Someone asked me today why my blog is titled "All the world's a phage...Scientifc progress goes boink". The first part is is a quote from William Shakespeare (although I can't recall from what work at the moment), and is maybe a bit overused by phage biologists to emphasize the importance of their field (http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030712/bob9.asp). Phage comes from the Greek word "phagein" meaning "to eat" (also, the Greek word "phagos" means a voracious or gluttonus man, which would also apply to some phages, like T1. Oh, for those of you that don't already know, a phage (full word - bacteriophage) is a virus that infects bacteria (i.e., it "eats" them)). I am studying the phage lambda host cell lysis system for my PhD project (see Young lab homepage link to the left). The second part is the title of a Calvin and Hobbs comic collection, of which I am a huge fan. "Boink", in that case, is meant to mean goes bad or off course or at least not the way you planned, sort of like what you might imagine happens to an object that when dropped, makes the sound the word boink makes when you say it. However, since I did not know the formal definition of the word boink, I looked it up on dictionary.com. I was shocked to see the answer:
- from the American Heritage Dictionary -
boink - verb; (boinked, boink·ing, boinks); To have sexual intercourse with; to engage in sexual intercourse. [From boink, imitative of bumping or bouncing.]
After reading this, I immediately realized that I did, in fact, know this definition of boink somewhere in the back of my brain, but it certainly did not come to mind when I picked the title of my blog!
Still, I think the title, using the Calvin and Hobbes definition, very aptly describes what my life has been centered around for the last 5.5 years, so I guess I'll keep it.
1 comment:
Hello,nice post thanks for sharing?. I just joined and I am going to catch up by reading for a while. I hope I can join in soon.
Post a Comment