Comment by carbocation
16 years ago
Wow, it's interesting to see how people in different fields make use of this term. In medicine, when I say "it turns out," I am often conceding that I just discovered an obvious connection that I should have discovered days earlier:
* "It turns out that our patient with salmonella has a pet lizard."
On the other hand, when I am trying to convey my knowledge in, say, human genetics in a humble fashion and convey to the reader that it's OK that they didn't know what I'm about to say, I'll also use "it turns out:"
* "It turns out that every gene found to cause Mendelian lipid disorders also has common variants discovered by genome-wide association studies."
In the pet-lizard case, aren't you using the phrase with mild irony? Something like, "After painstaking analysis coupled with a few brilliant flashes of insight, I managed to deduce this totally obvious fact"?
Sometimes (often, even)! But with that particular example, it's actually more like, "I didn't ask the questions that many second-year medical students might ask after finding out a patient had salmonella."