[lbo-talk] Jargon in Science

[123hop at comcast.net]

As you know, the IT space is full of such semi-technical jargon (in many cases borrowed from elsewhere), if not in definition, at least in usage. “Semantics” is one, “orthogonal” is another, and it keeps going… “closure” is very popular these days given the return of FP-style thinking. Personally, I am against most of these terms which often have simpler one or 2-3 word substitutes. Rather than adding clarity they in fact confuse because their usage is either metaphorical or is an act of unnecessary conceptualisation (formalisations, such as in logic, are to me valuable when they actively contribute to helping the project progress). They also act very effectively as tools of credentialism (as your CC coworker hints at!). 
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So, to sum up. 

A technical term is either a special use of a common language term or it's something put togteher from latin/greek to substitute for a common term. 

So, in IT we have "buffer," "stack," "cache," "heap," "protocol," "pointer," "cookie,"....all with common meanings that are not relevant to IT because for example in IT a "stack" is a data structure you use to process/execute assembly language instructions that represent higher language constructs. It's like a stack of dishes in the sense that you can only take the dish off the top (without breaking all the dishes). But otherwise, it's a very particular meaning that gives programmers a convenient term for communicating about the work they do. 

Or, in medicine you have "hematoma," -- blood clot, or all the "itis" words, which mean inflammation of something, and which mostly have the virtue of making doctors look like experts. 

Finally, you have the metaphorical re-adoption of technical terms into common language, which create the sense of "belonging to the same club." So if you talk to a programmer and say something like "can you pop your stack and answer this question?"....then the word has made the round trip through the common-technical-social loop. Though, on it's final leg, it is more of a wink than a token of agreement. 

But to get back to the humanities, a poem is a poem because we write poems; we create this entity (and then use words to describe its structure: quatrain, rhyme, alliteration). 

This is different from the special terms of physics and chemistry and biology, which claim to name the irreducible elements of nature, chemical reactions, and life. 

Joanna