Chemistry and alphabet soup

As I continue this trek through the 243rd American Chemical Society National Meeting (read previous thoughts here) I couldn't help but think about Baskin Robbins.
I can remember going to Baskin Robbins ice cream when I was a kid and marveling at the huge array of ice cream options. They were constantly changing, and some of the names were unrecognizable with any known flavor of ice cream.
We used to joke that you could walk into a Baskin Robbins and utter any three words in the human language - "Rock, Paper, Scissors" or "Asphalt, Shoeleather, Feathers" and they'd give you three scoops and send you on your way.
Maybe a better analogy for today would be Ben&Jerry's.
The same thought hit me today while listening to chemist and researcher after chemist and researcher at this national meeting.
They use a lot of words that I've never heard. "Cowellia'' is not a county in Georgia. Oceanosyphologia - and don't hold me to the spelling of that one - is not a communicable disease you get from swimming in salt water. Heptones are not a music group; alkines and hopanes and terpaines and Chromatographic fractions are not ... well, I don't even know what those things are, much less what they are not.
We use a lot of acronyms in all of our businesses, and certainly that's true in what I do now with the world of energy - "AOR" and "SOMs" and "IMT" and on and on.
But the truth is, I'm convinced you could stand up in front of a bunch of chemists and link any three letters of the alphabet and hit on some chemical combination and they'd be nodding their head in complete understanding.
"PAH" and "ESI" and "DBE" and formulas like "C4C>C3C>C2C>C1C" and ESI FT-ICR MS make perfect sense to these folks.

And then, after hearing these litanies of letters and letter-number mix formulas, they all start to asking questions about consistency of Y axis on the graph and ... well, about the only thing I do understand is these guys treat graduate assistants like they are pledges in a fraternity. They joke about "that's a job for a grad student" or "we almost lost a guy on that, which is why we have grad students do these kind of things.''

There was one funny moment, however. The conversation in this room is all research done about the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon incident. At one point, one of the scientists asked if, given the apparent obvious resiliency of the Gulf ecology, that oil companies should focus its efforts in drilling in areas like the Gulf of Mexico.
One actual oil scientist laughed and said, "I can tell you that oil companies' decisions on where to drill will be determined by where they think they can find substantial amounts of oil and gas."
The response was, "It sure would help things if you guys would drill where there wasn't any oil."
And the oil guy responded, "That happens. Unfortunately, you don't stay in business very long when you do that."

So occasionally the conversation does get to a practical level that I can understand.

And we all LOL.