Words and Stuff
More than 60 years have passed since C P Snow drew attention to the two cultures that dominated the intellectual life of postwar Britain: one based on the humanities, the other on science.
Snow, a scientist and novelist, pointed out that highly educated humanities graduates would admit, often proudly, that they knew nothing of the second law of thermodynamics. For scientists, he argued, this was like boasting of never having read Shakespeare.
Things have changed a bit. Science is now more often ‘popularised’ by authors writing in plain English. And increasingly we put our faith in science, whether it’s medicine or the internet. Yet the ignorance remains, and the terror: rocket science is daily held up as the ultimate in complexity. Oddly, though, it’s frequently considered cool, erudite or authoritative to use scientific terms. Often wrongly.
‘Epicentre’, for instance, is a word much heard in connection with COVID-19. Wuhan, Northern Italy, New York and the entire continent of Europe have all been called epicentres. Yet the dictionary definition of ‘epicentre’ is ‘that point on the earth’s surface directly over the point of origin of an earthquake’. Using it to describe a place with many COVID cases suggests the coronavirus explodes underground in a single event and thereby wrecks an area on the surface above.
Yes, words take on new meanings. It would be absurd to say that ‘focus’ must be used only for a ‘point on which rays converge after reflection or refraction’, or that ‘square’ describes only an ‘equilateral rectangle’. But, in the COVID context, ‘epicentre’ is not apposite. It conveys nothing of the virus’s ability to infect and multiply, or its destructiveness to humans, not objects. It works no better than plain ‘centre’, inadequate though that is. ‘Epicentre’ is used merely to impress.
The same is surely true of ‘catalyst’. This is a ‘substance that speeds up a chemical reaction while itself remaining unchanged’. When it crops up in everyday speech, it hardly ever fits this definition. Whatever it is that is bringing the change is nearly always an agent that undergoes some form of transformation as it does so.
Non-scientists are also fond of the Richter scale. Scientists shun it. Charles Richter’s way of measuring earthquakes, devised in 1934, worked only for a specific type of seismometer used in California. Nowadays, earthquakes are measured on a scale that describes them simply as magnitude 5, say, or magnitude 6.
‘Viable’ is another word favoured by those who like the highfalutin. Not long ago, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, promised to make it ‘unviable’ for migrants to cross the Channel illegally. If she was using this word properly, it was a nasty threat. In biology or medicine, ‘unviable’ means ‘not capable of living’.
Journalists like an implosion. Google ‘Theresa May’ and ‘implode’ and you’ll find countless instances of those words together in published articles. Mrs May’s government was certainly feeble; the term in mechanics would be ‘in a state of unstable equilibrium’. But it always looked more likely to explode than to implode – and it did: about 60 ministers departed. In fact, ‘explode’ is far more often the right word for the circumstances.
Maths also provides the pretentious with opportunities to show off. When you read of something ‘entering the equation’, beware. All equations have two parts, and if something happens in one part, something must also happen in the other. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be an equation.
But most people are too busy with their parameters, inflection points and exponential nonsense to stop and think.
Maths and science are no more difficult than French, history or the offside rule. If you doubt that, read Rocket Science for Babies, by Chris Ferrie, which in about 30 seconds will teach you all you need to know about lift and thrust. And then treat scientific language with a modicum of respect.