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Chris -- 2018-04-11
‘Pier revue’ is an expression usually found in the term ‘end-of -pier revue’, a seaside variety show with elements of the old music-hall, full of vulgarity and good cheer. “Peer review’ on the other hand is examination of an academic’s work by other experts in the field to detect and denounce errors of method or mind.
When appearing in a pier revue an actor is subject to a similar degree of scrutiny and criticism as that academic perhaps? I know, I know, it’s tenuous at best, but I couldn’t resist a double yolker…
Just to say that when the RSPB put out a scientific paper it has to go through pier revue, the same as any scientific paper. Any ‘bad’ science is quickly …
www.toothandclaw.org.uk/forum/ forum_posts.asp?TID=36&PN=2&TPN=4 – 44k – Cached
So far none of them appear to be able to withstand pier revue. I am not sure where you feel that “overstretched” families are threatened by reducing their …
www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/ earth/2007/05/25/ecological25.xml – 60k – Cached
But pier revue and being able to repeat the results every time are fundamental alternatives. It is a very cleaver statistics that are able to resolve …
www.norml.org.nz/article574.html – 44k – Cached
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I first wrote:
Wow. Wow. When I saw the headline I thought, “It must be a joke, right?” But those quotes clearly seem to intend peer review – and not to be joking. Google returns 10 hits for {scientific “pier revue”}
but then I looked at the actual pages – as opposed to the the Google summaries.
Three of the 10 Ghits refer to Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor who argues that immunizations cause autism. The piece satirizes Wakefield as practicing bad science, and alludes to “pier revue” apparently as an example of chicanery as well as a pun on peer review.
Pier Revue
Like it not, the MMR and Autism debate is once again about to explode into the public arena. Dr Crippen does not like it for, although I cannot fault the wishes of the medical profession and many others to call Andrew Wakefield to account, the process is going to give yet another airing to his unsustainable and discredited views.
http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/2007/07/ … d-gmc.html
Three additional pages happen to include Pier Revue (mostly punning or allusive, rather than referring to actual pier music-hall) with scientific elsewhere on the page.
Pier Revue: Comedy Fest Comes to Chicago …... Head to Map Room at 6:30pm on Wednesday for the inaugural session of Cafe Scientific,
www.gapersblock.com/merge/archives/Offb … %20Events/ – 319k
Two more hits are the same comment on BBC News, which Google for some reason indexes twice.
Now Computer Programmes always just give the result the programmer intended, and very few of these programmes are available for pier revue, partly due to their complexity.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2 … _line.html
Plus there are the examples Peter found. (My last two are his first two.) So that’s at least four instances of pier revue for peer review. It’s not the double-wow I first gave it, but there is something going on there, at least for a few people. As Peter admits, though, the semantic imagery is a stretch.
One last thought – the sources of this usage are an environmental activist, a marijuana advocate, a global warming sceptic, and an public transport advocate referring to a global warming sceptic. Each of these positions has a certain (polemical) relationship to science. I wonder if something like the anti-Wakefield parodic usage is influencing them?
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Even if it’s not an eggcorn, Peter did point out that he liked the twisting of two words—a double yolker he called it. I also like that aspect, and I’ll remind others of the eggcorn “crap chute” as an example of a construction with two twisted words.
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