Silly scientific titles – or – Interdisciplinary vade mecum of contemporary scientific terminology and comprehensive nomenclature conventions: an example from comparative in situ geomorphometric transnecrotism

I just love making up ridiculous scientific-sounding nonsense titles! And it’s really easy if you have just been exposed to enough real, serious titles and scientific terms, and add a bit of creative sarcasm.

And what is even more fun is when I make up a title that is actually not entirely nonsense, but it sounds hilarious anyway. For example, my good friend Nigel asked me for advice on a topic to give a speech about, and, knowing that he is not fond of mammal paleontology, I suggested “mammalian cranial morphological innovations in the late Eocene and implications for stratigraphic bias”.

So, I thought today I could just spark some ideas of how to design your own excruciatingly protracted titulary grammatical units.

Long words always help. Take the longest, most complicated synonym for a word you can find. If they are esoteric, even better! An easy way of making words longer and more esoteric-sounding is by adding typical scientific pre- and suffixes, such as:

• inter-
• intra-
• trans-
• micro-
• macro-
• psycho-
• neuro-
• synchro-
• proto-
  

• -ology
• -morphology
• -morphism
• -osis
• -metric

… and many others I cannot think of at the moment

Naturally, you should try to use these thoughtfully, so you don’t end up making words such as neuroconcertmorphology, because, although hilarious in isolation, they may fail to convey the sarcastic seriousness an ideal scientific nonsense title should have. Perhaps neurocortical concert-affiliated osteomorphology, or transneurotic concertational morphometrology are better candidates, but again, I can understand if these would be too ridiculous too.

I think another hint is to use many big words, but say nothing. Neurocortical concert-affiliated osteomorphology could be an example of this. It can of course be developed by adding more restriction words, to narrow the nonsense down to an even more incomprehensive level: Transatlantic neurocortical concert-affiliated osteomorphology of basal cervids from the Younger Dryas. This title is about the concert-related bone structure associated with the part of the brain that processes sensory information, in primitive deers from one of the glacial periods, making a comparison across the Atlantic ocean. You might want to skip the concert bit to make the title more serious; it is up to you, really.

I don’t think there is much else to tell for now. My final suggestion is to practice, and immerse yourself in weird titles every day, and soon you’ll be an expert in silly scientific titles.