The Retraction Watch blog tried to make sense of a nonsensical phrase — “vegetative electron microscopy” — that appears in several published research reports. Read the details to see what they discovered about how this meaningless phrase came to reside in those papers: “As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends […]
“Definitions of nonsense vary widely and often pay little attention to cultural context or the phenomenology of reading.” – explains Professor Alan Levinovitz of James Madison University, US in a Sept. 2017 article for the journal Comparative Literature. “After surveying the problems with these definitions, the article then redefines nonsense experientially, that is, as the […]
Try reading the following sentences : ”He took a sip from the transmitter.” – “I take coffee with cream and dog.” – “He planted string beans in his car.” Did you experience anything unusual? Probably not, but if you had been hooked up to a set of scalp-electrodes and an electroencephalographic analyser which was recording […]
The word “baloney”, which is just barely a word, is sometimes used by English speakers who want to say, emphatically, “Nonsense!”. The word may or may not be tightly related to the word “bologna.” Bologna is a kind of inexpensive sandwich meat, the name of which may or may not be derived from”Bologna”, the name […]
