mosis became brainwashed to the point that he he was elected President of the cult, winning the electoral but not the popular vote, at which point he became genuinely unhinged and unleashed seven different weapons of mass destruction on the city of his origins, including a flood that most modern historians attribute to the bombing of the Aswan dam. Where the Hebrews got the bombs is unclear – perhaps from the Chinese, or from Atlantis. There is no evidence that they were nuclear in nature.

Amosis means the opposite of osmosis and is named for Mosis’ brother Amos, whose function in the stories was as a sort of control group for his sibling, an Abbott to Mosis’ Costello. Whenever Mosis claimed that God was speaking directly to him, for example, Amos would say things like, “Are you sure it’s not just a malfunction of your parietal lobe? Have you been taking your meds?”

For centuries the term wandered around Europe on a sort of extended backpacking trip, trying to find itself, until it finally acquired its modern meaning for biology or physics. The French were the first to tame it, as part of a great influx of vocabulary that was necessary upon the arrival of the Baroque period. The original term was au mosé and was restricted to perfume, which was rediscovered in the Baroque period. Scholars knew that something like it had existed in ancient Egypt and believed, for some reason, it had been one of the seven weapons of mass destruction unleashed by Mosis, a type of chemical warfare. This interpretation might have arisen because women were using lots and lots of perfume which is understandable given the fact that no one bathed during the period between 1130 and 1730.

At the time the cloud that accompanied someone wearing perfume was wall-like and would thrust you backwards, unless you were trapped and couldn’t escape. At that point the perfume molecules would penetrate the outer layer of skin and begin an assault on individual cells. Cell membranes offered a first line of defense, but eventually a point known as the perfume pressure limit (ppl) was reached. This triggered an opening of membrane channels called schnozzoporins, which allow perfume molecules to pass through the membrane in exchange for water. At some point all the water is replaced and the system is saturated. Astoundingly, most of the body’s metabolic processes function nearly as well when supplied by perfume as with water, depending on what brand is used.

In its current meaning in physics and biology, the term osmosis refers to just the downriver portion of the Mosis story. So osmosis in a cell, for example, is any process in which an object embarks on a journey downstream, is hindered by some obstacle such as a kidnaping by bandits along the route, who are subsequently subdued in some heroic way, permitting the protagonist to reach the other side. In the case of the mythical Mosis the barrier was a social and political one, but in biology the term usually refers to a physical barrier that something needs to pass through. For example, as it is expelled from the body, urine must overcome the obstacle of air to reach its destination, through a special form of osmosis known as pissing.

otolith  “ear sand” – crusty calcium deposits which collect in the ear and are generally removed with the index finger on the same side of the body; using the other hand looks strange. This delivers external pathogens to the inner ear and was a cause of major epidemics until the invention of the Q tip. The mechanisms that produce otolith remain unclear. Hypotheses include: sand blown into the ear while lying on a beach, which may take decades to completely dribble out; particles dropped by birds or from airplane lavatories that land in the ear whenever you tilt your head; migratory belly button detritus; material ground up by the gears in the brain and exuded, if a person neglects to change the brain oil filter at regular intervals; and the remains of Q tips that have been lost upon insertion into the ear.

outbreeding  to engage in the act of reproduction in an distant location, usually outdoors, as in the situation: “Can Jane come to the phone?” “Sorry, she’s outbreeding at the moment, may I take a message?”

oviduct  Today this refers to a chute or apparatus in an egg factory which transports an egg from its point of origin in a chicken to its ultimate destination in an egg carton. The etymology of the word is interesting; the roots are derived from ovi- (eggs) and ductus, which was a Medieval vocal composition to be performed during marches or processions. The link between eggs and music is a custom from ancient times that began before dawn every day when a procession of soldiers, priests, and other dignitaries marched to a farm, selected an exceptional egg, and marched it back to the palace, setting the pace by singing a ductus. At the palace the egg was delivered to the Duke of Breakfast, who examined it for cracks or other obvious flaws, such as syringe marks, which might be an indication of an assassination attempt, in a ceremony adorned by plenty of Pomp and whatever Circumstances the occasion might require. After the Duke’s formal acceptance of the egg, he placed it in a bejeweled container called an ovi-carton and personally delivered it to the King. The King conducted his own inspection, with the option of declaring it kingsworthy and handing it to a page for delivery to the kitchen, or rejecting it and cutting off the Duke’s head.

Thus the original meaning of oviduct is best captured by a phrase such as, “Processional music for the King’s Egg.” The oviductus was one of the major musical genres of the late Renaissance and Early Baroque eras, undergoing an evolution not dissimilar to that of the sonata, dance suite, opera, and kazoo symphony, fulfilling an essential social function by providing a livelihood for musicians who were contractually obligated to compose a new one every day for as long as they were employed by the court, unless they died or went insane. All oeuvres in the genre share a feature: the rhythmic structure of the “Colonel Bogey March.”

In modern times Kings get their eggs from Amazon.com, sometimes using the delivery-by-drone service, and this sounded the death knell of/hammered the final nail into the coffin of/brought a definitive end to the art form known as/ushered in the Götterdämmerung of the musical genre known as the oviductus.

When a thing disappears the word often follows, unless it jumps the species barrier to inhabit another object. Oviductus was rehabilitaed in the shorter form oviduct: understood as a chute, apparatus, delivery robot or limousine service that collects a product at its source (chicken) and delivers it to its destination (egg carton). Linguistic creativity led to the combination of -duct with other roots in words such as aquiduct, boviduct, air conditioning duct, etc. In the process –ducts came to represent passageways between the starting position of a thing and its final resting point: Acquiduct, for example, is the route by which “aqua” (water) is passed to cities and towns and ultimately into the urinary tract for recycling. Bovi-, the Latin root for cattle, has now been used to coin the term boviduct, a passageway in slaughterhouses used by cows who have been selected for passage to the Other Side and a new plane of existence which must be pretty wonderful because they are so content they forget to write postcards home. By extension, one should understand air conditioner duct as the network of passageways in a house by which air conditioners are shuttled from room to room.

