Academia Obscura

by Glen Wright

  The most famous ‘Fuck’ in academia to date is a paper of that name, which explores the legal implications of the word, by Christopher Fairman, an academic at Ohio State University.82 Fairman begins:

  ‘Oh fuck. Let’s just get this out of the way. You’ll find no F-word, f*ck, f—k, @$!%, or other sanitized version used here.’

  Fairman isn’t fucking around: Fuck features a staggering 482 instances of the titular expletive in its extensively researched 74 pages (6.5 fucks per page). By contrast, Allen Walker Read’s 1934 scholarly treatment of the word ran to 15 pages, but there is not a single use of the word itself in sight.83

  Brian Leitner, head of the Social Sciences Research Network† refused to include Fuck in its annual calculation of law school rankings.‡ The ranking is based on the number of downloads of the school’s papers, and, reasoned Leiter, Fuck’s ‘unusually high download count was due to its provocative title, not its scholarly content …’84 Fairman disagreed, resulting in a protracted public exchange between the two.85

  Fairman was far from the first to have fun with the F-word. James McCawley, a Scottish-American linguist who studied under the supervision of Naom Chomsky (and wrote a book on deciphering menus in Chinese restaurants)86 produced a profanity-laden paper on ‘English sentences without overt grammatical subject’.87 Writing under the pseudonym Quang Phúc Đông from the fictitious South Hanoi Institute of Technology, McCawley employs colourful examples to explain why the phrase ‘fuck you’, and others like it, are not imperatives. For example, the sentence ‘Fuck Lyndon Johnson’ can be ‘interpreted either as an admonition to copulate with Lyndon Johnson or as an epithet indicating disapproval of that individual but conveying no instruction to engage in sexual relations with him.’ The paper features an assortment of choice phrases, like ‘ Describe and fuck communism’ and ‘Fuck complex symbols carefully’.*

  I have to confess at this point that I do more than my fair share of swearing. I love bollocks, I throw out the odd shit and fuck, and, having lived my adolescence in the American Pie era, I generally don’t take it personally if someone playfully insinuates that I have sexual relations with people’s parents. But somehow the C-word still feels taboo to me (I struggle to bring myself to type it out). And I am not the only one: ‘Cunt’ (there, I said it) is the only one of BBC’s big three yet to have an academic paper dedicated entirely to it.

  Nonetheless, an accidental inclusion came in a 2007 paper published in Chemical Communications, which deals with the subject of copper nanotubes.88 In a paper that refers to such nanotubes 50 times, finding an appropriate acronym is advisable, and, if you know your periodic table, you can see where this is heading. The unfortunate acronym, rendered ‘CuNT’ makes for some awful turns of phrase:

  • ‘We electro-deposited one sample with only CuNTs inside the half depth of the nanochannels.’

  • ‘The CuNTs have closed caps on top.’

  • ‘The formation of the CuNTs depends on two factors. The first factor is gold-sputtering.’

  • ‘The wall thickness of the CuNTs is about 10 nm.’

  The unfortunate acronym was widely reported, but the researchers continued to use it in a later paper.89

  Intentional uses of the C-word tend to come from gender studies papers, which, given the content of the papers, is as unsurprising as it is depressing. They include ‘“Back to the kitchen, cunt”: speaking the unspeakable about online misogyny’,90 one scholar’s horrifying stocktake of just how hard it is to be a woman on the internet.*

  ‘Motherfucker’ is also mercifully underutilised in academia (though someone did write a whole book on its history).91 It appears in the title of a book chapter about profanity in HBO’s television programming,92 and again in a book chapter about the TV show Deadwood (also HBO).93 Sondre Lie from the University of Oslo wrote a thesis on the subtitling of tricky taboo words in films, giving it the title ‘Translate this, motherfucker!’94

  SOME EXAMPLES OF WISTFUL ACRONYMS IN SCIENTIFIC PAPERS (SEXWASP) 95

  Multiple Intense Solvent Suppression Intended for Sensitive Spectroscopic Investigation of Protonated Proteins, Instantly (MISSISSIPPI)

  Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER)

  Biodiesel Exhaust, Acute Vascular and Endothelial Responses (BEAVER)

  Randomised Assessment of Treatment using Panel Assay of Cardiac markers (RATPAC)

  Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Myocardial Perfusion Assessment in Coronary Artery Disease Trial (MR IMPACT)

  Genetic variation and Altered Leucocyte Function (GANDALF)

  Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH)

  McGill Self-Efficacy of Learners For Inquiry Engagement (McSELFIE)

  Proton Enchanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy (PENIS)

  SearCh for humourIstic and Extravagant acroNyms and Thoroughly Inappropriate names For Important Clinical trials (SCIENTIFIC)

  ACADEMIC TRANSLATOR

  What academics say

  What they mean

  Various sources

  I forgot the name and author of that one paper

  We are grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive comments

  God help them if I ever find out who they are

  A promising area for an initial study

  I have to do this to get funding

  Widely discussed in the academic community

  I accidentally ended up in the middle of a heated Twitter argument

  The notes were meticulously transcribed

  I was drunk and missed out at least seven pages

  An extensive literature review

  A quick Google search

  A complex phenomenon

  I don’t understand

  Has long evaded the understanding of scientists

  I don’t understand why I don’t understand

  Is impossible to summarise simply

  I still don’t understand

  Approaching the traditional threshold for statistical significance

  Not significant

  More research is required

  I need funding

  Notes

  For the love of trees, I have opted to keep this bibliography (relatively) short. For more details, please go to AcademiaObscura.com/buffalo, where I plan to concoct a multimedia extravaganza containing links, photos, and videos. If I get distracted and don’t get around to doing this (highly likely), I will at the very least provide full references and PDFs (where I can do so legally).

