THE DEFINITION OF AN ENGINEER
An Engineer is a person who demands respect because he can, with incredibly productivity and energy, deliver pages of incomprehensible formulae with meticulous detail, derived from somewhat vague assumptions, based upon suspicious data, obtained from irrelevant tests and incomplete experiments, conducted using instruments of uncertain precision, by people whose reliability is questionable and whose mentality is dubious, in the specific hope of confusing and enraging all those outside his own field.
(The Electrical World, some time ago, translated twice)