Geology, Calc, and Chem! Oh My!

I've got a lot of friends who do chemistry and all those other crazy scientific thingamajiggies. I can respect that, I mean, I'm using some of them right now typing this.

So I hear them talking about moles of Ridicularium being lit on fire or dissolved in hydroboric acid and becoming some new thing with an incredibly difficult-to-pronounce acronym with numbers sandwiched in there sometimes and I can't help but hear a faint rushing sound overhead.

Note, this isn't me. I was way more wizard than this chump.

I used to get science. I was a goddamn wizard when it came to calculating the density of that little acrylic cube. I was a fucking prophet, predicting with infinitely more confidence than the weather man whether that cube would sink or not. Measuring the volume of irregularly shaped objects via water displacement? Done. Weighing something on a triple beam balance? No problem. Making trivial observations with my 5 senses (minus taste [ok, sometimes with taste{shhhhhh}])? Bring. It. On.

But now I've got to take real schmience classes, where they want you to learn all these weird words that don't actually mean anything, or have really really really frustrating definitions. Like "tephra" means "pyroclastic debris." Ok, that's all fine and good, but couldn't you just call it "pyroclastic debris?" Seriously, who the hell felt the need to make another word for literal volcano shit? And why do I have to learn it? Rocks used to just be rocks. You know, those hard, brownish-grayish-occasionally-cool-looking-so-that-you-wanted-to-collect-them-even-though-you-were-never-going-to-look-at-them-again-and-have-them-get-lost-between-the-sofa-cushions things that you weren't allowed to throw at people. Now they're subdivided on so many levels that even the way they sparkle seems important. I don't need to know what it's called for its shininess to distract me from maintaining eye contact with someone in conversation or lure me into a stranger's van.

When did density go out of style? And to add insult to injury, they even want me to calculate 3-D object volume with calculus integrals, not water.

I have a hard enough time with subtraction.

(My + friends) + [(my + required)(Schmience + classes)]

=

MyFriends + mySchmience + myclasses + requiredSchmience + requiredclasses

=

A whole bunch of "FOIL"-ed out words that I can't parse, and a dramatic increase in that mysterious overhead whooshing noise. 

<Note: It took me like a full 6 minutes to work up the courage to try to FOIL that.>

<Then it took me like 10 to actually do it.>

<It's still probably wrong.>

When my brain regains its functional capacity, it gets to thinking, a dangerous thing to be sure, that I know words too. Lots of them. Most of them aren't special fancy words like stoichiometry, thermodynamics, derivatives, gravity, and "force," but some of them make equally no sense when used in general conversation.

I'm talking straight up motherfucking jargon at its finest. Words like hendecasyllabics (which, I'll have you know, is so specific a term that Google Chrome doesn't even think it's real) and passive periphrastics and masculine and feminine caesuras. I'm not going to tell you what these mean.

No one ever explains jargon.
Otherwise it wouldn't be jargon.

I could tell you why the plural of cactus is cacti, but it'd blow your mind.

Beware the whoosh.

D