Reaching

Eight-Year-Old: You’re reaching your full potential again, idiot!

Ivory

Me: The king of where?
Thirteen-Year-Old: The king of the ivory city.
Me: Is that why everything is so white?

Sewer

Eight-Year-Old: They just broke out of the sewer!

Socks

Woman at Belk: Karen, if there are any more ironic socks?

Asserted

Friend: Pausanias refused to believe the story that every sacrifice to Zeus conducted on Mount Lycaeus caused someone to turn into a wolf.

…
He asserted that that only happened the first time.

Zoned

Me: I zoned out in my car for so long, when I woke up there were cobwebs in my car.

Digging

Me: I’ve been clam digging twice in my life, once by accident, and the second time we didn’t find any clams.

FYI

Colleague: FYI, I ordered your student to do her homework.

Obfuscatory

Me [in referee report]:  The basic problem is that the current manuscript is that it is disingenuously trying to correct an error that the author made in a previously published paper, without fully acknowledging that error.  Previously, in Ref. [54], the author proposed a nonlocal model of electromagnetic field observation that involved an interaction kernel that contained the Levi-Civita pseudotensor ε^αβγδ, apparently without noticing that this inevitably leads to parity violation.  This is an egregious error! Parity violation in gravitation is an exotic possibility but potentially conceivable, although it must inevitably be a tiny effect.  Parity violation in inertial effects, as Ref. [54] unwittingly proposed, is another category entirely; it is difficult to conceive of how they could be allowed even in a heavily modified version of relativity theory.  So a main result of Ref. [54] was simply wrong, and this paper is evidently an attempt to rectify that error—although without ever explicitly addressing the severity of the original mistake.

The abstract and introduction dance disingenuously around this issue, describing the purpose of the current manuscript as to “revisit” certain issues or “re-examine our previous proposal and provide a deeper and more general analysis.”  Never is the fundamental error in Ref. [54] identified as such, and the whole paper seems written to obscure the fact that the calculations it contains are there to try to fix that fundamental error.  That makes the paper essentially impossible to read clearly, since the goals of the argument are presented in a misleading fashion, to cover for an author who seems unwilling to explicitly admit his mistake.  This kind of obfuscatory is not acceptable in scientific writing, or in any kind of expository presentation where the principal goal is to transmit information, rather than to salve the author’s ego.

Peeling

Me: I just squirted myself in the eye with garlic sauce while peeling a shrimp.