I’ve been saying for years that one of the biggest problems scientists face when they’re talking to non-science folks is that some fairly commonplace words have a completely different meaning when they come out of a scientist’s mouth.

Image ganked from Bad Astronomy. Click to view source.

For the record, I don’t think this is necessarily the scientist’s fault. I think a great deal of the fault can be laid at the feet of shitty American schools. I know what “theory” means when a scientist says it because I had good science teachers in school. We’ve spent the last ten or twenty years stripping funding, mocking intellectuals, leaving children behind, and letting them teach fauxscience in our classrooms, and now we’re paying the price.

We need to turn this show around when it comes to our schools, folks, or we really are going to turn into Idiocracy.