Abstract.

So I have myself a little job working in the library at school. I’m one of a few student assistants helping with an archiving project that involves digitizing several decades’ worth of Master Thesis projects. To some people that might sound boring as all fuck, but those people don’t read this blog anyway. I find it to be completely FASCINATING and I fear that I am going to end up falling in love with Library Science, but that’s a whole other story.

This story is about how one of the things I do is (basically) review and upload each thesis abstract. Essentially I spend hours reading these super short little summaries of each thesis and there’s no telling what they will be about from one to the next and some of them get extremely technical. Well I have absolutely fallen in love with the weird, super-specific, and obscurant language of these things. It is as if there is a bizarre sub-language going on that I never knew about before; both mysterious and strange. So here now I will share with you some of my favorite thesis titles (so far):

- Vector Photon Miss Distance Indicator Ground Station

- EEG and Behavioral Correlates of Amnesia Induced by Pentylenetetrazol in Chicks

- Comfortable Interpersonal Distance as Perceived by Educationally Handicapped Children

- An Electronically and Mechanically Tunable X-Band Gunn Oscillator

- Defensive Attribution of Responsibility for a Happy Accident

(BTW, I’m not making fun of this weirdness, I do genuinely love it.)



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The Humorfulness of Words.

So this is going to be stupid and pedantic, but I like to think about words and specifically what a mixed up melting pot of a mutt the English language is.

What is the opposite of humorless? Strictly speaking I think that it should be humormore. Or humor-more. Because the less suffix is what changes the word for humor to no humor. And the opposite of less is more. So the opposite of humorless should be humormore.

But I know that “humormore” isn’t a word. Initially I honestly thought that the opposite of humorless would be humorful, but Microsoft Word is giving me the red squiggles on that one. So I hopped on the google machine and discovered that the internet says that it is a word (and is even allowed in Scrabble).

But technically, shouldn’t the opposite of humorful be humorempty. Since humorful is a word constructed to mean “full of humor” the opposite should mean “empty of humor” because humorless is also constructed and would technically mean “having less humor” which is not the same as being empty of humor, because empty means that there is none inside, which is pretty absolute, but less is a comparison. It just means that there is not as much as there is someplace else. And that is not the same as being empty. But we all know that that is not how these words work.

A grain silo which is grain-less is understood to be empty of grain and it doesn’t need to be sitting right next to a grain silo which is full in order for us to know that.
I’m sure that I am probably understanding some of these words wrong, so if anybody knows more about these things, feel free to pipe up. Just don’t get me started on why flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.

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