Tidy Lookup
All sites11
Curious Word of the Daycuriouswordoftheday.com

scientician

noun

  1. Someone with the trappings of science who is probably not a true scientist.

    Near-synonym: pseudoscientist

Where it comes from

The word has existed since the 19th century, when it began as a term for the concept that later would nearly universally be called scientist in English. But in the late 20th and early 21st century, the word has mostly been used as a joke implying suspect credentials or pseudoscience. The joke operates on the fact that scientist is the only current idiomatic term for a scientist and that scientician sounds like a word that a biased party (e.g., a corporate or government PR mouthpiece) would use while trying to mislead the audience while escaping liability because if it were questioned then they could lawyer their way out of liability technically by saying, "I never said scientist." This comic use of the word was popularized by a 1995 episode of The Simpsons called "Lisa the Vegetarian".

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry scientician (CC BY-SA 4.0).

← sciagraphscintilla →

Another random word More words starting with S