I recently came across a modern reference to a boviduct in a text in Dutch on a website. Here I present the original and a rough translation. (For those of you who don’t speak Dutch, a word of caution: be aware that according to some scholars, Dutch isn’t a real language. It’s a random mixture of German and English and some old Viking words, thrown together with any word order a speaker feels comfortable with, and then vocalized in a Scottish brogue. This is actually wonderful for translators, because it gives them a great deal of freedom in interpreting the text. It also adds a certain excitement to relationships, because neither partner can ever be completely sure of what the other means.) I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert in Dutch, but based on a thorough acquaintance with English and German and after a weekend of total Dutch immersion I have enough of a feel for the language to offer a rough translation:

Original

Een aantal panden kan worden afgevoerd omdat ze inmiddels zijn gesloopt of zodanig verbouwd dat de historische kantjes er wel af zijn. Maar de speurders kunnen er ook wat aan toevoegen: karakteristieke stukjes bebouwing die beschermd dorpsgezicht zouden moeten worden, mogelijke archeologische vindplaatsen (Oene) en een aantal kleine cultuurhistorische objecten. Een daarvan is het ‘boviduct’ in Vaassen, een tunneltje als doorgang voor het vee onder de Geelmolensebeek door, die even voor de Geelmolen in een hoge bedding stroomt. Het zou de enige boviduct in Nederland kunnen zijn.

Translation:

A portion of panda can work effectively if governed in the middle of ten sloppy sudden buildings where the historical corners are well-seen. But the spurters can hook something up to the tobogan; characteristic pieces built the smeary (beschmierde) dork-face that has suddenly become mute (Note: the word in the original Dutch is moet, and the author may instead be referring to an alcoholic beverage), perhaps like archeological wind palaces (or at least one of them) and a smidgen of small culturo-histo objects. A divan is the “boviduct” in Vaassen, a tunnel which begins at the doorway of the horny moles’ back door, which existed even before the horny moles needed it to “storm” (move with effort) a huge bedding. It is there that the only boviduct in the Netherlands can be seen today.

Reference: https://ampt-epe.nl

p value  In statistics, the p value is a number which indicates whether life is a sequence of random events with no meaning, or whether the universe really is out to get you. The p value can be useful when an experiment doesn’t work and you must decide whether to repeat it. While it may work the second time around, there’s always a risk that the results might turn out even worse; you might, for example, acidentally create some antimatter. Even if you created only a tiny little amount, hardly anything at all, not even a dollop, it doesn’t take much to cause the solar system to implode. Since this has never happened before, it’s hard to estimate the probability that it will on any given day. The p-value might hover at around 0.03 for weeks or months, and then suddenly, within just a few minutes, jump into the millions. If you’ve ever seen it happen, it’s pretty impressive. In general, scientists try to keep the p value for undesirable things as low as they can and raise it as high as possible for things they would like to happen. This is possible because the probability of the bad thing is often almost exactly the inverse of the probability of something good. In figuring the p value, put in any quantitative information that might be relevant.

As an exercise, estimate the p value of a zombie apocalypse. Here the only quantitative value you really need to determine is the maximum number of days that it might take until the zombie apocalypse occurs, which is probably the total number of days left before the sun expends all its energy, providing scientists are unable to develop a zombie apocalypse inhibitor beforehand. Since scientists place the future lifespan of the sun at about five billion years, the likelihood that a zombie apocalypse will occur on any given day is 5 billion x 365.4 (1,827,000,000,000). So the p value will be p = 1/1,827,000,000,000. Remember that tomorrow you will need to recalculate; tomorrow the p value will be 1/1,826,999,999,999. (Note, if your experiment involves antimatter, there won’t be any days left before the zombie apocalypse occurs, so p = 1/0; this is an irrational number, but you won’t be around to worry about it.)

In clinical science, the p value represents the amount a clinic will pay you for a warm cup of urine, or charge you for it, depending on whether they are asking you for the pee or you are trying to get rid of it.

palindromidae  members of very rare camelid species with such nearly perfect anterior-posterior symmetry that only experts can determine which end is the front and which the back. The most famous example is the Pushmi-pullyu, a llama with heads on both ends. Its first description in the scientific literature was provided by the group of Dr. John Dolittle (see, for example, Lofting et al, 1922), who originally mistook it for a cross between a gazelle and a unicorn. (The mistake was corrected for the documentary film on Dolittle’s career, produced by Walt Disney in 1967.) The animals themselves often become confused about whether they are coming or going, and have nearly gone extinct due to physiological difficulties during reproduction, or quarrels over which end gets a mate. The term is sometimes extended by analogy to human beings who can’t tell their heads from their asses.

parsimony  a basic principle in science which involves trying to keep things simple. This can only be achieved in a scientist’s early years, before life gets cluttered by events such as matrimony. At that point parsimony becomes very difficult, and in the alimony phase it is completely impossible.

peer review  There was an ancient custom among certain Native American tribes in which a warrior, fallen into enemy hands, was made to run down a corridor formed of members of the tribe that had captured him, each of whom was equipped with a weapon with which to strike him. If he made it all the way to the end he was permitted to survive. Peer review is the scientific equivalent.

penetrance  the degree to which some genetic or medical condition that you have – such as a cleft chin, or a mosquito bite – annoys you, and as a result the extent to which you annoy anyone who has inherited part of your genome.

perianth  the non-reproductive part of a flower; generally the ugly parts which resemble weeds, or everything that is left when the petals fall off.

permeable  describes a type of hair that can be remolded into the shapes of clouds or classical sculptures through an application of chemical stiffeners by stylists. Compare to semipermeableand nonpermeable, which resist these efforts to varying degrees. The latter two types probably originated as mutations which have increasingly spread through the population over time, due to the difficulty of people with perms finding mates.

