As part of my work as a free-lance editor, I work with people from all over the country, editing their dissertations. A couple of days ago, one of the dissertations mentioned "heteroskedasticity-consistent tests." Try to say that six times really fast. I will say, in defense of the doctoral candidate, he hadn't used the word himself. It was simply cited in his reference list as part of an article title.
Not only did I have to look it up so I'd know whether or not it was spelled right (you can apparently substitute a c for the k and still be correct), I was curious as to what it meant. Once I knew that, I began to wonder what words a bee would use to sound really important in her thesis. Here are a few I came up with:
- Nectargrination: flying all around the place to find some flowers that have enough nectar to be interesting.
- Queenification: the process of eliminating a weak queen and producing a new one.
- Beebreadify: To bring bee bread (a rich mixture of pollen and various liquids) down from the storage cells and feed it to the baby bees.
- Cleansidepoopifidumpification: Taking the queen's waste products away from her and depositing them outside the hive.
- Scrubbadubbadadeck: What Frannie will have to do next summer after a lot of cleansidepoopifidumpification has been going on.
BEEattitude for Day # :
Blessed are those who spend their whole lives learning, for they shall either be a fountain of wisdom or a fountain of trivia.
One thing Fran is grateful for right now:
Sesquipedalian words that make me laugh
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