Nomenclature Memes

Posts tagged with Nomenclature

Chemistry vs. Biology: The Classification Wars
Biology Chemistry Academia Science
8 hours ago 2.7K views 0 shares
Chemistry vs. Biology: The Classification Wars
The chemistry-biology rivalry continues. Top panel: IUPAC chemists sitting in perfect order around a circular table, calmly discussing how to name some theoretical compound with 47 carbon atoms and functional groups that only exist in computer simulations. Bottom panel: Biologists literally brawling in the dirt because they can't agree if two nearly identical frogs that mated once in captivity constitute separate species or not. Chemists have a systematic naming convention; biologists have chaos and occasional fistfights behind the natural history museum.

Let Her Eat!
Chemistry Science
1 day ago 2.8K views 0 shares
Let Her Eat!
Chemistry students have ZERO fear of long chemical names! While everyone's avoiding "sodium caseinate" and "pyridoxine hydrochloride" on food labels, chem majors are casually writing out 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol like it's their middle name. 🧪 That moment when you realize your organic chemistry knowledge has ruined the "natural food" advice forever. Sorry, but everything is chemicals - even that organic kale smoothie contains dihydrogen monoxide! 💦

Can We Stop Being So Mercurial About Our Planetary Compositions?
Astronomy Universe Science Chemistry
2 days ago 3.1K views 0 shares
Can We Stop Being So Mercurial About Our Planetary Compositions?
The ultimate planetary misnomer! Mercury got its name from the Roman god of speed (and his liquid metal namesake) because it zooms around the Sun so fast—completing an orbit in just 88 Earth days. But plot twist: despite being named after quicksilver (mercury), the planet is actually a dense iron core with a thin rocky crust! It's like naming your pet turtle "Cheetah" or your rock collection "Clouds." The cosmic irony is that Mercury's core makes up about 85% of its radius, making it proportionally the most iron-rich planet in our solar system. Scientists suspect Mercury lost its outer layers in a massive collision billions of years ago, leaving behind this metallic heart with serious identity issues.

Let Me Just Slap My Fancy European Name On It
Chemistry Science Scientists
3 days ago 3.2K views 0 shares
Let Me Just Slap My Fancy European Name On It
European scientists naming dragons (ahem, I mean elements) on the periodic table! The first two heads are all serious and intimidating with their fancy abbreviations Hz (Hassium) and Bq (Berkelium), while the third derpy dragon is just "/s" - the internet's way of marking sarcasm! It's the perfect representation of how scientific naming can seem so formal and intimidating until you realize scientists are just humans who occasionally slap random letters together and call it official. The contrast between the serious scientific nomenclature and internet shorthand is pure chemistry comedy gold!

The Higgs Boson Identity Crisis
Physics Science Scientists
4 days ago 3.1K views 0 shares
The Higgs Boson Identity Crisis
Nothing triggers a physicist's internal rage meter quite like hearing "God Particle" instead of Higgs boson. The media coined this ridiculous nickname in the 90s because "goddamn particle" was too hard to find, and publishers wouldn't print the original expletive. Meanwhile, Peter Higgs and François Englert spent their careers mathematically predicting this mass-giving field only for pop science to turn it into clickbait. That subtle look of contempt? That's 50 years of quantum field theory reduced to a theological soundbite. Next time you want to see a physicist's soul leave their body, just casually drop "God Particle" at a conference and watch the internal screaming commence.

The Increasingly Verbose Sugar Daddy
Chemistry Science
4 days ago 6.1K views 0 shares
The Increasingly Verbose Sugar Daddy
This is what happens when chemists get on dating apps. Starting with the slang term "Sugar Daddy," each line gets progressively more scientifically accurate until we reach full IUPAC nomenclature nightmare mode. It's like watching someone transform from a casual Tinder bio to their PhD dissertation in six easy steps! The cosmic brain imagery perfectly captures how unnecessarily complicated we can make simple concepts. Next time someone asks what you do for a living, just hit them with "(2R,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[(2S,3S,4S,5R)-3,4-dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxolan-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol Homo sapiens, XY" and watch their soul leave their body.

