Particle physics has a lot of trying-to-be-funny names in it. For example,
- The quarks are named up, down, charm, strange, truth and beauty. - The unit of cross-section is a barn, as in 'can't hit the side of a.' The barn is 10^-25 cm^2. - There is a way of organising mesons known as the 'Eightfold Way'. - Names for detectors are deliberately chosen to acronymate (is that a word?) well : BaBar, Belle, ATLAS, ALICE, DELPHI... - Then there's the infamous 'penguin diagram', referring to a particular kind of process. Apparently (and I am not making this up) someone lost a darts match, and the penalty was to use the word 'penguin' in a journal submission. Given some illegal substances inside you, the Feynmann diagram describing these processes can be drawn to look slightly like a penguin. To the trained eye, at least. Hence such sentences in respectable physics journals as "The existence of penguins was proven at the BaBar experiment in 1999."
What funny jargon is there in your fields?
Posted by Jutsa Notha Name (Member # 4485) on :
Woah! Did you see that up there? I think that was the joke flying over all of our heads!
I always like these spots, since they remind me of most of my coworkers and associates.
[ October 23, 2004, 11:54 AM: Message edited by: Jutsa Notha Name ]
Posted by Eaquae Legit (Member # 3063) on :
I dunno about "jargon" but I can give you the Big Book of Ways to Insult a Man in Latin...
Not much jargon in the "dead languages" field...
[ October 23, 2004, 12:19 PM: Message edited by: Eaquae Legit ]
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Hmmf. Since no-one appreciates my humour, I shall take my post to another forum. *Sniffs in an offended manner*
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Awww...don't be offended. It's just that none of our fields have good jargon.
In traffic safety, we have lots of acronyms, some of which are funny:
- MMUCC is the model minimum uniform crash criteria