| Every profession or trade, every art,
and every science has its technical vocabulary. Different occupations, however,
differ widely in the character of their special vocabularies. In trades and
handicrafts, and other vocations, like farming and fishery, that have occupied
great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary, is very old.
It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked
themselves into the very fibre of our language. Hence, though highly technical
in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more
generally understood, than most other technicalities. The special dialects of
law, medicine, divinity, and philosophy have also, in their older strata, become
pretty familiar to cultivated persons and have contributed much to the popular
vocabulary. Yet every vocation still possesses a large body of technical terms
that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has
been much increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various
departments of natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new
terms are coined with the greatest freedom, and abandoned with indifference when
they have served their turn. Most of the new coinages are confined to special
discussions, and seldom get into general literature or conversation. Yet no
profession is nowadays, as all professions once were, a close guild, The lawyer,
the physician, the man of science, the divine, associated freely with his
fellow-creatures, and does not meet them in a merely professional way.
Furthermore, what is called "popular science" makes everybody acquainted with
modern views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a
remote or provincial laboratory, is at once reported in the newspapers, and
everybody is soon talking about it--as in the case of the Roentgen rays and
wireless telegraphy. Thus our common speech is always taking up new technical
terms and making them commonplace. |
