more entries in the Devil’s Dictionary: today including biped, bioprospecting, Brownian commotion, colon, and permeable
See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.
all entries in the Devil’s Dictionary copyright 2018 by Russ Hodge
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.
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.
Browning commotion jiggly-leg syndrome at the scale of molecules.
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.
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 semipermeable and 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.
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