I’ve just finished reading an article on languages that share the rare feature of having the same words acting both as interrogative and relative pronouns. This is the case in most European languages (e.g. Who is speaking ? / The girl who is speaking) as well as in some native American languages (likely due to contact with the former) but nowhere else, it seems.
It was written by Marianne Mithun who’s one of the foremost authorities on native North American languages, especially the Iroquoian family. So, some bona fide research there, and given the author and the topic, I was going to read it anyway. But what definitely won me over was the title :
One of the key works on the Big Bang was written by cosmologists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, who then got particle physicist Hans Bethe to sign off as a co-author as well, just so they could have an author list of “Alpha Beta Gamma”.
Of course, that was a work of fiction, not a real paper (though his PhD committee did ask him about it during his defense). And the real joke there was that, here he has this miraculous substance, and the best use he can find for it is using it to measure the solute concentration of saltwater.
In imitation of this, Optical Scientist Wayne Knox got his father, chemistry professor Robert S. Knox, along with physicists J.F. Hoose and R.N. Zare to publish this April Fool’s day paper in Optics and Photonics News
Knox, W. H., R. S. Knox, J. F. Hoose, and R. N. Zare. “Observation of the 0-fs pulse.” Optics and Photonics News 1, no. 4 (1990): 44-45.
“When exposed to music by AC/DC, who articulated the null hypothesis that “rock and roll ain’t noise pollution” in a song of the same name, lady beetles were less effective predators, resulting in higher aphid density and reduced final plant biomass relative to control (no music) treatments.”
I worked in the testing of computer chips, and I wrote a column which posited that you could use thiotimoline to get the results of a test before you applied it.
I don’t recall any in my field, but when you are putting together sessions for a conference sometimes you are stuck with three unrelated papers that are stuck together in a session. If you don’t want to use that old warhorse Potpourri you can come up with something weird.
We had one with a paper on asynchronous logic, on burn-in, and on core testing, so we called the session “asynchronously burning cores.”
Fans of Poetry will immediately see the resemblance to John Keats’ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1816), praising an Elizabethan translation of the works of the Greek poet Homer. (And is almost a famous for confusing Hernando Cortez with Vasco Nunez de Balboa). Nyekulturny troglodytes can look it up on Wikipedia.
Actually, I myself wrote a journal areticle with a punny title. I still wonder how many people got it:
The Scarecrow of Os: The Function of Antefixes, Oscillae, and Suspended Masks in the Roman Garden
Classical World 107 (3) 383-397 May 2014
“Os” literally means “bone”, but was also used to mean “skull” or “head”. “Oscilla”, meaning “little head” was the name given to small swinging masks used, I maintained, as scarecrow figures in orchards and gardens, hence the title. It’s also a reference to L. Frank Baum’s character of The Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, and the title of the ninth book about Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz, published in 1915.
I have a paper in press currently that had a cutesy title that was a play on a Woody Allen movie. Reviewer 2 pointed out that were misquoting the line and after a back and forth the editor made us remove the whole thing for a boring title.
A paper titled ““Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers, the “five S’s”. Characterizing “cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield” appearing in an environmental journal, was removed in 2021 after being criticized for bad science and for unfairly blaming gays and bisexuals for harming aeolian landforms.
