Something I explained to my kids: There's a kind of fake science that consists of making up intellectual-sounding words for ideas everyone already has. Canonical example: ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph.
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This is tricky - often technical language is BS. However, sometimes it is important for compressing information that helps people within a discipline communicate and think new thoughts.
It's not technical language I'm against, but taking mundane ideas like "too skinny," "too fat," and "just right" and dressing them up in technical language, as if that represented some sort of discovery.
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The exception to the rule being Sniglets, which enable me to explain that my fear "that objects in the side mirror are closer than they appear" is a perfectly normal case of "Magniphobia", thank you Rich Hall and Not Necessarily The News.
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The words mesomorph and endomorph do not match to the categories "too fat" and "just right", though.
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Helps to get it published tho
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To be fair, these specific words simplify concepts in the nutrition/fitness space that allow for effective heuristics. The underlying concept (that humans have a wide variance in metabolic function due to differences in genetics) is generally true.
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Aren't {ecto, endo, meso}-morph exactly the type of compression Ben was referring to though? I only have superficial understanding of it, but it seems more similar to "setosa, veriscolor, virginica — fuzzy classifications over multi-dimensional attributes — than your 1D one.
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+1 for effectively using fancy words while debating the value of fancy words and postulating (see what I did there?) a fancy word meta grammar.
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Huge fan of Randall Monroe’s book “Thing Explainer” for this very reason
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This is not what those categorisations are about at all. The refer to the build of the person as determined by their genes e.g. heavy, medium, sleight. Or whatever you want to call them. Unless you are going to argue there is only one genetic build?
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Are there exactly three, though?
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