Questioneering

I looked at the wrong week of my timetable last night so here I am at uni and I don't have a class for a whole 'nother hour. When I mentioned it to one of my Esteemed Colleagues he told me, "Mate, that's such a first year mistake to make". O the shame. (I like to use "O" instead of "Oh" like that because it looks really Biblical. Like me.)

Anyway, in my past life as a Man With A Job, I presented papers at a bunch of different conferences. About half of them were academic research conferences, and the other half were professional conferences. I noticed that the types of questions people asked at the two types of conferences were completely different.

At professional conferences people ask the speaker to clarify things for them or to comment on what the speaker's future plans are. This seems to be motivated by the fact that they are trying to get something done.

In contrast, at academic conferences people ask questions about topics the speaker hasn't mentioned at all but that the questioneer (a typo that deserves to be a neologism) clearly has the desire to parade around in front of the audience as something that they know all about. In this way it's actually more of a statement than a question. This seems to be motivated by the fact that academics are trying to show each up as numbskulls so the question is directed as much at the other audience members as the to the speaker.

Since I'm holding forth about questions, someone asked a question yesterday in the middle of a lecture about the enteric nervous system. The question was (roughly): "Are those nerves the so-called C-type non-myelinated fibres?" This question made me think two things:

1. Am I in the wrong room?
2. The phrase "so-called" is an odd one to use in this context.

A major use of "so-called" is to indicate that you think that the person doing the "so-calling" is full of crap. For example, the leftist co-operative ABC news here in Australia made a point of referring to "George Bush's so-called War On Terror", especially after March 2003. A closely related use is as a kind of oral quotation marks to indicate sarcasm. For example: "Prone To Reverie is chock full of so-called entertainment". Closely related again is attaching the phrase to information that you think is wrong or bad in some way and want to flag as such, for example: "Adelaide, the so-called Paris of the South".

As you can see, it's a handy little phrase to use. But I'm still struggling to figure out what the questioneer intended to convey by referring to "so-called C-type non-myelinated fibres", unless perhaps he has some kind of intellectual dispute with the text-book writers or the lecturer.

Any ideas? I'm interested in your so-called opinions.