Figures of speech are inadvertent social information about the user until proven otherwise: they are particularly misplaced at work, where they reduce signal relative to noise, usually because the operative wishes to bring something of himself or herself to the format.

The use of metaphor indicates lack of substance until proven otherwise, such as advising clinicians who adopt the evolutionary approach to accept that they are not watchdogs of biological adaptation: but evolutionary diagnoses of mental disorder that are based on reproductive fitness are clinically unworkable, because they can only be made after decades, so this would have been a very long watch, for a very old dog. “How many for dinner? Recruitment and monitoring by glances in capuchins”; quantitative data were only available for one capuchin: an alternative metaphorical title could have been ‘Look back in hunger’. The use of loanwords borrowed from another language is naive in a technical context, because although it may merely represent pretensions to literacy, it alerts technicians to other possibilities, for example that the subject matter lacks substance, or that the authors think that the subject matter lacks substance: there was no good reason to refer to the place selectivity of hippocampal cells as ‘bona fide’, when they could have been described as authentic, or genuine, or rigorously validated: only 11% of all cells recorded “…fulfilled the criteria for bona fide place selectivity…”, and the distribution of those cells among seven patients was not specified.
Hyperbole indicates excessive activation, insufficient inhibition or both: “We all know that…”, “People say that…”, “It is a well-known fact that…”.
The litotes of “Not bad” rather than “Good” conveys a degree of inhibition, which, as usual with figures of speech, leaves the recipient with work to do: “Why is this person understating in this way, in this place, at this time?” The usual answer is problems dealing with now, for example, envy or jealousy of “good”. Other possibilities are a wish to provoke someone who is desperate for “good”, and a wish to collude with someone who is envious or jealous of “good”.
The metonym ‘schizophrenic’ indicates a lack of substance.
The oxymoronic word ‘hypomania’ combines a prefix and a word that are usually opposites. The behaviours of hypomania are scaled downwards from mania, instead of being scaled upwards from excitement, which contributes to the underdiagnosis of hypomania. “…selfish punishers refrain from expelling themselves from the group” is an oxymoronic nadir from the contrived world of evolutionary models; “expel” is a transitive verb, so that the oxymoronic contrivance is the conjunction of the subject and the object, which are usually separate agents; as usual, the questionable semantics are followed by a plethora of mathematical models and theories: human examples may be hard to find.
Euphemisms are contextual, which, again, leave the recipient with work to do: “Why is this person euphemising in this way, in this place, at this time?”; what follows tells you that it may be because of a suite of stupid behaviours: “Experimental peripheral administration of oxytocin elevates a suite of cooperative behaviours in a wild social mammal” was published by The Royal Society in 2011; but the oxytocin was given in a carrier inclusive of chlorobutanol, for which there was no control: chlorobutanol has sedative, hypnotic and anaesthetic actions.

The word ‘prefrontal’ is a tautology, because prefrontal structures are part of the frontal lobes.
‘The future of theoretical evolutionary game theory’ was published by the Royal Society in 2023, perhaps in tautologous recognition of the rather theoretical nature of theoretical evolutionary game theory.
Analogy lacks depth.
Complex mathematical and genetic theories may be used for circumlocution and intellectualisation. “Why is this person invoking this theory, in this place, at this time?” The usual answer is problems dealing with now.
Eponyms obfuscate, for example, the chaotic ‘Edinger-Westphal nucleus’, and the confused mimicries of Bates and Müller, for which see Adaptive simulation.

Freudian slips betray the truth: after a video assistant referee had mistakenly awarded a penalty to the home side during the closing stages of a premier league football match, his superior explained that the mistake had occurred because the referee had been ‘uber-focused’, confirming the impression that the main priority of premier league officials is to get home quickly and safely.
Malapropisms undermine prodigies of scientific endeavour, as in pubic health surveillance, a tired approach to chromosomal microarray analysis, memories localised in discreet regions of the brain, and both alternative and alternate models of head direction cells in the same Wikipedian paragraph.

Hypnosis is a misnomer that suggests sleep: hypnosis is focused relaxation.
The sex that invests least in its offspring must have been compared with at least two other sexes.
The participle ‘kindling’ is used to describe both induced epilepsy in animals and substance withdrawal in humans.
The participle ‘fluctuating’ is used to describe structural asymmetries.
“Central cues prompted fixating participants either to choose which of two peripheral spatial locations to covertly attend or formed an instruction” is syntactically specious, and directs attention away from the article and from the journal.
In “Spatial remapping of touch: Confusion of perceived stimulus order across hand and foot”, eight of the ten participants were right-handed and all ten of the participants were right-handed: confusion indeed.
A neurone cannot ‘adapt’ if it is refractory.