My parents encouraged me to keep a scientific notebook from a young age, and I maintained a more or less disorderly pile of notes about lessons, experiments, and observations from well before I could reliably spell the implicated words. An early highlight of my personal scientific documentation was a catalogue of amino acids and associated laboratory techniques, derived from molecular structure puzzles George posed to me on the conference room blackboard on Sunday afternoons. I experienced writing as a part of a process of learning, with results that made the incomplete nature of that process continually apparent. Notes were never final, always just adequate to the learning in progress, an impression reinforced by my parents’ shared conviction that a child of eight should not rely on adults to come up with a good-enough spelling of terms like ninhydrin or chromatography.

My first opportunity and challenge to write up a more durable exhibit of scientific prose began with a research project that spanned the summer of 2003 and eventually became a short communication with longer online supplementary information in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (Barany et al. 2005). The summer featured long days in the laboratory, punctuated by sampling the summertime social and cultural amenities of a large Midwestern university, and bookended by a bicycle commute. To resolve the investigators’ discrepancy in preferred commuting pace, we took up a tandem bicycle, which worked well so long as we were in agreement about which direction to turn and resulted otherwise in some scrapes and bruises.

The sweaty commute was an integral part of my immersion into peptide research, but was presumed immaterial to the chemistry protocols and findings. As do all laboratory neophytes, I learned to recognize and valorize a whole spectrum of activities and attitudes that bore more or less directly on the reactions and analyses around which they were focused. This education in the multiplicity and differential visibility of scientific activities gave me an early appreciation for a kind of observation that has been foundational for the history and sociology of science, about the discrepancy between formal, protocolized science and the constellation of practices and narratives that form working science and working scientists.Footnote 2

George’s idea for my summer research came in the process of sorting chemicals that had been exposed to a recent laboratory fire. A bottle of heptamethyldisilazane obtained in the latter half of the 1980s by then-graduate-student Robert P. Hammer appeared (and was subsequently confirmed) to have survived intact. So the bottle, with a mandatory additional label indicating its status as fire survivor, came with me back to the working laboratory and became the starting point for a series of experiments Hammer had hypothesized might provide an alternative synthesis for the Dts protecting group on which George made his early career in peptides.

The experiments made use of another starting material from the core of George’s organosulfur synthesis program in his first years at the University of Minnesota, part of a stockpile of arduously obtained sulfur compounds stored away for occasional reexplorations of those early research themes. In the supplementary experimental description, we referred to this compound with an explanation that “Material synthesized and purified in the early 1980’s, and stored since then under ambient conditions, was still completely unchanged (and mostly colorless) when used in experiments conducted in the summer of 2003.” Even in this protocolized write-up, George showed how one could write formal science combining precision with euphemism, alluding to serendipity and eliding extraneous details. The parenthetical about color directly undermined the preceding claim about the material being completely unchanged, but simultaneously asserted that the obvious changes were immaterial. The remarkable fact on which to focus was that the starting material from the 1980s, like the idea whose investigation it enabled, remained intact enough in the early 2000s for original research despite a long period of intervening “ambient” neglect—to starting material and idea alike. “Ambient conditions,” “mostly colorless,” and “the early 1980’s” are characterful expressions of exploratory science not taken too seriously, if one knows how to read them.

When that starting material ran out, we targeted the noxious large-scale sulfur-spewing process of making more for holiday weekends in a small out-of-the-way laboratory not routinely shared by other researchers. This social fact of timing appears only as “Two new batches were made in 2004” in the supplementary experimental description of starting materials. Where the published reaction description indicates “Progress of reactions at 25 °C was monitored by direct 1H and 13C NMR spectroscopy,” we omitted the six flights of stairs between the top-floor wet lab and the sub-basement nuclear magnetic resonance facilities that the teen-age investigator bounded down, glass tubes in hand, rather than let an estimate of reaction kinetics be dependent on elevator timings. The stairs were mostly clear during the fringe hours I had booked time on the department spectrometers, another unwritten fact driven by the discounted instrument costs and the social expectation of staying out of the way of researchers using the machines for their careers.

