Thanks to everyone who suggested a science cliché in response to my recent post. I can now reveal the official top fives, broken down by number of words. Remember, the terms have to be surrounded by speech marks. Note, I re-searched every term today, as the numbers differ slightly depending on when you search.
Tomorrow, I’ll do the same for Google Scholar results.
Two words
Statistically significant 9,340,000
Paradigm shift 2,910,000
Rocket science 2,840,000
Mad scientist 2,480,000
Major breakthrough 842,000
Three words
A new study 5,820,000
Scientists have found 1,050,000
Sheds new light 826,000
This study shows 720,000
Implications for therapy 388,000
Four words
Necessary but not sufficient 1,270,000
More research is needed 977,000
Closer to a cure 139,000
Long term climate change 137,000
The next ice age 120,000
Five or more words
According to the latest research 121,000
Release of calcium from intracellular stores 50,600
One step closer to a cure 41,900
It has not escaped our notice 23,200
This raises more questions than it answers 686
Those top five are dear, familiar friends of mine. Nice to see they are friends of lots of other people too!
I wonder if we should perform a similar analysis from an editorial point of view? In other words, what phrases/cliches are most likely to be used when a sentence half the length would do just as well?
Examples:
I’ve seen both recently. I changed them to
respectively
(actually, the second example was worse than that. It said that the proteins bind to RNA ‘in a sequence specific manner’ and then gave the sequence. I think I left out ‘specific’ altogether, as it’s kinda implied, yeah?)
How about:
increased female resistance to extra-pair courtship would lead to increased infertility due to pleiotropic effects of resistance alleles resulting in maladaptive resistance to within-pair copulations.
?
Nope.
@Maxine: “Wimmin. They just don’t know what’s good for them”.
Yours, Alf Garnett
Maxine – hard to beat.
Ouch! I’m really disappointed I didn’t contribute to the poll! Nice one, Matt.