Fertility v. Fecundity

Fertility and fecundity are two closely related concepts.

One means the physiological state of being able to have offspring, the other means the state of actually producing offspring. In a population of 26 year old human females, 95% might be physiologically capable of giving live birth, while perhaps only 10% might actually have a baby that year. So fertility and fecundity are different. The problem is, which is which?

Demographers refer to the ability of have babies as fecundity, and the rate at which women actually have kids as fertility. Biologist do the opposite, saying that fertility is the capacity and fecundity is the realization.

This is just a quaint fact in academic linguistics until one tries to write papers and give presentations that will sit well with both demographers and biologists. Biologists think it is totally unreasonable to adopt the linguistic oddities of the social scientists, and demographers are not happy about people reversing the meaning of these terms. I usually go with the demographer's lingo. They are the ones who employ me.

My people are nerdier than your people

As I walked by two of my labmates today, one of them was introducing a visitor to the other.

LM1: "I initially falsely synonomized you with Robert!"
LM2: "He does phenotypically converge with Robert."

Translation into English:
LM1: "I mistook you for Robert at first!"
LM2: "He does look a lot like Robert."

Note that while the English version is shorter and easier to read, the original is easier for people in my line of work to say.

Editing I know not what.

My wife often asks me to edit her writings in linguistics. This is an interesting exercise, as my knowledge of linguistics is probably sufficient to get me a D+ on a Linguistics 1A final. And most of that limited knowledge is derived from the works I have helped to edit. This makes me very good at finding sentences that are not crystal clear, but very bad at knowing whether the lack of clarity arises from my lack of knowledge. The result is that Iris's writing ends up being much clearer to the non-linguist (or at least to me) than most technical writing is to non-experts.
Perhaps all academics should be encouraged to have their work edited by a practitioner of an unrelated field prior to publication.

Why most scientists are not poets

As I try to write my thesis, I am coming to a realization. Writing complex scientific chains of thought in a way that is both clear and interesting is hard. Much harder than the natural history writing I have much more experience with. One of the many reasons this is so is because scientific writing must rely almost entirely on sentence meaning rather than speaker meaning. My wife, a linguist, has helped me to appreciate the difference. Sentence meaning is the information actually contained in the words of the sentence, accessible without knowledge of the thought processes or social context of the speaker. If a young man says, "Oh, I hate spiders!" the sentence meaning is simply, "I hate spiders." However, if the young man has just been asked to help clean out a garage, walks into the garage, looks around, then turns to the person who asked for his help and says, "Oh, I hate spiders!" much more is conveyed. The young man is not just signaling his dislike of spiders, but also that he has detected spiders in the garage, and is therefore reluctant to help with the cleaning. He may even be conveying that while he doesn't want to help he is a friendly person and therefore is reluctant to refuse outright, but please take this hint. This additional information, the speaker meaning, is nowhere in the text of his words, but is obvious to most humans who have healthy social comprehension skills. Much of the artistry of writing is in the careful crafting of speaker meaning. Beautiful writing, poetry in particular, generally conveys far more through speaker meaning than sentence meaning. But scientific writing by tradition and necessity relies almost entirely on sentence meaning. If any piece of information or logic is a necessary part of a scientific argument, the author has little choice but to state it outright. Likewise, if something has not been stated, scientific authors generally cannot assume the reader knows or agrees with it. This of course goes only so far. Scientists, as humans using human languages, are incapable of avoiding speaker meaning entirely. But the injunction is clear: thou shalt not ask thine audience to read between the lines.

Writing a complex chain of mathematics laced evolutionary thought in a way that is readable and elegant is a real challenge. I begin to understand why so many scientists over the centuries have largely let elegance and readability fall by the wayside. I very much hope to avoid following that clearly but unattractively marked trail.