Cis And Trans Are Everywhere!
Chemistry Biology Math Science
5 days ago 3.5K views 0 shares
Cis And Trans Are Everywhere!
Scientists are the original users of cis/trans terminology, and we're not giving up our nomenclature without a fight. In chemistry, it's all about those fatty acid configurations—cis fats like avocados and olive oil vs. trans fats trying to clog your arteries. Meanwhile, biology's over here with cis/trans gene regulation and cellular membranes. And then mathematics swoops in with complex functions and geometric transformations because apparently everyone wanted a piece of this positional relationship action. The scientific community was into position-based identity labels before it was cool.

Seriously, Who Let Physicists Name This Stuff
Physics Science Academia Research
7 days ago 18.5K views 0 shares
Seriously, Who Let Physicists Name This Stuff
The three-headed dragon of physics: two heads looking fierce with legitimate scientific terms, while the third derpy head is just yelling about "magic and mana." This is basically what happens when physicists run out of cool-sounding Latin and Greek words and start describing quantum phenomena with whatever sounds impressive at 3 AM before a grant deadline. "Topological materials" sounds way better than "weird stuff that does unexpected things when you twist it." And let's be honest, "generalized parton distributions" was definitely named by someone trying to make their thesis sound more complicated than it actually was.

The Existential Mathematics Of Made-Up Numbers
Math Science
11 days ago 5.8K views 0 shares
The Existential Mathematics Of Made-Up Numbers
The mathematical existential crisis is real! This is the numerical equivalent of naming your pet rock—technically, you can do it. In mathematics, we can indeed assign any name to any number (hello, Graham's Number and Googolplex), but "morbillion" exists in that delightful limbo between made-up internet nonsense and legitimate mathematical nomenclature. Since our number system is infinitely extensible, the fictional "morbillion" could theoretically be defined anywhere we want. It's like reserving a username that nobody was competing for but still feeling smug about getting it first. The real mind-blow is realizing our number naming conventions are just as arbitrary as deciding whether a hotdog is a sandwich.

IUPAC Is A Rocks
Chemistry Science Scientists
12 days ago 4.3K views 0 shares
IUPAC Is A Rocks
Just imagine being a chemist in 1918, naming compounds however you pleased, only to find out a year later that some international organization decided to standardize everything. "Wait, I can't call it Jeffium anymore? But I discovered it!" The chemical wild west was officially over, and suddenly everyone had to learn Latin prefixes instead of naming elements after their cats. The pre-IUPAC era must have been glorious chaos—like trying to read a recipe where "a pinch" and "some" were legitimate units of measurement.

The Great Fish Impersonators
Biology Oceanography Science
14 days ago 4.4K views 0 shares
The Great Fish Impersonators
The ultimate taxonomic bamboozle! Marine biology's greatest naming prank strikes again. Despite their fishy names, cuttlefish (cephalopods), starfish (echinoderms), jellyfish (cnidarians), silverfish (insects), and shellfish (mollusks) aren't actually fish at all—they lack vertebral columns and other fish characteristics. Meanwhile, seahorses, with their weird vertical swimming position and horse-like heads, are legitimate fish with gills, fins, and vertebrae. Nature's like that friend who labels all their kitchen containers incorrectly just to watch you put salt in your coffee.

The Chemical Naming Spectrum: From Formal To Unhinged
Chemistry Science
14 days ago 5.1K views 0 shares
The Chemical Naming Spectrum: From Formal To Unhinged
The evolution of naming the same chemical compound (NO) gets increasingly ridiculous! First we have "Nitrogen Monoxide" (technically correct but uncommon), then simply "NO" (the actual chemical formula), followed by the proper IUPAC name "Nitric Oxide" (what chemists actually call it). Then it escalates to the pretentious "Oxidonitrogen" (someone's trying way too hard to sound smart), and finally peaks with "Anti-yes gas" (pure chemistry dad joke territory). It's the perfect representation of how scientists can go from formal terminology to completely unhinged humor in five seconds flat.