One wakes each morning, if one is fortunate enough to have endured another night of this interminable existence, expecting a certain level of daily absurdity. Even by those generous standards, however, the latest missive from the scientific establishment — delivered, one presumes, from some sun-drenched Californian edifice where critical thought goes to perish — manages to plumb new depths. We are informed, with all the grave solemnity the modern research industrial complex can muster, that a rather common painkiller, the one Americans insist on calling ‘Tylenol’ (we have ‘paracetamol’ here, thank you very much, and it serves the same purpose with rather less fanfare), appears to be linked to 'shrunken baby genitals.' One might, quite naturally, blanch at such a pronouncement. Yet, the esteemed boffins at the self-styled ‘Institute for Unwarranted Optimism’ — a name, one must admit, that rather gives the game away — are quick to assure us, with a truly breathtaking alacrity, that this finding is “statistically significant but utterly meaningless.”
Meaningless. Right. As if the average expectant parent, already navigating the bewildering shoals of modern parenting advice — much of it, it must be said, utter claptrap — needed another layer of inscrutable academic doublespeak. One reports, as is one's lamentable duty, that apparently, baby girls’ ovaries and baby boys’ testes were found to be 'notably smaller.' And then, in a stroke of public relations genius that would make a particularly cynical government press officer weep with joy, these organs were described as 'adorable.' Adorable. One covered the Falklands War, gentlemen. There was precious little that was 'adorable' about it. And certainly not the sort of anatomical detail one usually finds in serious medical reporting, which this, presumably, purports to be.
The mandate, apparently, is that expectant parents should 'absolutely not lose a single wink of sleep over it.' One finds this rather telling. One is encouraged to lose sleep over the environmental impact of one’s almond milk latte, or whether one has correctly pronounced ‘quinoa’, but the potential diminishment of one’s progeny’s reproductive apparatus? Absolutely not. It is merely another inconvenient truth to be immediately dismissed with a soothing pat on the head, as if the public were a particularly dim-witted spaniel.
This is the very essence of the modern scientific communiqué: present a vaguely unsettling finding, then immediately retract any possibility of concern with a blizzard of reassuring adjectives and qualifying clauses. It saves one the trouble of actually thinking about the implications, you see. I have seen rather worse attempts at obfuscation in my four decades of this thankless trade — I recall the 'minor adjustments' to the national debt figures back in '87, for instance, which proved anything but minor — but this particular brand of 'everything's fine, nothing to see here' after dropping a bombshell about shrunken bits is a masterclass in passive-aggressive reassurance. One is left to wonder what would constitute a valid reason to lose sleep, if not this. Perhaps the editor will deign to provide such an assignment next week, assuming, of course, that the world hasn't entirely disappeared up its own adorable, statistically significant but utterly meaningless, posterior by then. A tiresome business, all told.
