“Kidney Disappointment”: How “Kidney Failure” Is Vanishing from Scientific Papers

Hacker News picked up on a curious find: if you run a Google Scholar query for the phrase “kidney disappointment,” the search engine for academic work returns papers that say exactly that — “kidney disappointment.”

Behind this awkward turn of phrase it's easy to make out a quite different, perfectly standard medical term — “kidney failure” («почечная недостаточность»). The English word failure really can stand in for “disappointment” — a setback, a letdown — it's just that this last sense has nothing to do with how the kidneys work. As a result, a rigorous clinical term turns into something more like a complaint from a frustrated patient.

A single coincidence like this could be chalked up to chance, but the search turns up not an isolated example but a whole set of publications with the same substitution. It looks as though someone methodically rewrote the set expression synonym by synonym — and “failure” became “disappointment.”

The find quickly took off: the post gathered 115 points and some fifty comments. For readers, it's less an occasion to laugh than a reason to wonder how phrases like this end up in texts that claim scientific status and pass through peer review without raising a single question from anyone.

For now, “kidney disappointment” is joining the collection of odd turns of phrase by which mangled academic prose can be spotted with a single search query.

Source: Hacker News