Buzzwords
t
"Quite Without Redeeming Quality?"
Berenbaum
MAy BERENBAUM
Y
OU MIGHT THINK THAT, AFTER
18 YEARS AS
an independent professional scientist, I'd be pretty much inured to criticism. After all, the review process is intrinsic
to the conduct of contemporary science.
Grant proposals are scrutinized by panels
and ad hoc reviewers, manuscripts are criticized by reviewers and editors, and even
course lectures are evaluated by undergraduate students. I'm certainly no stranger to
negative remarks, either-I've had my share
over the past two decades. I actually keep all
of my reviews, favorable or unfavorable, in
a file cabinet in my office (they now fill two
complete drawers) and read through them
again every now and then. Even favorable
reviews tend to have a few critical remarks,
and it's almost always the case that even the
most negative reviews I've received have had
some merit to them, some constructive comments, no matter how inelegantly these comments have been phrased. The one that
stands out as being particularly brutal was a
review I received for a manuscript submitted
to Apidologie (and eventually published, after extensive revision, in another journal). In
the course of a single paragraph, this reviewer managed to use the words "inadequate,"
"naive," "superficial," and "farcical," as
well as the phrase "quite without redeeming
quality." Mercifully, most people tend to be
a little more circumspect in their choice of
adjectives. Conservatively, I can say I've received over a hundred bad reviews over the
course of my scientific career to date, counting just manuscripts and grant proposals. I
console myself with the knowledge that
Michael Jordan doesn't make every basket
he shoots for, either, and I regard every bad
review as a learning experience.
Notwithstanding all of my experience in
this context, I confess I was completely unprepared for a bad review that I received recently. Ironically enough, the review was directly related to "Buzzwords." In a fit of
egotism, I thought that it might be a good
idea to collect all of the columns I've written
to date and submit them to a publisher in
the hope of converting them into a book.
196
Such an idea is hardly radical-a number of
columnists, even those writing on scientific
subjects, routinely publish their essays in
book form (Steven J. Gould comes immediately to mind). Because I knew that Cornell
University Press has a history of publishing
such works, and because I ran into Peter
Prescott, an acquisitions editor for Cornell
University Press, at the Entomological Society of America meeting in Nashville in December 1997, it seemed like a good idea at
the time to bundle together the columns and
send them off to Cornell University Press
for appraisal. As all good editors should,
Peter Prescott sent the package out for review. The first review came back quickly and
was quite positive; I figured this was going
to be easy. The second review, however, completely threw me. The reviewer, evidently an
entomologist who had taught and conducted research at a land-grant university for 40
years (and, therefore, eminently entitled to
an expert opinion), was breathtakingly unimpressed with "Buzzwords." He described
some of the essays as "inane" and apparently found references to "orifices, sex, and
other basic bodily parts and functions" unappealing. "Little conceptual matter of any
depth" was another phrase that appeared in
the review, threatening to displace" farcical"
as the most depressing criticism I've ever received.
Maybe ego is to blame, here,
but it really never occurred to
me that people might detest
these columns.
I couldn't even take solace in the fact that
this opinion might be an exceptional one;
this reviewer, in a frenzy of thoroughness,
polled a group of his or her entomological
colleagues (also eminently entitled to expert
opinions) and found, of 19 who knew of the
columns, 3 who did not like them at all. Of
those who admitted to liking the columns,
none was reported to be "ebullient" in his/
her praise. In contrast, those who did not
like the columns were free with their use of
adjectives and offered up words such as
"trite," "weird," and "juvenile" to describe
them. Maybe ego is to blame, here, but it really never occurred to me that people might
detest these columns. I always figured that a
few people would ignore them, but I never
thought they might be utterly despised.
Reading this review was like discovering, in
the middle of a prestigious lecture in a
packed hall, that the zipper of my pants was
undone and that audience members who
were laughing were not marveling at my fine
sense of humor but rather at my choice of
undergarments that morning.
In short, after reading this review (over
and over again), I became acutely self-conscious and acquired a major case of writer's
block. The reason for the writer's block was
that, as always, this negative review contained a considerable amount of truth.