perspire  etymology: from the Latin per, which means with or through, and spire, which is the pointy thing on top of a church; the compound perspire is probably derived from the fact that a spire is awfully darned heavy and whoever has to carry it up all those stairs to mount the thing on the roof is bound to emit some sweat. Perspiration is an involuntary process in which anywhere from 1 to 1 billion pores of the skin open and release a fluid that covers the skin. The precise composition of this liquid is a mystery, at least to me, unless you have eaten garlic recently. Perspiration is found in many living species, and a few nonliving ones, although I’m not sure about fish. They probably perspire, but measurements are technically challenging, and it’s hard to see the point. Whatever, this wide pattern of evolutionary conservation suggests that perspiration has some vital function, including some, all, or none of the following, respectively: 1) it provides an outlet for fluids so that an organism won’t explode if something goes wrong with its bladder; 2) it has antiseptic properties, which is why mothers use it to wash your face, although you’d rather they didn’t in public places; 3) under certain lighting conditions it diffracts light in a manner that renders a person invisible, which is helpful in evading predators, such as your boss, an unpleasant relative, or a loan shark; 4) some of it slews off a person (the perspirer) and hits anyone following him (the perspiree), for example during the Tour de France, who undoubtedly find this bit of precipitation refreshing, unless the perspirer’s perspiration contains trace amounts of banned substances that might later appear in the urine of the perspiree (This was one of many defences mounted by Lance Armstrong during his “troubles”, but the tactic fell apart because during the races he was always in the lead, and was unable to propose a mechanism by which perspiration might overcome the laws of physics); 5) it contains pheromones that attract a member of the opposite sex, but only briefly; later your partner becomes habituated to it, which comprises the middle period of a marriage, and finally develops an allergy to it, which can be quickly cured by divorce, murder, or some other method of separating spouses. It should be noted that there is a weak correlation between perspiring and doing work. Perspiration is also correlated with lying. Therefore signs of perspiration may mean you were working, you were not working but are lying about it, you were working and lie about it, or some fourth alternative, such as a rare condition not yet recognised by medical science but will be named for your doctor if it kills you.

Perspiration has been spun off into many derivatives, including:

• aspire  to intend or plan to perspire
• respire  to perspire again if it didn’t have the desired effects the first time
• inspire  to motivate others to perspire
• conspire  to perspire with at least one other person, usually while participating in a free-time activity such as reproduction, or a plot to overthrow the government
• expire  to perspire to an excessive degree with fatal consequences
• transpire to perspire across traditional boundaries between disciplines or genders; another meaning is the brief state of spiritual enlightenment that sometimes follows  heavy perspiration, but prior to the onset of the heart attack.
• despire an existential Angst related to anxiety about perspiration performance, or a feeling that perspiration has lost its spiritual significance; this can also mean to physically remove the tower and spire of a church, usually as a college prank, then relocate it to somewhere unexpected: the back seat of the convertible that belongs to the head of your department, the breakfast cereal aisle of a grocery store, or the International Space Station.
• perspiritus  an alcoholic beverage made from fermented perspiration
• prospire  to perspire professionally
• perspirosome  the cellular compartment that synthesizes perspiration
• panperspirum hypothesis  the theory that life on Earth arrived in the form of extraterrestrial perspiration borne by comets, spaceships, or shed by aliens during the Tour de France.
• Perspi-cola  a soft drink that was marketed very briefly in the 1980s. Stories that the drink contained naturally-produced perspiration is probably an urban legend; over a period of about 20 years, Perpsi-cola chemists had developed a synthetic version that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The drink was removed from the market after three days due to its failure to attract a loyal customer base, probably because it tasted disgusting.

PhD  an abbreviation of the German expression “P hoch Drei,” which refers to a mental state of Perpetual Panic and Paranoia.

PhD student  slave

philosophy  a field of knowledge which aims to prove that knowing anything is impossible – well, except for that. Years of study are required to unlearn everything a person has picked up over the years, followed by great mental discipline and constant vigilance to prevent information from seeping into the vaccuum that has been created. The brain has a natural hunger for knowledge and finds clever ways to smuggle it in without a person’s knowledge, which causes difficulties because anything you don’t know that you know is hard to identify and remove because it never occurs to you to look for it. The extent of unlearning required by a true philosopher is usually only achieved upon earning a doctorate, at which point you have racked up about $300,000 in debt from student loans in the pursuit of ignorance. On the salary provided by the 7-11 or Dairy Queen, which are the only jobs you are qualified to do, it takes about a 3000 years to repay this sum, not taking inflation into account. But perhaps it is worth it; philosophy may be the key to a happy life, although by definition, there is no way to know this.

Philosophy is sometimes called “the Queen of the Sciences,” but only by philosophers, revealing that many of them have a secret hankering toward monarchical forms of government. Actual scientists, on the other hand, call it something else, such as “a bunch of malarkey covered in spam and generously topped with Cheeze Whiz.” Natural scientists consider philosophy a completely theoretical field that has no bearing whatsoever on the real world, because philosophy has neither mass nor energy, and thus by definition cannot interact with matter. Philosophers counterargue that millions of books have been written on the subject; you can see this for yourself if you visit archeological sites called libraries. Natural scientists respond by calculating the cost of printing all of these books, in terms of the millions of acres of trees that have been sacrificed, and thus the extent to which philosophy is accelerating the end of the world.

Despite the inherent antagonism between these two views, it should be noted that many natural scientists go through a brief phase of intellectual flirtation with philosophy, usually when confronted with the task of writing a dissertation. This little fling usually doesn’t cause any permanent damage, unless it produces a child or lasts too long. Sustained dosages of philosophy are toxic and can lead to a mild disassociative state in which a scientist believes his or her body to be a robot under the control of aliens, or secret government powers using mind-control devices, which is why so many of them wear tinfoil hats. Documented symptoms of full-blown cases of philosophy include hemlock poisoning, insanity through syphillis, depression, existentialism, atheism and nihilism, although the order in which they appear may vary. Happily, in most cases of temporary philosophy, an external stimulus causes the mental fog to dissipate, much the way pressing a button can open a garage door and let out the cats, or opening a keg of beer produces pandemonium. A person infected by philosophy may remember going into a bookstore to buy a copy of Also Sprach Zarathustra; then there’s a gap in your memory, and suddenly you wake up on the side of a barren hill in a foreign land, surrounded by a large herd of goats. If this ever happens to you, philosophy is probably the culprit. That, or aliens. Although some philosophers become contract killers instead of goatherds.

