Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Eleven ways to say "accidentally" without saying "accidentally"

I suspect most experiments in the Brainerd Group happened serendipitously.
Credit: DVDizzy
From the inbox, a short article by Belle Dumé that leads to a funny sentence in a recent article in Science Advances (emphasis mine):
During our studies on conjugated D-A polymers with positively charged moieties in the side chains, we accidently discovered that incorporation of ammonium salts into certain conjugated D-A polymers can improve the interchain packing order and enhance their charge carrier mobilities. 
I suggest that, next time, they use the following adverbs rather than "accidentally":
  1. fortuitously 
  2. serendipitiously 
  3. by circumstance
  4. not by design
  5. happily
  6. as part of a Design of Experiments matrix (I kid, I kid!) 
  7. inadvertent
  8. by chance
  9. by coincidence
  10. as an unintended experiment
  11. in the style of Professor Brainerd
Congratulations to Luo et al.; sounds like an interesting project. 

3 comments:

  1. Someone used the word "indeliberately" in an email today. (As in "I indeliberately messed this up...can you come fix it for me, please?")

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whenever my labmates would utter "oh <explitive deleted", I would prepare to move out smartly. In the federal world, referred to as "remedial movement:. :-)

    ReplyDelete

looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20