Conventions and euphemisms indicated what mattered. I learned the common shorthand of 25 °C for “room temperature, not measured” and a great variety of ways to describe reaction yields in situations where I was not confident of my experimental technique and associated measurements. These latter could be “quantitative” (evidently fully reacted as hoped but my experimenter-imposed imprecisions resulted in calculations of yields exceeding what should have been physically possible) or “respectable” (variable due to experimenter inconsistency, good enough to be satisfied) or even “high” (variable but striking and even exciting! ). The wages of a temperamental rotary evaporator operated by an inexperienced teenager were protocolized as reaction products “concentrated in vacuo.” We never mentioned in the article the rituals and superstitions around crystallization that I learned in the lab.

The purpose of scientific writing is never simply to record (or euphemize) what happened. Good scientific writing produces understanding, insight, and prospects for more science. George’s ‘orthogonal’ coinage noted in the introduction was a particularly successful written intervention that changed how chemists in and beyond the field of peptides understood and designed approaches to synthesis. A good word choice with a suggestive metaphor clarified the scientific principles at play and gave coherence and direction to a valuable methodology.

The acronym-rich landscape of peptide chemistry gave George other opportunities to play suggestively with scientific nomenclature. The “peptide amide linker” was a helpful PAL (companion) for peptide synthesis (Albericio et al. 1990). The name suggested a use and also an accompanying attitude and emotion. George paid tribute to a childhood friend when choosing EDITH as a shorthand for a new substrate (Xu et al. 1996). We derived recurring amusement from a poster we stumbled upon at the 2003 American Peptide Symposium in Boston that proposed using the names of public figures as a peptide design strategy and exemplified the proposal with a synthesis based on Secretary of State COLINPOWELL (Wade and Wade 2003).

Wordplay has been an enduringly important feature of George’s scientific and personal lives. His office door memorialized one of his first collaborations with departmental colleague Barbara Goldenberg, a few years prior to the collaboration that would result in the birth of the present author. Their 1983 semianonymous (signed ‘gbg,’ a combination of their initials) parody memorandum advising of a gravity shut-down in Koldoften Hall (a looking-glass counterpart to the chemists’ Kolthoff Hall at the University of Minnesota) was rich in puns and sardonic commentary on university budgeting, health and safety regulation, laboratory supplies and facilities, teaching, and bureaucracy. Many in the department were not amused, but it brought the couple closer together and jointly vented some of the frustrations and absurdities of their shared professional context.

I grew up in a household where wordplay was a way of life, and learned to speak with parents who preferred a tongue-in-cheek embrace of my nursery coinages to any kind of prescription about correct terminology. I have gone on to offer my own coinages for the history of science and mathematics to describe distinctive conceptual or bureaucratic phenomena (e.g. Barany 2014a, 2019b). These coinages include the term ‘bureaunym’ to describe initial-based signatures (such as my parents’ ‘gbg’), which have a crucial role in the paperwork of scientific funding and infrastructure (Barany 2019a). I have used punning and wordplay as an analytic method (e.g., Barany 2020a, 2023b) and developed historical methodologies that focus on the multiplicities of words’ meanings in their historical contexts (e.g. Barany 2018b, 2020c, 2023c). Inspired by episodes like the gravity memorandum, I have also researched how historical mathematicians have used puns and pranks as a foundation for social cohesion and scientific creativity (e.g. Barany 2018b, 2020b, 2021b, 2023a).

In retrospect, one of the most significant and enjoyable features of my early immersion in the Barany Lab was the constant sense of language as multifaceted, living, and playful. As a historian whose main working materials are written records on superficially lifeless paper, it has been crucial for my research to find ways to recover and explain the liveliness of those records. In the Barany Lab, words and their multiplicities were an active constituent of the research process as well as of social customs and relationships.