A typical dialog between a scientist and a philosopher goes something like this:

Scientist:  Hey, how are you doing today? Oh, I forgot that you maintain that we can never know for sure what day it is, or if such a thing as a day even exists.
Philosopher:  That’s correct, but it is possible to talk about a day without establishing that it exists. Providing we share a frame of reference that contains “day” as a concept.
Scientist:  But wouldn’t the frame have to exist, for us to share it?
Philosopher:  Not necessarily; it’s enough to postulate that it does, and that your framework and mine are similar enough to permit communication.
Scientist:  But what basis can there be for doing so? Doesn’t it make all communication a thinly-veiled lie?
Philosopher:  No, because lying presupposes the existence of a truth that can be lied about.
Scientist: …And somehow you get out of bed in the morning. Me, I get up, develop a hypothesis that it’s Tuesday, which it either is or isn’t; it can’t be both. So I perform an experiment that will disambiguate the situation by clarifying the Tuesday-ness of a particular day. For example, by asking my wife.
Philosopher:  Ah, but who’s to say that your wife’s Tuesday is the same as your Tuesday? When your wife asks you if her butt is fat, is fat to her the same as it is to you?
Scientist: I’m not in the mood for the “fat” argument today. Keep it up and things are going to get ugly.
Philosopher:  Why does the the failure of objectivity as a tenable world view always incite you to violence?
Scientist: I can tell you for certain that what you mean by violence isn’t what I mean. You’ll find out, though, if you brainwash any more of my PhD students.
Philosopher:  Is that so?
Scientist:  You betcha.
Philosopher:  Well maybe I will, just to prove a point.
Scientist: Go ahead, I dare you.
(pause)
Philosopher:  By the way, did you drive to work today? My car’s in the shop.
Scientist:  Yeah, you need a ride home?
Philosopher:  I’d really appreciate it. Should I come by around five?
Scientist:  Works for me. Catch you later.

pipeline  the sequential application of many technologies to a scientific problem, forming a sort of artificial digestive tract in which raw materials enter one end and a Wurst-like object emerges at the other. A pipeline is usually constructed by lining up every instrument in the lab in a long row, end to end, in any order you please, so that what emerges from one passes directly into the opening of the next, preferably without human handling. Any technology may be included in the pipeline, including automated X-ray crystallography devices, musical instruments, mousetraps, the lab sprinkler system, and devices people use to alter the three-dimensional structure of their hair. For models of pipelines see the work of Rube Goldberg.

placebo  a treatment or action that has no value whatsoever, since it lacks an active substance that might have some positive effect on an organism’s well-being – a diploma is a good example of a placebo.

planarium  a strange model organism that never dies, but simply shrivels up for a while when food is scarce and then fattens again, and sometimes reproduces, when food is plentiful, resembling the way humans attempt to control their phenotype through various diets. When you attack a planarium with a knife and cut it into up to 256 pieces, each subunit is capable of reproducing an entire organism. The 257^th piece is used as food. It is unclear why this hasn’t left the Earth piled in heaps upon heaps of planaria. The best explanation is that there are lots of planaria shriveled up in various locations, waiting for their chance to puff up and achieve world domination.

An illustration of planaria, which reveals some of their difficulties adapting to modern ecosystems, can be found here.

pleuston  the aquatic version of a windbag

polycarpic  any process in which several carp, a species of fish, engage in a mutual activity, such as feasting on toes that have been inserted into the water by people sitting on the bank of a river or lake.

polymer the designation for a collection of objects that experience some sort of attraction for each other, become attached, and remain that way until being physically separated – by an enzyme, a hacksaw, a pry-bar, or various types of legal proceedings. Examples of polymers include amino acids, relatives who show up for the holidays, children and babysitters, people handcuffed to each other, members of a chain gang, professors and students, scientists and administrators, and pets and owners.

polymery  a state of intoxication in a parrot.

polyploid  derived from combining the terms polyp – an ugly protrusion from a surface which ought to be smooth – and loid, which is a strip of metal used to open a car or some other enclosed space that the user of the loid can be arrested for entering. Thus a polyploid is a device to slice open polyps, or separate them from a surface to which they have become attached. This should restore the surface to more or less its original condition, although you may have to apply a new coat of varnish to hide the scratches made while inserting the polyploid under the polyp to pry it up.

poorly understood  a term used to describe something nobody cared the least bit about, and then our lab came along and showed that it is responsible for everything: cancer, the origins of life, consciousness, and alien abductions.

postdoc  a person in the lab who, after many years of training, is able to understand the odd mumbling sounds made by a group leader and translate them into occupational therapy activities for predocs, technicians, and other lower forms of life, using equipment on hand in the laboratory. The qualifications needed by a postdoc include: dexterity with a bullwhip; the ability to build a gin distillery using laboratory equipment; basic first aid skills, including the ability to reattach limbs on the proper person and correct side of the body; Black Ops training for carrying out sorties against competitors; and the ability to write sentences of at least four words using proper punctuation, then enhance them with 80 or 90 superfluous words to demonstrate a profound, impenetrable intellect. Candidates with any of the additional skills or experience are usually given preference: an internship in a circus (involving the handling of large, aggressive animals); computer hacking (scientific journals), and ventriloquism (when the group leader loses his/her voice or train of thought). (requested by Fatimunnisa Qadri, MDC)

posterior  if you are sitting down, what you’re sitting on; otherwise, what you would be sitting on, and everything below it. The posterior is also the part of a person that you have to ask your spouse whether it is getting too fat.

postulate  to proclaim something while standing on a post: a precarious position from which one can easily be knocked off by the wind, a cow, or the shotgun of a rancher who does not look kindly upon trespassers who stand on his posts.

potential drug target  something in a biological system that is not affected by any known drug and probably never will be.

premortal  a phase of life up to and including the moment of death, followed by embalming and a brief nap before hatching as a fully mature zombie.

