This one came up in the Uncommon words and their meanings group, but I thought it apropos here as well.

Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum

This phrase appeared in Kurt Vonnegut's comedic novel, The Sirens of Titan. It was his second novel and was published in 1959. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend it. It is a completely unserious look at serious social issues told in a future setting where space travel has become somewhat commonplace.

My comment to the other group was as follows:

Hah...! This is one of Kurt's better inventions. He was notorious for his ability to string words together that seemingly made sense but were more ephemeral than a loose cloud of hydrogen. For instance, in this case we have a particularly interesting trio of words strung together to "explain" something that for the average reader appeared to make "perfect" sense. So, looking at the parts making up this phrase: An infundibulum is a conical or funnel shaped cavity. There is also an infundibulum in the brain structure. It is a hollow tubular connection between the hypothalamus and the posterior pituitary gland.

So now we know that Kurt's infundibulum as he employed it was to describe something like a funnel or, more accurately, how we graphically define a deep gravity well.

Moving now to the word 'synclastic' we find that it is a descriptive for something curved toward the same side in all directions. In describing a spherical surface, for instance, it is synclastic in nature. That is, a tangent taken at any point on its surface will show the surface curving away from the tangent in all directions toward the same side.

Let's couple 'synclastic' to 'chrono' and we get something curving away from the time line in all directions, assuming the timeline to be curved. Well, it could have been straight and everything else curved away from its tangent to time. All rather perplexing. Now, to make this conundrum terminally confusing, let's put it all together. Oh my, what we get is a wonderful nonsense combining several descriptive words all pointing at one another and saying ... well, saying absolutely nothing.

Fortunately for Kurt, it is nowhere near as bad as a lot of other technobabble one finds in Science Fiction. Gravity on ships in space, for one. Things made from unobtanium or nonexistium are always fun. Faster than light travel at the flip of a switch. Instant communication through 'subspace.' On this one we have to allow for the possibility we will one day know how to manipulate quantum entanglement to transmit information, but it too is an incredible stretch.

All these things are literary devices that make it simpler to advance story lines without having to bow to physics, but I find the reality far more interesting and challenging. I like to keep my Science Fiction more in line with the difficulties we actually face because that is where our ingenuity as a species really shines. Magic is better left to Fantasy, which I also like writing.