h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

At least nobody believes in pomo, economists have somehow managed to convince everyone they know what they're talking about!

Well, until recently maybe...

Does anyone else keep reading 'pomo' as 'porno'?

Yes...

Me too... was wondering if I had managed to skip a whole page of postings for the topic to change so drastically

Me, too.

I thought lilitis was spreading in this journal

lil x

Who's chasing me, and why?

Well kudos to me for spotting it as an obvious fake, then. The first bit didn't *sound* like something Derrida would have said - although he said a lot of stuff, not always consistent. At first I suspended judgement.

But the Baudrillard reference was the clincher. Did it even sound remotely like the renowned author of 'Les Fleurs du Mal'?



Proper sociology I'm rather fond of.

Lanza:

>>I'm sure I've been given things to read that used language like this, to blind the reader into believing that the writer was so superior in intellect that the average mortal cannot possibly argue with them - as they really have no idea what they're writing about.

>>I had to laugh when you revealed that they were random generated pieces.


Without wishing to defend the disease of academic obscurantism...can I just poke this a little? What we're all chortling at here *isn't*, in fact, academic work. Maybe the jokes on us for being incapable of telling the difference? (Yes, yes. Sokal.)

I wonder if I were to write a paper full of strange squiggles would anyone (except, perhaps, Dogster) be able to tell it from a mathematical treatise? What, if anything, would this tell us about maths?

There's an old, Croatian phrase that sums this up nicely:

'Moja je lebdjelica puna jegulja'

Well, 40 years old anyway.

And not one of you has mentioned Sokal yet: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

Re: jargon: I know enough medical termiology to either annoy or please my doctors, depending on my doctor. I could say 'mechanical phlebitis' to my anaesthetist, for example, and have him get my point at once, whereas when I was trying 'swollen vein' he gave me a little patronising chat on bruising being inevitable. No no no, I did NOT mean bruising, I meant 'mechanical phlebitis', as I have small veins. Aha. He was then very careful. Score.

But the GP who once asked me about previous surgical procedures seemed a bit miffed when I reeled off laparotomy, oophosalpingectomy, laparoscopy, hysteroscopy, hysterosalpingogram, D&C. Did I know what all those terms MEANT, he asked. Why yes, I did. I did CLASSICS, you know. Wrong answer, as he started to explain them all to me as if I was five. Very much de haut en bas. Funnily enough, I declined to see him as my GP again.

Oy, I am verbose today. Apologies.

Agapanthus:

>>And not one of you has mentioned Sokal.

I did! Post 29.

Pearls before swine, pearls before swine...

Edward - so you did! I am so sorry. I'm blaming the anaesthesia hangover. It's a) making me verbose and b) frying my attention span (sorry - to be clear, I had surgery yesterday. Anaesthetic ALWAYS does this to me. End of digression).

*Carefully picks pearl out of mud and gives it a wash*

Agapanthus, in my experience 9/10 patients who use medical terminology and aren't doctors have misunderstood what the different bits of terminology mean.

The difference between an angiogram and an angioplasty, between mild cognitive impairment and dementia, are really important and most punters don't know the difference. Most of them pick up a few medical words from somewhere and drop them into the conversation.

I once told someone they'd had a heart attack because they'd told me that they'd had a cardioversion and not a cardiac ablation. (Both procedures do the same thing, a caridac ablation does cause a certain blood test to look like you've had a heart attack and a cardioversion does not.)... He was very forgiving when I had to go back and grovel.

It is really important to clarify what people actually mean, otherwise you risk doing something life threateningly awful. Like actually treating said heart attack.

I know someone who insisted his leg hadn't been broken. Only fractured.

However we shouldn't kid ourselves on the precision of words, no matter how precisely they have been defined.

'Words,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'Can mean whatever I choose them to mean.'

There is one mindset that says you *must* define and you're an idiot if you don't stick to the standard definition. This leaves out the fact that that definition may have been shaped by a particularly domain. The Smart Kids are the ones who listen out for when others are using words differently.

Z - good point. But my conversation with Doctor Patronising did make it clear I DID know what the terminology meant (he asked do you know what that means, I said, why yes, a laparotomy is where they open up your abdomen, making a sizeable incision that will need stitching or gluing, a laparoscopy is where they make a small incision to insert a camera and one or maybe more other small incision to insert the instruments, the oophosalpingectomy is the removal of an ovary and fallopian tube...' whereapon he interrupted me and explained it all again, using words like 'tummy button' and 'the place where the baby grows' (he deserved a kick in the shins for that last one, certainly).

Moral of story, by all means check the patient knows what the words mean and isn't muddled. Very important. But 1 in ten patients will turn out to be quite clever, you know...

>>Agapanthus, in my experience 9/10 patients who use medical terminology and aren't doctors have misunderstood what the different bits of terminology mean.


So...are these patients doing it to show off? Or have they somehow developed the crazy notion that it's what they need to do to get these mysterious, god-like doctors to take them seriously?

I don't know why they're doing it...
Probably because they think that it will get them taken more seriously.

Which is a shame because you shouldn't have to. But why ever they do it I feel I have to double check the really important stuff to, erm, not kill people.

I'm so much happier now that I've found a GP who actually takes me seriously. Wasn't easy to do. Especially when you've got a foreign passport, then they feel the need to talk veeery slooowly and use short words. Even though they can hear that you speak English. Aaargh!