preservation  any artificial procedure that extends the shelf life of organic material beyond its natural expiration date, usually to ensure that there will be a supply of food in the future. Various methods are used, including freezing. Humans are often cryopreserved, for example, so that someday they can be cured of diseases, or eaten, depending on the state of society when the electrical grid breaks down.

press release  a shortened form of the expression “press and release:” a description of the muscular activity of the intestines when trying to digest and then expell a piece of science that has been swallowed without chewing.

proboscis   a tissue extending from the front of the face which evolved as a mechanism to probe the space ahead, a bit like a blind person’s cane, or the front bumper of a car. If an animal walked slowly enough and hit an obstacle, it would first detect the impact via the proboscis, which is composed of tissue soft enough to absorb the impact providing the animal is not traveling faster than about 10 cm per second. Upon encountering an obstacle, sensors in the proboscis trigger a reflex that instinctively brakes the rest of the body before it suffers so much damage that insurance companies need to get involved. In many mammalian species this function became redundant through the evolution of whiskers, which is why the species with the longest whiskers tend to have the smallest noses (felines), and vice versa (elephants, whose tiny whiskers are purely ornamental). Derivatives include proboscuity, a habitual and socially offensive behavior in which the proboscis is inserted into places, situations or affairs where it has no business being.

proportionate (verb)  an aggressive social behavior in which a person proactively volunteers to cut the pie, or the chicken, or divide the loot, in a thinly disguised move to get the most. After things have been divvied up, the distribution is said to be “proportionate” (adjective) if the portions people receive correspond to the amounts they deserve, calculated through a complex formula that takes a person’s body mass index into account and variables such as whether your spouse feels that your BMI falls into an acceptable range, whether he or she is presently at the table, and the H (holiday) factor, where the normal physiological regulators of eating are repressed. If a proportionatee disagrees with the amount he has been proportioned, he may petition a civil court, at which point he has the opportunity to present evidence that his piece of pie was too small. The court may order the plaintiff and defendant to enter a binding process to decide on “reproportionation,” to whose terms both parties must agree. If they are unable to come to terms, the case is heard again and decided by the judge.

psychology  a field devoted to the study of invisible, immaterial, and potentially supernatural entities such as the mind, the psyche, and large imaginary rabbits. Psychologists use invisible tools to cut these phenomena into subcomponents that are also invisible, but smaller. This produces new entities such as the Id, the Superego, and a ghost called Elvira. By studying defects in the interactions of these components, and the use of silverware by psychiatric patients, psychologists have identified the causes of a number of mental diseases which no one previously recognized. Diseases are assigned names based on characters from Greek mythology who have committed terrible acts of a sexual nature.

Psychology is considered a science only by its practitioners and those they manage to draw into their collective delusion. They justify this claim by pointing out that the psychology curriculum requires them to take a course in statistics. They also do a research project in which they stand at a window, watch the behavior of zoo animals, and count whatever happens, usually acts of a sexual nature. The real trick is to find clever excuses to discount any evidence that fails to confirm the initial hypothesis. Either that, or to make up the hypothesis after the observations have been performed. Statistical methods are then used, in a random order, to convert the hypothesis into a theory that can be immediately applied to human society.

Psychologists claim to be studying the brain, although most of them have never actually seen one. If some other part of the body takes part in an activity that interests them, such as acts of a sexual nature, they are not required by law to shut their eyes and ignore it. Noticing it deliberately is considered bad form, however, because it encroaches on territory claimed by specialists in other branches of medicine. The eyes, for example, lie in the domain of optometrists, while facial muscles are the province of plastic surgeons. Hair is the exclusive territory of coiffeurs with names like Raimondo or Giancarlo, unless it emerges from the nostrils or ears. That places it in the domain of psychologists again.

pterocarpus  something or someone in possession of winged fruit, such as a flying banana.

qualifier  a word or phrase that scientists generally attach to every assertion so that in 10 or 20 or 50 years, when it is proven wrong, you won’t be too embarrassed, unless you have reason to believe that you will no longer be alive because, for example, you will be burned at the stake. For example, “Possibly it is thinkably presumable that our putative explanation is perhaps likely be somewhat true, at least on Tuesdays, although we are probably not yet entirely capable of controlling some of the potential variables that might impinge on the process and one should rather consider, as a means of eventually eliminating all other eventual potential conceivable explanations for what we believe we may have observed.”

On one’s deathbed, it is permissible to make assertions, such as, “And yet it moves.” (Galileo Galilei)

range  a defined finite space whose boundaries are often described by numbers, in which a cow or another free-roaming object, such as a piece of data, wanders aimlessly about in a leisurely and random manner, sometimes stopping to eat something it finds on the ground, such as a boot, a weed, or a dead armadillo, chewing it repetitively for as long as it takes until it can be swallowed. “Ranging from 1 to 5” indicates the position of the fences that border this space, which an item within the range should not cross. Otherwise it risks being electrocuted by the fence or shot by the farmer whose land begins on the other side.

ramification  what happens to a door during the springtime if you put a ewe on one side and a male sheep on the other.

reductio ad absurdum  explaining a system or concept to a level simple enough that a human with an average level of education can understand it without the help of a computer. Thus reductio ab absurdum is the guiding principle in writing articles for newspapers or blogs. If even then it is too complex to be understood, run the text through Google Translate using the “pirate speak” setting.

reductionism  to repair a piece of equipment, a scientific theory or model that has already been repaired once using duct tape by applying another layer of duct tape.

reflex  the best way to understand a reflex is by using a diagram of the human body, ideally a diagram of your own. If you don’t have such a diagram yet, briefly go outside. Find a relatively empty, flat surface somewhere on the ground, such as the middle of the road. Briefly lie down on that spot, facing upwards, which should place your back to the ground; if not, repeat the procedure until this is the case. Be sure to smile. Then get up, go inside, log onto Google Earth, and zoom in on your coordinates until you see your image. Print this out and cut carefully along the outline until you have your personal diagram.

