I was quite happily day-dreaming through a student’s progress talk this afternoon, when I distinctly heard the phrase
release of intracellular calcium stores
Shuddering, I was wide awake, to find that my ears had not deceived me, and there, in stark contrast on the screen, was a feedback loop and osteoclasts and osteoblasts and impenetrable abbreviations (much like this sentence, in fact).
I think I need a drink. Henry? Your round.
See what I mean? When I was a mere lad doing first-year biochemistry, every single process, no matter how complicated, always seemed to end with the release of calcium from intracellular stores (TROCFIS). And that was it. No explanation was given about what happened next; neither was it explained how, if all the various proximate cellular process were so different, how the still-shady downstream processes could distringuish between one particular TROCFIS and another. But that was the early 1980s, back when we still talked about phlogiston and the luminiferous aether. TROCFIS has always stuck with me as the canonical scientific throw-away remark, replete with long words but deficientr in semantic content.
Of course, one might reduce its semantic content still further by adding the word social to the beginning, a lexical trick that has the result of vitiating the meaning of anything that comes afterwards, e.g. ‘social market’, ‘social policy’, ‘social contract’, ‘social security’ and most of all ‘social justice’. So how does ‘social release of calcium from intracellular stores’ sound? Strangely, this serves to increase the meaning, showing how vacuous the original statement was. It sounds like some heavily micromanaged program of parole, the calcium ions bing let out on licence to serve their sentences in the community; or perhaps some rather fun kind of party in which exiguously-clad calcium ions burst out of very large cakes.
How come I don’t get invited to your parties?
Every discipline has a similar phrase. It’s sort of a paradigm shift.
Eddies in the space time continuum. Really.
How come I don’t get invited to your parties?
I think you’d find the conversation of the other guests wasn’t up to your usual standards.
Hey, barman, fling us some more Bacardi Breezers, pronto!
Clucking ‘ell.