Question: Are there any code words you use in science ?

Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 19 Jun 2016:

Hi 755parf34,
There are a lot of jargons which are words that would not make any sense to people who are not doing science for career .. things like names of specific techniques, names of molecules, or name of equipment and softwares etc. Any words about my work that my mom will go “what???”, I probably count those as code words. 😉

But a more fun type of code words are those which people understand but would wonder how on earth does it match the context! …I sometimes say the data are “sexy” or “pretty” when I have experiment results that answer my questions very well in a very nice and neat way. “I love this data, they are so sexy” “This graph is pretty” (It doesn’t mean the graph have a nice colours but mean it is showing the information clearly…although nice colours might help too!)

Another form of codes are computer programming. I do this a lot to analyse my data, because it is a big dataset so I let the computer do the job instead of doing it manually myself. I need to talk to the computer, in their language, and the computer will either do exactly what I ask it to do (even if I ask for a wrong thing…) or it will complain that I didn’t give it the right information to do the job. This is wonderfully good fun and this is my favourite kind of code words… I get to talk in a completely different language, and sometimes I find it difficult to talk to humans after extended hours of talking to computer! 😀