  * Modern academic writing tends to be more about sitting down at a laptop and despairing at your poor life choices.

  * In his paper, ‘Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly’, Daniel Oppenheimer assesses the hypothesis that using long words makes you seem smarter (they don’t).

  † The keywords to the paper are: enough; already.

  ‡ That is, the study of the diversification of living organisms. If I understand correctly, and there is every chance that I do not, Cartmill questions why tiny differences are sometimes taken to separate certain animals into different species and families, while others aren’t, whereas Tattersall sees this position as an attack on the field of systematics itself, it being essential to document even the tiniest of changes and classify species accordingly.

  * The entire article reads: ‘A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded 27-195+84-195 +110-195+133-195 =144-195 as the smallest instance in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power. This is a counter-example to a conjecture by Euler that at least n nth powers are required to sum to an nth power, n>2.’ The CDC 6600 used by the authors is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer. It was the world’s fastest computer at the time, outperforming the closest competitor, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three. It remained the fastest in the world until 1969 when it was outpaced by its successor, the CDC 7600. IBM was concerned that it was b
eing beaten by CDC, a much smaller company, leading IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson to write a memo to staff: ‘I understand that in the laboratory developing the system there are only 34 people including the janitor. Of these, 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers . . . Contrasting this modest effort with our vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world’s most powerful computer.’ The electrical engineer that created the CDC 6600, Seymour Cray (often called the ‘father of supercomputing’) responded: ‘It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question.’ In 2011, Michio Kaku observed that ‘your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon’.4 By the same token, that sleek slab of glass and plastic in your pocket (that you mostly use to crush candy and fling birds at pigs) has far greater processing power that the CDC 6600 (the maximum speed of the CDC6600 was 3 megaFLOPS (millions of floating point operations per second) while the iPhone 5’s graphics processor alone can hit 76 gigaFLOPS (billions of floating point operations per second) – 25,000 times more).5 The first CDC 6600 was delivered to CERN in Geneva in 1965, where it was used to analyse the 2–3 million photographs of bubble chamber tracks that their experiments were producing each year (a bubble chamber is a piece of apparatus used in physics to ‘see’ particles by photographing the tracks of bubbles left by ionising particles as they move through a superheated transparent liquid (usually liquid hydrogen) (CERN’s website has lots of cool photos)).6 The bubble chamber was invented in 1952 by Donald Glaser; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1960. Legend had it that Glaser’s inspiration for the bubble chamber came from the bubbles in a glass of beer. In a 2006 talk he corrected this story, noting that while beer was not the inspiration for the bubble chamber, he did experiment with using beer as the liquid to fill early prototypes.7 Beer has nonetheless been used to demonstrate the exponential decay law,8 inspired a theory on the impact of the moon’s phases on sleep and diagrams of particles that look like penguins (see pages 119 and 205), and fuelled many hours of writing for this book. All that is in spite of the fact that a study in the Czech Republic hypothesised that beer consumption lowers academic productivity.9 On the topic of beer, the medical literature contains a report of a man with so-called ‘Auto-Brewery Syndrome’:10 the presence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the man’s gut caused the spontaneous brewing of alcohol nearly 24 hours after the ingestion of sugar, meaning that he was frequently intoxicated despite not having touched a drop. But I digress …

  * Soifer has an Erdős number of 1, as Erdős was his PhD supervisor (See page 148). Unrelated: Soifer teaches an uncommon combination of math, art, and film history at the University of Colorado.

  † Insisting they must have the last word, the publisher moved the original title to the body of the paper and added a more substantive title without consulting the authors.

  * In reality, nanopublications aren’t quite as diminutive as their name might suggest – though the body of the article is always a single statement, it is generally accompanied by a much longer ‘background’ section resembling a traditional abstract.

  † The Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests that this term only came into usage in 1945. It had a period of minimal usage until about 1965, when it really started to take off. Usage shot up until about 1987, when there was a sudden dip. Neologisms are central to academia – and to nonsense.

  * A footnote to the title reads ‘Portions of this paper were not presented at the 81st Annual American Psychological Association Convention’. To me this suggests that portions of the paper were presented at the Convention, which would presumably involve a ‘presentation’ consisting entirely of silence, a la John Cage’s 4'33".

  † I attempted to confirm this, but the representative from the American Institute of Communicative Disorders was incredibly rude to me and refused to comment.

