Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

In this comic, a scientist proudly unveils his invention, the "Logogen-eplex," which "inserts superfluous syllables directly into otherwise clear wording." He demonstrates by taking the simple sentence "We used a ruler" and transforming it into "We utilized a linear distance analyzer." When someone in the audience asks how this squares with efforts to make science more accessible, the scientist gleefully responds: "Oh... it won't square... it'll hypocube."

The comic is a pointed satire of academic and scientific jargon. Researchers often inflate simple concepts with unnecessarily complex language, making their work sound more impressive but far less understandable. The punchline -- substituting "hypocube" for "square" -- is itself a perfect demonstration of the machine's function, as the scientist can't resist using an obscure mathematical term (a hypercube is the four-dimensional analogue of a cube) even in casual conversation. The comic argues that the tendency toward obfuscatory language in science is so ingrained it might as well be a machine.