What is Zohnerite?
1.
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.
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