Explain it in a dentist’s chair
I was having a routine dental cleaning the other day, and of course it’s an occupational hazard that people want you to explain what you do in words of one syllable or fewer (which, while you’re having your teeth cleaned, is all you can manage anyway.) So I tried the “Explain it in 60 seconds” piece on charged leptons that I wrote for the June 2010 issue of symmetry, and by gum (a dental joke there) it worked!
Bob Bernstein, Fermilab