Zohnerite

A gullible person who believes an absurd conjecture regarding the chemical properties of an inocuous and benign substance, such as water, salt, shaving cream, etc., as the result of three essential characteristics of conjecture promulgation:

1. A fundamental naiveté or outright misunderstanding of chemistry on the part of the would be Zohnerite.

2. A deliberate misrepresentation of the chemical properties of the substance in question by referring to them by their technical names, or the referencing of names of their constituents; or the pretense that some constituent of the substance has the same properties in the substance mixture as it has in its purified form.

3. The inclusion of putatively supporting examples that are clearly impossible on their face, except that their true nature is obfuscated by technical jargon, or the use of metric units.

The above second point is usually deliberately exacerbated by the creation of a website with an authoritative-sounding name which purports to be the authority on the subject, but is in reality simply a sham created by the hoaxer.

It was amazing to see how easy it was to turn Ruth into a Zohnerite regarding diet soda by merely referencing a website that claimed the methyl ester in aspertame was converted by chymotrypsin into large blood plasma levels of methanol.

Zohnerite by Gregg Bonner October 17, 2006

Zohnerism 

The act of presenting true, but misleading facts to confuse scientifically illiterate people.

It was named when a teenager named Nathan Zohner sought to ban the chemical "Dihydrogen monoxide" from public use. Zohner stated the following things about "Dihydrogen Monoxide"

-It is colorless and tasteless

-It can easily cause suffocation (especially in its liquid form)

-It can burn your skin at high temperatures

-If too much of it is consumed, it can cause a feeling of being bloated, and possibly even death

-And to top it all off, it is present in EVERY stream, river, pond, etc. in the world

...And so on. Zohner then asked his classmates to vote on whether or not to ban "Dihydrogen monoxide." The vote was yes by an extremely large margin. It was at this point that Zohner revealed the trick: Dihydrogen monoxide is much better known by a much more simple name...WATER! Everything he stated about WATER was true; he just distorted them in such a way to make it sound extremely dangerous. Thus, the term "Zohnerism" was born.

Another example of a Zohnerism would be for someone to say that people should not "Touch their pussies" in front of other people, and saying that it's "Unsanitary" or it "Gets hair everywhere" This is technically true, so naturally people would be supportive of it. But the word "Pussy" can also refer to a cat, which the other people did not understand; by exploiting the dirty minds of his peers, the person just tricked his peers into agreeing that people should not pet their cats in front of other people; but he didn't lie to them at all.

Zohnerism by Ubeenbamboozledson January 2, 2022