A Tale of Two Cities, or The Long and the Short of It
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POSTERMINARIES
A Tale of Two Cities, or The Long and the Short of It Having stolen a title from Charles Dickens, I suppose I am constrained from using his opening line,* too. Anyway, it does not quite work, because the two cities in question are Boston and San Francisco, which I associate primarily with the Fall and Spring Materials Research Society meetings, and therefore only the Best of Times. I was introduced to Boston as a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fresh from England. As far as transatlantic culture shock goes, Boston is a relatively benign experience for a cityraised Englishman, but many things in my new environment still produced amazement or amusement. Although these could fill many POSTERMINARIES columns, I shall address only the First Law of American Rhetoric: that you should never use a short or clear word where a longer or more obscure one will do. Plus its various corollaries: If a longer word is unavailable, use a phrase; if you cannot create a phrase, add some syllables to make a longer word. This law has been both obeyed and countermanded with only two words in the brilliant bumper sticker “Eschew Obfuscation.” Write on! Examples of the First Law are so common that, over time, we become immune to them, but try to remember to ask yourself, next time you fly, why the cabin crew uses the phrase “at this time” in place of “now.” I guess it just makes it sound more important or something. Why do we see authors at MRS meetings (none of you good readers, I am sure) pointing to projected images of little chunks of matter and calling them “particulates?” How did the noun “particle” transform to the adjectival phase “particulate” and retain that form upon retransformation into the nounal phase field? Is a linguistic Carnot cycle in play here, indicating the intrusion of a kind of verbal entropy, or is the word merely a supercooled, nonequilibrium form that will eventually retransform upon further annealing? Another thermodynamically misfavored word is “homogenous,” which results from the transformation under equilibrium conditions of the adjectival “homogeneous” to the verb “homogenize” followed by a rapid transformation back to the adjective. The rapidity of the second transformation prevents *It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
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the formation of the equilibrium ph(r)ase, by suppressing the thought process. “Homogenous” is an anomaly also because it apparently flaunts the First Law by having fewer syllables than its parent ph(r)ase. This will probably make it much less stable than the nounal particulate. The greater Boston area is perhaps the home of the First Law of American Rhetoric. It is only a little surprising that MIT did not extend its name even further by substituting “Institution” for “Institute,” thereby gaining a syllable. Of course, the name is already so long that when it is printed in full along the length of a pen or a pencil, it requires a special long-life writing tool. The scene of one of my many diatribes against the First Law was a stre
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