The article discusses the specifics of the ironic nomination of people in the Russian language. The aim of the work was to clarify in detail how, on what grounds, and with the increment of what meanings, the ironic names of science representatives are implemented in the Russian language. The methodology for analyzing the set of corresponding set expressions includes the methods of etymological, semantic, functional and stylistic analysis. The source of the language information is a continuous selection of material from colloquial speech, the language of fiction, journalism and the National Corpus of the Russian language. This selection has allowed to compile a list of the units. It was established that the beginning of the series was laid by the expression a cabinet scientist borrowed from the French language in the 19th century. It is shown that the active dissemination and increase in the inventory of ironic nominations of scholars in the Russian language occurred in the period from the second half of the twentieth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The reasons why the Russian language has such a number of nominations of scientists, and not of any other social group are clarified. They relate to such extralinguistic factors as ideology, politics and culture. Attention is drawn to the fact that the emergence of new nominations does not supplant or deactivate the previously existing nominations. It is proved that recently, the semantics of all these expressions has become more abstract and applicable to people of other professions. This process causes an extension of the reference field for the use of these units.