Never mind the bollocks...
March 21, 2015 9:03 PM   Subscribe

 
Anyway, never mind the bollocks, what about other swear words?
[...]
If the rate of usage continues to pick up as it has done over the past few years, expect to see more clusters of fucks in the near future.


This article clearly exists mainly to set up bad puns like these. I approve.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:10 PM on March 21, 2015 [7 favorites]


Gosh.
posted by JHarris at 9:58 PM on March 21, 2015


the one that has appeared the most (more than 650 times) is in an ornithological context rather than any swear-y sense.

Nature: Over 650 tits in 145 years... National Geographic obviously has 'em beat...
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:05 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was expecting this to be an article about how often Nature (as an entity, not the journal) cares about anything, which I would've guessed to be zero. Instead, I am glad this article was researched and written.

<farts>
posted by not_on_display at 10:05 PM on March 21, 2015 [14 favorites]


And so, this initimately related pair of ‘bollocks’ appeared in Nature within the space of two weeks.

The quotation marks of plausible deniability.
posted by traveler_ at 10:18 PM on March 21, 2015 [4 favorites]


Kemp’s article was quoting what a monocle-polishing Cortex was heard to have said ("What’s this bollocks doing in Metafilter?") Overheard in the mod's tea room at the underwater lair.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:24 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


Reminds me of this Slate article from a few months back:

The New York Times’ Obscene Profanity Policy

... the Times’ internal style guide ... stipulates that the newspaper “virtually never prints obscene words, and it maintains a steep threshold for vulgar ones.” Not only are reporters expected to avoid profanity, they’re also supposed to avoid the perception that the writer might even be pondering naughty language: “An article should not seem to be saying, ‘Look, I want to use this word, but they won’t let me.’ ”
posted by dgaicun at 12:34 AM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


before going on to suggest that Parker would not be any less eligible to evaluate the Leicester University student’s work than that student would be to evaluate hers – and so perhaps she should be invited to be an external examiner for his PhD thesis.

Is this a threat?
posted by Literaryhero at 12:37 AM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Much like not_on_display, I expected something different, and a whole lot better. I really thought I might get a quantitative analysis of just how much nature gives a fuck, because I always hold out the irrational hope that somehow, once in awhile, she does. What I don't give a fuck about is how often Nature swears.
posted by Hobgoblin at 5:51 AM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I have a friend whose side project at work (The New York Times) is to try and get the word "booger" into the paper.
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:27 AM on March 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


I was expecting this to be an article about how often Nature (as an entity, not the journal) cares about anything

Based on their pricing history and publishing model, it is clear that the number of fucks Nature gives is indistinguishable from zero, using any metric or detection methodology hitherto discovered.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:48 AM on March 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


It might not sound terribly risqué, but the paper "Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube–nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties" mentions perhaps the most offensive of Carlin’s 7 dirty words more than 50 times – there’s even a bunch of them shown in the graphical abstract that accompanies the article. Perhaps a different abbreviation for copper nanotubes would have been a better choice?

I propose an experiment to determine whether this was driven by school boy humor, linguistic unfamiliarity, or obliviousness.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:52 AM on March 22, 2015


I would strongly hypothesize schoolboy humor.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:24 AM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Nano-fuck!

I must use this word sometime soon.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:32 AM on March 22, 2015


I was expecting this to be an article about how often Nature (as an entity, not the journal) cares about anything, which I would've guessed to be zero.

"Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere."
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:21 AM on March 23, 2015


GenjiandProust: I propose an experiment to determine whether this was driven by school boy humor, linguistic unfamiliarity, or obliviousness.

The paper in question was authored by Yang, Meng, Zhang, Hao, An, Wei, Ye, and Zhang; affiliated with labs in Hefei and Beijing, China. So I'm going to go with "unfamiliarity".

Whereas from me it's totally "schoolboy humor" as I point out that the semimetal in question was bismuth, meaning they also examined the electron transport properties of BiNTs.
posted by traveler_ at 12:11 AM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


Obscure Reference: "I have a friend whose side project at work (The New York Times) is to try and get the word "booger" into the paper."

Maybe a WKRP retrospective?
posted by Chrysostom at 10:36 AM on March 25, 2015


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