Now we are ready to approach the topic of reflexes. A reflex is a process that takes place in one specific part of the body whenever a stimulation is applied to another part, whether or not you want it to – because reflexive circuits entirely bypass the brain. For example, hitting your kneecap with a hammer will cause you to kick the person who has struck you, unless the blow is so strong that it shatters the kneecap entirely – you may need to try several times, raising and lowering the force, until the stimulus has reached the appropriate strength. Hitting your thumb with a hammer, on the other hand, will cause the mouth to open and utter signals of distress. A blow directly to the head will cause the knees to buckle and drop you to the ground. Try this across the entire body until you have mapped all the reflexes stimulated by hammer blows. Then measure the effects of other types of stimuli. Stimulating the ears with the sound of a bell will trigger salivation in the mouth, for example. A stimulation of the ears through the entry of a bee or wasp, on the other hand, will cause you to run around and flap your arms, as if trying to fly away. All of these are reflexes.

reflux  to eject a disgusting substance from your body for a second time by, for example, vomiting. The first time it came out it was efflux. After studying the contents of, for example, the vomit, you decided it contained something your body needed, such as a kidney, and tried to return it to its natural environment (influx). Reflux occurs when the body regards this as offensive and refuses it a second time. At this point most people give up. But the literature reports a few cases of triflux, quintiflux, and a pathological condition called millifluxitis. Cats often ingest the same reflux so many times that they can survive for months or years on a single meal.

regulation  In cells, processes involving molecules whose function is to prevent everything from happening at the same time. In governmental affairs, a process involving bureaucrats whose function is to try to prevent anything from happening at all.

reproducibility  the likelihood that something which happened in a certain way in one place will occur again in another; for example, if you are playing golf and hit a hole in one, and then are struck by lightning. This is reproducible if you are struck by lightning a second time, after hitting another hole in one, on a later date, on another course. In science, reproducibility is achieved about this often.

reproduction  any process that permits something to make a replica of itself, nearly always leading to the creation of something of poorer quality than the original – including photocopying, faxing, sexual intercourse, teaching, gossip, and memory. Repeated rounds of reproduction usually distort the outcome to the point that it is unrecognizeable.

residual volume  a small reserve of air at the bottom of the lungs that remains after you think you’ve expelled it all – like the portion of gasoline that remains in a car’s tank after the needle hits red. No matter how hard you exhale, there’s always just a little left – ask any tuba player.

respectively  A word put at the end of a list of items which have been scrambled into a sort of puzzle by an author, suggesting a strategy by which reader should reassemble them into groups. If the words were socks, the word “respectively” would function like colors and patterns. An example:

My father, my step-mother and my sister have birthdays in January, June, and May and are aged 59, 27 and 27 respectively.

Decoded, this should be interpreted: “After the divorce, my father ran off with a slut who was younger than my sister.”

rhinoviruses  viruses whose natural hosts are rhinoceroses. During viral maturation, particles migrate to the highest point of the horn, where they cluster and hope that someone will come along and grind it into powder. When eaten, this powder causes an infection and fever that are sometimes mistaken for a temporary increase in sexual potency. The virus can also be transferred directly from a living rhinoceros to a human host, upon injection by the horn.

rho factor  a handicap system to make rhoing matches more exciting by giving slower teams a head start on the river. The rhoing factor represents the amount of head start given to the weaker team; a rhoing factor of 100 would mean 100 meters or 100 kilometers, depending on the comparative level of skill of the two teams. This system levels the playing field even when pitting professionals against amateurs. And even greater handicaps can be awarded. For example, when the Cambridge University Rhoers were matched against the Rhoing and Knitting Club for Sopranos Who have Retired from the Grandview United Methodist Church Choir, the Cambridge team was required to rho upstream while the Methodists were permitted to rho downriver, with the help of an outboard motor.

sally forth  a more elegant way to say “go”, which should be used as often as possible in scientific papers.

scientific advisory board (SAB)  formerly known as “scientific oversight boards,” or SOBs. The research equivalent of visiting Heads of State. An Inner Circle of scientists who have passed their expiration date and spend their time flying First Class to Five-Star Hotels around the world, listening to stupifying presentations, then recovering by drinking prodigiously in hotel bars, Karaoke bars and other types of bars, then voting to give each other enough money to continue in this lifestyle into perpetuity. Membership is by invitation only; generally when one becomes Director of an Institute one invites the SAB for an evaluation, and as a means of returning the favor the SAB invites the Director onto the SABs of the Institutes of the other members of the SAB.

scientific paper  a highly fictionalized, Hollywood-style account of a scientific project, with a plot that makes it seem as though someone knew what they were doing when embarking on a piece of research and planned the whole thing. There is always a happy end. Members of a laboratory often fail to recognize scientific papers about their own work.

-scope  an instrument used to “check something out,” usually to determine whether it could serve as an appropriate sexual partner. The first scopes, in fact, were developed to search for genitals before scientists discovered their locations on the body. Later the suffix was attached to other types of instruments, including:

telescope  an instrument developed to look at things so far away they lie in another dimension, called teleology.

colonoscope  an instrument first developed to probe the depths of a person’s ear. Prior to its invention, no one knew the true depth of the auditory canal, so colonoscopes were made very long. With enough force the instrument could be pushed in so far that it emerged from the other end of a person. At some point scientists discovered that more information could be collected about the auditory canal by examining it from the other side, so they began inserting the colonoscope at the former exit point.

endoscope  this term was originally derived from the expression, “end o’ th’ scope,” and referred to the end that was farthest from the person in charge of the instrument, and closest to the victim. If it changed hands in the middle of a procedure, for example when the patient snatched it to end the abuse, endoscope now referred to the end held by the former patient, and the person who initiated the incident was called the endoscopee. This caused confusion in cases where two people both got their hands on the thing. If each tried to tell the other in no uncertain terms what he could do with his end of the endoscope, this produced garbled communication and often fatal results. A national committee was formed to find a solution. Eventually a consensus was reached through the creation of the new terms proximal endoscope and distal endoscope, also sometimes seen in the forms myendoscope and urendoscope, as defined by the end that was cleanest at any given time.

microscope  a type of scope that moves the eye one million times closer to whatever it is you are trying to look at. At the time of invention another theory was proposed to account for the functions of the instrument: it actually made objects one million times larger for a very brief period of time. Fortunately this is not the case, because a lot of the things you see with a microscope are disgusting enough without being made a million times larger. This early “expansion theory” of microscopy was not fully discarded until Einstein published the theory of relativity. Einstein proved that if two people with microscopes were standing on trains that were pulling away from each other at the speed of light, they would never see each other because rays emanating from the microscope’s light source would never reach the slide, unless they turned around and faced the other direction. At that point each would either see what the other person had looked like a million years in the past, or be crushed as the two trains underwent a sudden, million-fold expansion. Since neither outcome was particularly desirable, scientists discarded the theory for the one they liked better.