  * A reversed question mark (؟) appears to be the frontrunner solution to this problem. It was proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s and used by Marcellin Jobard and French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century. Ethiopic languages already use a mark to denote sarcasm, Temherte Slaqî, which is indistinguishable from an inverted exclamation mark (¡).

  * The body created by the US government to investigate disloyalty and subversive organisations, known for its McCarthyist witch-hunts during the 1950s and 1960s.

  * I thought I was being clever, but I am not the first to make this joke. The phrase first appeared around 1960 in a review for Mathematical Reviews, wherein Lee Neuwirth, then an instructor at Princeton, began a review of an article by Hale Trotter with the sentence. The phrasing was unintentional (or at least subconscious), such that when Neuwirth showed the review to his colleague Ralph Fox he ‘roared with laughter’.

  * Writing this, I am reminded of the words of Felipe Andres Coronel (aka rapper Immortal Technique), who, in lamenting the lack of diversity and variety in commercial hip-hop, says: ‘There is a market for everything man. There is a market for pet psychologists . . . For nipple rings, for river dancing, for chocolate-covered roaches …’ Take it from Tech, there is always a gap in the literature.

  * Specifically he sought out papers from peer-reviewed journal articles in which: (a) the authors set themselves the threshold of 0.05 for significance, (b) failed to achieve that threshold value, and (c) described it in such a way as to make it seem more interesting.

  † I read somewhere that providing an uneven number of items in a list increases the intrigue.

  * An antibody that plays a critical role in mucosal immunity.

  † A type of white blood cell.

  ‡ Daphnia magna, a type of water flea, is commonly used as a laboratory animal for testing ecotoxicity because they are small, easy to raise, and produce genetically linked offspring through asexual reproduction.

  § The content of a baby’s earliest bowel movements.

  * While it may be a cute phrase, a Woozle-hunt would not be a straightforward, or useful, proof technique. You may recall that in the world of Winnie the Pooh, a Woozle-hunt involves going round in circles for an extended period of time, ultimately ending without the capture of any Woozles. Achieving proof by Woozle-hunt would therefore be a considerable achievement. Incidentally, the ‘Woozle effect’ is a term sometimes used to describe evidence by citation, i.e. when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads readers into thinking that there is evidence.

  * A commonly used type of metrical line in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm that the words establish in that line, which is measured in small groups of syllables called ‘feet’. The word ‘iambic’ refers to the type of foot that is used, known as the iamb, which in English is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The word ‘pentameter’ indicates that a line has five of these ‘feet’. I copied that entirely from Wikipedia. Sorry.

  * Josh Bernoff’s first comment when editing this book was: ‘Academics overuse the passive voice. So do Brits. There is a whole lot of it.’ I too dislike the passive voice, but as a British academic, I have trouble identifying it and rephrasing accordingly. Rebecca Johnson, Dean of Academics and Deputy Director of the Marine Corps War College, came up with a rule to identify passive voice: ‘If you can insert “by zombies” after the verb, you have the passive voice.’ This ingenious test helped me no end. However, this sentence proved difficult to reword because I was not able to identify who was behind the PhD Challenge. In the absence of a subject, I am choosing to assume that the PhD Challenge was started by zombies.

  * Do not google this. There are some things you can’t unlearn.

  † If you are easily offended by profanity, it may be best to skip over this section, which discusses the use of such words in academia. The BBC, which I shall use as my barometer for foul-mouthery, categorises just three words as ‘the strongest language’: cunt, motherfucker and ‘fuck or its de
rivatives’ (is ‘motherfucker’ not a derivative of ‘fuck’?).

  * In fact, all of the remaining seven instances of the word, and its variations, are found in quotes, and only appear in news stories, features or the Books & Arts section.

  † One of the biggest repositories of papers in the social sciences, recently bought by Elsevier.

  ‡ If the rankings had included Fairman’s paper, then Ohio State (where Fairman was based) would have ranked 10th, and Emory (where he was visiting) would have ranked 8th; without Fairman’s paper, neither would have been close to the top 15.

  * The reason for this excessive use of obscenities is a story in itself. In the late 1960s a loosely linked group of linguists were developing a movement, ‘generative semantics’, with a strong anti-authoritarian streak. This generally manifested as self-deprecating humour and/or deliberate unprofessionalism, the idea being that scholars wouldn’t take them seriously and they would therefore know that when their theories succeeded they would be doing so on their own merits. In that spirit, they searched for bizarre and provocative example sentences to communicate their concepts. They also wrote some of the first linguistics papers about obscenity and humour. Their movement withered, but their papers (and obscenities) remain.

  * I was absolutely mortified to find that one of the first vitriolic comments quoted by the author is attributed to another G. Wright.

  1 Oppenheimer, ‘Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly’ (2006) Applied Cognitive Psychology.

  2 Goldberg & Chemjobber, ‘A Comprehensive Overview of Chemical-Free Consumer Products’ (2014) Nature Chemistry.

  3 Lander & Parkin, ‘Counterexample to Euler’s Conjecture on Sums of Like Powers’ (1966) Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.