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There was a time, which now seems like aeons ago, when the word ‘event’ usually referred to something celestial in origin — like an eclipse or a supernova — or a subatomic happening, like the birth of a neutrino or Kaon. Perhaps that is just my bias, having studied physics for longer years than I care to admit, but I am sure my contemporaries from outside the sciences never thought of a wedding, a fashion show or a film music launch as an ‘event’, rather, it was some momentous political happening, a rally which involved huge crowds or something of that order. While the last remains the lead definition of the word in dictionaries, it is undeniably true that ‘event’ has lost its position among the stars and has come home to stay and magnify lighter goings-on.
Frequently, scientific terms are used to lend gravitas or enchantment, or even respectability, to ordinary happenings and objects. Sometimes, the reverse occurs and science borrows words from the repositories of common parlance — for instance, imagine a ‘well-behaved’ mathematical function eating its veggies, going to bed on time and listening to its parents in addition to not violating any assumptions and generating a smooth set of values. Either way, you’re left with a curious tingling sensation when you encounter such terms — like the mixture of pain and wellness one gets when running one’s tongue over a shaky tooth that’s about to leave its place from the gums. To counter the usage of ‘event’ you can take the word, ‘mitigate’.
‘Mitigate’ was the word I had come to take for granted in a scientific context — from mitigating disasters to mitigating forest fires and pollution, it has come to mean, within science, the effort to reduce loss or burden and tackle disasters. In this way, ‘mitigate’ has acquired a usage that far transcends its original function of describing the lowering of the intensity of, say, suffering. Now, far from being applied in the context of amorphous and uncountable nouns, it has come to be quantified in science. Many years ago, before this form had become prevalent, when I was copy-editing a book, the editorial manager, a native English speaker who had an excellent command of the language, raised a doubt whether this was correct usage — but by then whole journals and books were full of it, and it became a bit dated to ‘discuss’ whether it was appropriate usage.
Years later, now as a science writer, I faced this question once again — in the context of ‘merger’. You as a reader will agree that on hearing the word, the mind automatically drifts to big businesses and corporate deals, invoking the gentle rustling of paper money rather than the now-famous chirp with which science-writers associate it. I wrote a piece about the ‘violent processes in space such as mergers of black holes’ which I offered to a business editor with eclectic reading habits to read and was a bit nonplussed when he pointed out that ‘merger’ was hardly a violent process — quite the contrary. In scientific usage, the word grew like a natural extension of ‘merge’, wholly ignoring already existing impressions and implications.
Now, ‘vanish’ is a word I normally associated with the supernatural — like, ghosts vanish, magicians cause pigeons to vanish (poof). The first time this was used in algebra class, it made us all giggle (this was a good thing in and of itself — math teachers, for all their hearts of gold, inspire in us deference, fear, fever, and hypertension, not laughter). The cause was funny if not strange. A ‘function’ in algebra takes various values within a range based on the values taken by the one or more variables it depends on (for the love of math, please tolerate that long-winded sentence, and read it once again if you have to). For instance, the velocity of a car could be a ‘function’ of time, in that it varies as time increases. Whenever a function touches a zero value, it is termed to ‘vanish’ at that point. Yet, as high-schoolers still under the influence of Mandrake, the magician, we found it hilarious that numbers could conspire to ‘vanish’ a variable.
Mrs Jebaraj, our admirable math teacher, who was extremely efficient and even kind, and, most importantly, ensured many of us crossed the 90% mark in our public exams, also introduced us to another such word, again in algebra, and that was trivial. The very non-trivial word, trivial.
As everyone knows, there are a few smart alecks in every class, and we had one or two. There was this girl — let’s call her Sumitha — who used to come up with contrary, counter-intuitive and sometimes plainly comical interjections during class. Her questions and objections generally came when the teacher was engrossed in outlining this theory or that fact. A mild irritant as far as the teachers were concerned, the teachers would serve her choice put-downs on such occasions. And the best put-down was served by Mrs Jebaraj.
She was introducing us to the intricacies of set theory and Venn diagrams. To illustrate what she meant by intersection of two sets, she said, “Imagine that ten of you speak hindi, seven of you know telugu and three students know both hindi and telugu. This is the set of students who know one language (she drew a circle), this is the set who speak the other (she drew an intersecting circle). What number would you place in the intersection?” The students overall could see that the answer was three, and many shouted out the answer, and the teacher looked relieved that some headway had been made. Then, up went Sumitha’s hand — “But Mrs Jebaraj, we all speak Tamil, so should we not all be in the intersection?” she said. Mrs Jebaraj, not to be outdone, looked at her in the eye and said: “That, my dear, is trivial.”
trivial (adj.)
Mathematics
Denoting a subgroup that either contains only the identity element or is identical with the given group.
Whoops went through the class, as we learnt the usage of this word in math for the first time. Needless to say, the rest of week, we discovered many ‘trivial’ things.
Every time I hear a media person comment on the excellent ‘optics’, my skin crawls. Optics is an entire branch of study, and to reduce it to being a reference to photo-ops is, well, outrageous. Is any scientific term safe? Just think: words like ‘quantum’, ‘black hole’, ‘entropy’, ‘inertia’, ‘time warp’ all may be standing in a queue to undergo this merciless decimation of their etymology and history.
But you know what? These 'usages are somewhat okay still, in the sense that there are mostly used in an irreverent or flippant way. The greater crime, in my opinion is the way the word ‘scientific’ itself is bandied about. Just imagine, anything — from crystal gazing to Reiki, to food habits, to Vaastu (or some rules laid down for architecture), to Vedic math to spraying cowdung all over the floor, to chanting specific mantras — anything at all that is traditionally done in some households today not only enjoys the stamp of ‘tradition’ but covets the adjective ‘scientific’ in addition to that.
Unfortunately, ‘scientific’ implies not merely long-term practice or tradition, but a certain method, a reproducibility and a falsifiability. I do not denigrate here traditional sciences and I certainly do not deny that colonial regimes may have led to the glorification of one set of sciences over the knowledge systems that existed earlier. My complaint is against the attempt to grab the scientific domain to place practices that have precious little of the above-mentioned qualities. The fight is for the liberation of science and words are the battleground.