The microscope revolutionized science because it was so powerful it could detect things so small that they didn’t actually exist, which explained why they had been invisible to the naked eye in the first place. It also played a key role in the deanthropomorphization of science by disproving the concept of the Big Picture. Through a microscope one realizes that the Big Picture is nothing more than a lot of Smaller Pictures containing things so small they defy human cognition, unless they somehow manage to reach it by entering through an ear. Thus the Big Picture can be discarded altogether.

Understanding why this is the case can be demonstrated through a metaphor: Imagine cutting any normal puzzle into a million pieces. Now try to assemble it again. You’ll discover that this is impossible because the maximum amount of information in 1/1,000,000^th of an image is an R, G, or B dot, and not even a whole one, and good luck matching that to the picture on the box. But you’ll never get that far because you’ll never find the corners. Theoretically you could, but it would take an amount of time that can be represented by the formula UP * (n)^1,000,000/4!, where n = the time it takes you to locate a single corner piece that it has become so small that you have to apply the Uncertainty Principle (UP), which means that whenever you go looking for it, it probably isn’t where you think it is, and even if it were, it would be gone before you could grab it.

sepal  a sort of umbrella growing over the bud of a flower, to protect it from hailstorms and hide its sexual organs from the wrong pollinators.

sessile colonial cnidarian  a quantity of cnid – a jelly-like mass, shaped into a coherent form using a device such as a jello mold – which has colonized a place where it does not naturally occur, such as a sofa, and thereafter resists all efforts to remove it, citing the timeless justification given by all colonialists: that it is simply exercising its natural right of eminent domain.

shrub  a derogatory term used by trees to refer to plants that are unnaturally stunted, haven’t fulfilled their potential, or are somehow disappointing overall.

significantly  insignificantly

simple  the quality of being simple. While scientists prefer that things be simple, they don’t like their descriptions of things to sound simple, because people might get the idea that science is simple, and then anyone could do it. So scientists have developed many alternative ways of describing simple things, including the following: “a gratifyingly low degree of complexity, bordering on null,” or “a state of not having achieved, evolved, or developed any apparent structural modularity,” or, “an entity or process which can be described without adding a lot of boring, unnecessary detail, particularly those features or properties that have no effect on the outcome of an experiment.” For those who prefer a single word, the base “simple” can be ornamented with some useless consonants: simplifical, simplificability, or simplificabilical. A word can also be built on some other base whose simple meaning can be deduced by anyone with a thorough knowledge of Latin and classical Greek: aheterocomplificatory, apolymorphological, nonmultifeaturologicistical, unquantiplurifiable, monouniformalogically integrated, etc.

single nucleotide polymorphism  a case in which a letter generally found at a specific location in the genetic code (or another text) has been replaced by another letter. This can change the phenotype of the organism. In the following text, for example:

“The barn is fallin’ apart”

Replacing the letter “a” with an “e” produces the following text:

“The bern is fellin’ epert”

and changes the speaker from an American to a Scotsman.

sitology  the scientific study of the interactions between a butt and a chair

skeletal muscle  long fibers made of fused muscle cells that connect various regions of the brain to different points on the skeleton, turning the body into a sort of marionette and creating the illusion that we have conscious control over it, although some people obviously don’t, at least not their mouths. Skeletal muscle is the foundation of voluntary movement by animals. Before it evolved, animal movement was strictly involuntary – if a pet or child were in the way, you had to pick it up, throw or kick it to make it move. The arrival of skeletal muscle was highly practical because it permitted people to make the trip from the sofa to the refrigerator themselves; you no longer had to spend all your time fetching beer for them.

Skeletal muscle promoted the development of some further evolutionary adaptions while retarding others. Experts believe that it delayed the evolution of language because skeletal muscle allowed animals to use the digits of their forelimbs to point at things. Pointing served all the important functions of language that a species needed except for those that required head-butting or biting. But it also led to negative selection, because having control over your finger made it possible to poke someone else in the eye, and you could no longer blame such behavior on the absence of skeletal muscle. This often led to negative selection through the loss of the finger in question, as well as whatever functions it served in the survival and reproduction of an individual.

smudge  a subpopulation of a microbiome that is deposited on a surface such as glass, usually by a finger or nose, where it forms an oily colony that is visible to the naked eye.

snurps  cynical, quip-like comments in a review, usually delivered in a sarcastic manner

somatic  everything that remains of a body after the soul has been extracted, whether through surgical, psychological, or divine methods

sonogram  the standard unit for measuring the weight of a sound. Contrary to popular belief, loud sounds are not heavier than soft ones. Weight is determined by pitch: the lowest pipe on an organ, for example, produces a bassogram, which when converted to standard measurements is approximately the weight of an adult whale. By contrast, a sopranogram weighs about as much as a hummingbird.

southern blot  the condition of a scientist after drinking an entire bottle of Southern Comfort.

sporadic  the description of a rhythm that has been disrupted but would otherwise occur at regular intervals, like what would happen if you stole a stick from a drummer.

sprocket  a wheel-like cog that screws onto the doohickey that fell off the thingamajig.

straightforward  moving ahead in a direct line no matter what the impairment, such as during a sobriety test conducted on the highway.