These columns tend to go into orifices, as it
were, with greater regularity than the vast
bulk of entomological writings (although, if
anything had "depth," one would think orifices would). My sense of humor does on
occasion slip from lofty to lowbrow. I began
to obsess over every word and wonder how
I might recognize "trite" or "inane" whenever it crept into my writing. But after a couple of months of worrying, it struck me that,
to some extent, the criticism was a little unfair. The humor may be juvenile, but I happen to know it's not nearly as juvenile as it
could be. As a matter of fact, there are several subjects I've refrained from writing about
expressly because they seemed to me to be
too juvenile. And, just to prove the point, I'll
share them with you now. Here are four column ideas I personally rejected as being too
trite, juvenile, or tasteless to follow up on,
even before explicit recognition of my shortcomings was thrust upon me.
1. According to Partridge (1974), there is
an assortment of colorful turns of phrase
AMERICAN El\TOMOLOGIST
•
Winter 1998
that metaphorically
associate insects with
the act of masturbation,
including "to box
the Jesuit and get cockroaches"
and "to gallop one's maggot."
2.
Nolch (1997) in an article titled "Perfectly inflated genitalia every time" describes
the development
of the vesica everter, or
"phalloblaster,"
developed by 1. WD Engineering and CSIRO's Division of Entomology. According to Dr. Marcus Matthews,
quoted in the article, "The vesica everter inflates the genitalia with a stream of pressurised absolute alcohol which dehydrates
and hardens the genitalia ... They then remain inflated like a balloon which never
goes down." As a point of clarification, I
should mention that the phalloblaster
was
designed for use only with insect genitalia.
3. Dangerfield and Mosugelo (1997) in an
article titled "Termite foraging on toilet roll
baits in semi-arid
savanna,
South-East
Botswana (Isoptera: Termitidae),"
describe
a method for surveying termite abundance
with the use of "single-ply, unscented toilet
rolls" as bait. According to the methods,
each roll is "placed in an augured hole" not
References
to be "even" with the soil, or to be "level"
with the soil, but to be "flush with the soi!."
4. Following up on earlier work reporting
tha t Aedes gambiae is highly attracted to the
odor of Limburger cheese, which bears a
strong resemblance to the odor of (some)
human feet, Knols et al. (1997) were able to
produce a synthetic Limburger cheese (or
foot) odor by characterizing
the chemical
components
of Limburger
cheese headspace. Again, as clarification, cheese headspace is the volatile milieu immediately surrounding the Limburger, not the empty seat
next to a guy wearing a funny hat at a Green
Bay Packers' game.
Anyone of these topics would have made
for an incredibly tasteless column, and, up
to this point, I have restrained myself from
succumbing to the temptation to get really
sophomoric.
Truth be told, though, it was
more than just good taste that led to this restraint. These columns, in case you didn't
realize, are peer-reviewed, and I really don't
think I could stand reading the reviews I
might get if I actually went ahead with one of
these ideas.
Cited
Dangerfield, J. M., and D. K. Mosugelo.
1997.
Termite foraging on toilet roll baits in semiarid
savanna,
South-East
Botswana
(Isoptera:
Termitidae).
Sociobiology
30:
133-143.
Knols, B.G.]., ].A.]. van Loon, A. Cork, R. D.
Robinson, W. Adam, J. Meierjink, R. De]ong
and W. Takken. 1997. Behavioural and e1ectrophysiological
responses of the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Diptera:
Culicidae)
to Limburger
cheese volatiles.
Bull. Entomol. Res. 87: 151-159.
Nolch G. 1997. "Perfectly inflated genitalia every time." Search 28: 107.
Partridge, E. 1974. A Dictionary
of Slang and
Unconventional
English. Macmillan,
New
York.
•
May Berenbaum is a professor and
head of the Department of Entomology,
320 Morrill Hall, 505 S. Goodwin Avenue,
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801.
Currently, she is studying the chemical aspects of interaction between herbivorous
insects and their hosts.
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