In his essay "To Tell a Chemist" (1965), Asimov proposed a simple shibboleth for distinguishing chemists from non-chemists: ask the person to read the word "unionized". Chemists, he noted, will read un-ionized (electrically neutral), while non-chemists will read union-ized (belonging to a trade union).
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In his essay "To Tell a Chemist" (1965), Asimov proposed a simple shibboleth for distinguishing chemists from non-chemists: ask the person to read the word "unionized". Chemists, he noted, will read un-ionized (electrically neutral), while non-chemists will read union-ized (belonging to a trade union).
Or some will say it’s spelled incorrectly
If you don't think about it very hard, solidarity is basically macro ionization
Onionized
Ah, because of the ions.
Took me eons.
Good luck finding the chemistry teacher, though.
As a leftist chemistry teacher, I read it as "having attained union", rather than "not ionized", so YMMV with this heuristic
ETA: (also, yeah, I have excellent job security until all public schools are abolished in the US)
My initial thought was "would chemists theoretically be less into labor protections than plumbers"?
I guess that puts me in a third bucket.
Am a chemist in your group. I read it the plumber way too. Took me several seconds to get it.
What about ChemE then? They're both. Sort of. Okay maybe they're not chemists, but... chemistry-adjacent.
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.