supination  a posture adopted by a penitent when petitioning mercy on the part of a superior being, such as a religious authority or a group leader. In proper supination, the ventral side faces upward, toward the superior, exposing the soft parts, basically offering one’s intestines to the predator in the event he or she has a taste for such things. Inverse supination is to lie with one’s ventral side to the ground, usually after partaking of large quantities of alcohol.

survey  a form of stalking in which the group conducting the survey asks random questions of anyone foolish enough to talk to them, based on the principle that if you ask enough questions of enough people, you’re bound to learn something eventually. On the street it is hard to get people to stop, so some surveyers carry big nets. They also carry clipboards, usually to hide the hand that is picking your pocket.

surprisingly  something that really wasn’t surprising to our lab at all; we expected it, but that’s because we’re so much smarter then the rest of you.

synthetic lethality  a situation in which two things, either of which could be borne with non-fatal consequences in one context, combine to kill something in another. For example: a woman might be able to live with her mother, and her husband, but put them together and there’s bound to be a fatality. Or: “I would undress in front of my mother, and undress in front of my wife, but never both at the same time.” (James Hartman, professor extraordinaire, University of Kansas)

systems biology  “…Systems biology is a whole-istic approach to understanding biology; it aims at system-level understanding of biology, and to understand biological systems as a system.” (Reference: http://www.sysbio.de/info/background/WhatIs.shtml)

taken together  is used when a scientists adds up many results and gets a whole that is a thousand or perhaps a million times more than the sum of its parts. In other words, an expression used before pronouncing a wild and baseless exaggeration. An example is the comment made by an astronomer following the 2010 discovery of an exoplanet called Gliese 581g, whose orbit around a distant star put it in a “habitable zone” where water might exist on its surface: “Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent,” Prof. Vogt said during a press briefing. “I have almost no doubt about it.” Any slight inconsistencies in this statement could have easily have been rectified if Prof. Vogt had said, “Taken together” instead of “Personally,” and then scientists would have put his comments in the proper frame of reference. (It should be noted that shortly after his pronouncement, Gliese 581g was deemed likely to be an artifact caused by the telescope, and probably does not exist at all.)

tarsi  structures that keep a person’s eyelids from falling off

teleology  the scientific study of 1) television sets and 2) the content they broadcast; i.e., the powerful hallucinations that occur when viewers are exposed to a television’s electromagnetic field. To avoid fatal accidents, the first type of study should only be carried out after disconnecting a television set from its source of electricity. The second should only be done after disconnecting the rational parts of the brain.

tepal  a part of a plant which arises when it misspells a petal.

theoretical consideration  something that can safely be ignored without any negative consequences whatsoever.

therefore  the answer to the question, “Wherefore?”

thingamajig  a piece of laboratory equipment whose technical name you can always remember until just the moment you need it, at which point it is always being used by what’s-her-name. You know that the lab has a second thingamajig somewhere – which you call a whatchamacallit so that people will know what you’re talking about, but you can’t find it, either. The conversation that ensues goes like this:

“Have you seen the thingamajig? I really need it.”

“Which thingamajig are you talking about?”

“The one that what’shername is using.”

“Really? I thought she she’d finished with the thingamajig. Why don’t you use the watchamacallit?”

“I can’t find it. I think it’s got a broken doohickey, anyway.”

“Ask what’shisname, he’s fixed a doohickey before, but I think it was the one on the thingamajig.”

thither  the opposite of hither; almost but not quite yon.

tohuwabohu  a state of absolute chaos, similar to the state of the very early universe, or the laboratory after a party.

truncate  to reduce the size of something so that it will fit into a chest, for example by chopping off its limbs.

ubiquitous  something which is everywhere, all the time, such as a particular molecule, your children’s cell phones, or paperwork.

utter, utterly  an emphatic word, almost always negative, associated with the milk-producing glands of a cow. To say that a competitor’s hypothesis is “utter nonsense” is to imply that it should be chewed up, passed through a bovine digestive tract, and ejected from the scientific literature by squeezing firmly on a large teat. Not to be confused with “otter” or “otterly”.

vegan  an extraterrestrial being from a planet that orbits the star Vega, in the constellation Lyra. The biochemistry of their world is so fundamentally different from that of our own that vegan refugees have a hard time finding anything edible on Earth.

ventral  the part of an organism that expands in direct proportion to the amount of beer that is consumed.

whorl  a region within a person’s hair which is shaped like a tiny hurricane, formed through similar physical forces. In those born in the Northern Hemisphere, whorls generally form in a clockwise direction, while in the Southern Hemisphere the structure flows in a counter-clockwise direction, viewed from above. Usually this region is located on the back side of the head, although there have been well-documented cases of its appearance in other places, such as between the eyebrows. Contrary to popular belief, one cannot retrain a whorl to grow in the opposite direction by sticking a finger into it and twirling it in the opposite direction, or with the aid of some mechanical device such as an electric mixer, although a few recent studies suggest that this can be achieved temporarily if the device rotates at a speed above 1000 rpm.

workflow  an idealized schematic diagram of how a scientific project might work in a perfect world, in which labor is divided up among members of a laboratory in a fair and rational manner, to be carried out within a reasonable time frame. In practice, the first step in a workflow is to throw out the workflow.

xylophagy the process of digesting a xylophone.

yon  an abbreviation of the word yonder, which is where you’ll end up if you don’t complete your thesis.

zither  an annoying instrument which only functions after being pounded on, pinched or stroked. While this is also the case for most other equipment, true zithers are seldom seen in modern laboratories. If you’re asked for one, first determine whether your colleague has a lisp and is actually asking for “scissors”.

zoology  the scientific study of zoos, a field which has produced remarkable insights into interactions between predators and their prey – particularly crocodiles, polar bears, zookeepers and small children, although not necessarily in the same cage at the same time. A number of general principles have emerged from zoological research: cotton candy should not be sold within the grasp of great apes, and people should not climb over fences to take selfies with lions. And anyone who makes rude faces at an orangutan or disturbs a shark by knocking on the glass may well get what is coming to him. In recent years zoology has taken on the wider theme of studying any interaction between species that have been removed from their native environments and sequestered together in an unnatural habitat, such as a marriage.