Sunday, February 07, 2010

Bad omics word of the day: religionome

And so they go - on and on.  I am addicted to bad omics words.  They are a bit fascinating ion that the spread of the ome suffix is astonishing.  And here is one that is both funny and a bit sad: religionome.  Not that new.  But out there.  And winner of today's "Bad omics word of the day." Not sure exactly where it started but here is one of the first uses I could find:
We have a lot of new data we are working on, and one of the thoughts I’ve come up with recently is can we create something similar to the human genome – perhaps we can call it the religionome – with which we can begin to look at all of the different beliefs and practices and traditions and try to evaluate and understand them not just from a spiritual perspective or a subjective perspective, but from physiological and biological and social and cultural perspectives as well
This is from a transcript of a conference involving Andrew Newberg from U. Penn.

Some other things on this include:

2 comments:

  1. If they wanted to use a biological metaphor for comparative religions, they could have gone with a phylogenetic tree, as many religions are obviously related to each other as heretics from one religion go on to start a new religion, analogous to speciation. But I suppose evolution and some religions don't mix too well...

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  2. All these words should be part of the "bollocksome", which of course shall include the word "bollocksome" itself.

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