Popular scientific articles

Popular-scientific articles appear in semi-specialist journals which aim at disseminating specialist knowledge to a general

audience of interested lay-persons. In contrast to academic research articles, popular-scientific articles prefer a wide

variety of stylistic devices aimed at attracting and retaining the reader's attention and interest. Popular-scientific writers

tend to apply linguistic and stylistic means which are well tested in journalism -- for example, colourful headings, and

openings consisting of an anecdote, an episode, a recent event in a particular field of discourse, a bold personal assertion,

a proverb or saying, or an allusion to the common cultural heritage. Furthermore, authors of popular-scientific articles

prefer figures of speech (striking similes, metaphors, metonymies, parallelisms, rhetorical questions, antitheses,

inversions, and other means of emphasis). Analogy from the reader's background experience plays an important part and

provides the inductive basis for elaborating a complex problem.

The following text has been taken from the international journal New Scientist (8 January 1994: 3) and illustrates the

writer's use of phraseological units.

(5) How to give science a bad name A 59-year-old British business woman gives birth to twins on Christmas Day

following a fertility treatment in an Italian clinic. A 37-year-old black woman undergoing fertility treatment in

Rome opts for a white baby, allegedly to spare her child from racism. Are we on the brink of a brave new world

of 'designer babies' and 'unnatural' post-menopausal mothers?

The alarmist responses of many doctors and politicians wrongly suggest we might be. Last week European

newspapers were rife with lurid references to 'Pandora's box' and Frankenstein-style biologists playing God with

motherhood... Swap these ages around to produce a 59

year-old father and what was previously a hot news story becomes a dead donkey.

The heading itself contains a phraseological unit which has the stylistic connotation 'colloquial', 'not formal' (to give

someone/something a bad name is defined in the Longman Dictionary of English Idioms (LDEI) (1979) as: 'to harm the

reputation of (a person or thing) with which one is connected because of one's bad character, behaviour, appearance,

etc.'). The given heading has a stronger appeal than its non-idiomatic wording -- e.g. 'How to disparage scientific

advancement'.

The phrase brave new world has become a catchphrase and designates-according to the Oxford Dictionary of English

Idioms (ODEI) (1983) -- 'a new era brought about by revolutionary changes, reforms, etc.'. It has negative expressive

connotations derived from the utopian novel by Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. In terms of intertextuality, the book's

title is an allusion to Miranda's words in Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the present article, the phrase rouses a whole

complex of associations and has more expressive power than its possible nonidiomatic substitute an alarming/threatening

future.

The phrase Pandora's box is an allusion to antiquity, the Greek cultural heritage, and has literary connotations. It is absent

from idiomatic dictionaries, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) (1995) gives the following explanation: 'the box

from which the ills of mankind were released by Pandora, the first mortal woman, only Hope remaining'. Here again, we

could replace the figurative phrase by a stylistically neutral expression -- e.g. the root of all evil, the consequences of

biological manipulation, and the expressive value of the sentence would be considerably weakened. Moreover, the allusion

to Frankenstein, the humanoid, blood-sucking monster-figure, would be isolated from the previously mentioned

mythological context, and the whole sentence structure would be unbalanced. The phrases hot news and dead donkey are

reminiscent of journalist jargon, the latter usually meaning a human-interest story.

Another example comes from a popular scientific article in The New Scientist (20 March 1993: 31) which deals with laser

beams and their application in medicine:

(6) The Achilles heel of the X-ray laser turned out to lie in how tightly the beam can be focused. Chemical,

free-electron and most other lasers, the light is forced to travel back and forth between a pair of mirrors so that

it is amplified and forms a tightly directed beam.

The idiomatic phrase Achilles heel, another allusion to ancient history and Greek antiquity, has literary connotations, and is

suitable in the

present context. It could be substituted by a wordy circumlocution like the weak point (or problematic nature) of the X-ray

laser. The alternative, however, is less pithy, and the loss of stylistic expressiveness can be felt.