Words, glorious words

With interchangeable meanings and ever shifting definitions – maintaining a comprehensive scientific lexicon is basically impossible says Russ Swan

Do you know geekspeak? How is your vocabulary of nerd words? In short, can you babble with the best of them? Two very different examples of the value of technical language have manifested in the last few weeks, like a shibboleth in a Judean bazaar, and are at once both fascinating and ludicrous.

Shibboleth? It’s an ancient word from the eastern Mediterranean, used to distinguish the Ephraimites from the Gileadites. Apparently the former struggled to pronounce ‘sh’ sounds, and so when they spoke they betrayed their origins. A modern UK equivalent might be to ask someone to bring you a ‘kipper tie’. If they returned with a freshly-brewed hot beverage made from the leaves of Camellia sinensis, you might be confident they hailed from Birmingham. Everybody else would bring an item of neckwear, or perhaps a fish-smoking attachment and a baffled expression.

Modern shibboleths are everywhere, and we use them subconsciously to identify members of our particular tribe – not so much for the way they are pronounced as for the way they are used. If I mention spam, the chances are that you as a person of scientific bent will understand that I’m talking about unwanted emails and so on, not a tinned meat product.

The problem is that, as lab tech evolves and gets more specialised, it gets harder to keep up with the lingo

We’ve got plenty of our own shibboleths in the laboratory, and you can be confident that if you overhear a conversation involving Maldi-Tof or electrophoresis in the pub, you’ve stumbled across people in a similar line of work. But you’ve also found people who talk shop down the boozer, so it might be advisable to slip away quietly...

The problem is that, as lab tech evolves and gets more specialised, it gets harder to keep up with the lingo. Most of the stuff I operated in my first job in a lab in the (cough) 20th century would qualify as museum pieces these days, and most of the terms bandied about in a modern lab would have sounded like Martian to the teenage me doing paint-bucket chemistry back then.

Helpfully, those nice nerds at the US national accelerator laboratory Fermilab have compiled a list of particle physics terms that sound familiar, but probably mean something quite different. This could prove to be really helpful, but in fact I think it might actually cause more confusion than enlightenment.

They tell us that a quench is not the elimination of thirst, or the dowsing of a fire, but the loss of superconductivity probably through an increase in temperature. If your field is more chemistry than high-end physics, you are excused for thinking that it really means retarding a reaction or reducing the fluorescence of a compound.

Another example is cavity. In every day parlance this probably implies a lack of dental hygiene, or in medicine one of the many hollow parts of a body. The Fermilab folk inform us that, to them, it is a substantial metal chamber inside a particle accelerator, which shapes an electric field and pushes particles towards the speed of light. Cavities also keep particles bunched together in tight groups, increasing the intensity of the beam. But if you work at the photonics bench you might think of a resonator that creates an optical circuit, which is a very different thing.

It goes on. A house is not a home, but a collection of magnets. A barn is much much smaller than a house, counterintuitively, and is defined as a unit of area of 10-24cm² – invisibly tiny in the real world, but to hot-shot particle physicists representing a vast target for their collisions. What rapidly becomes clear is that the idea of maintaining a comprehensive scientific lexicon is basically impossible. If a simple word like quench can have five different meanings, none of them interchangeable, it’s clear that the lingo has no limits. The patois is impenetrable.

It could all become too much for my addled brain. Time to sit down and rest, and enjoy a nice kipper tie. You can see Fermilab’s list of particle physics terms here.

Russ Swan