The Accidental Elitist: Academia is too important to be left to academics
I&#x27;m going to be snobby. There is a vast VAST difference between the humanities and social sciences and natural sciences with jargon use. There are a shitload of things no one ever talks about that need a name. Jargon in natural science is used to speak precisely, but in social science it&#x27;s invariably used to speak in general terms. In human geography the words &quot;place&quot; and &quot;space&quot; for example are quite maddening to a scientist.<p>In natural science words aren&#x27;t made up to replace simpler common words about phenomena most people are aware of. Instead the names for the most part are very specifically <i>systematic</i> and precise especially in Chemistry. So from a composite name like &quot;hydrogen dioxide&quot; and &quot;carbon dioxide&quot; you get an idea of similarity. If everyone spoke about &quot;water&quot; and other dioxides, it&#x27;s actually less obvious you&#x27;re only talking about dioxides.<p>The worst offenders in natural science are for sure people who work in taxonomy and phylogenetics. They still demand that everyone understand Latin and use really ridiculous names for most species. It took me two years to realise all the things with &quot;carteri&quot; in the name wasn&#x27;t something meaningful. It just meant &quot;Carter&#x27;s&quot;, who was the victorian mutton-chop-rocking guy who discovered them. But the naming of species isn&#x27;t very systematic in general, and is frequently whimsical.<p>A fun example is &quot;Selenochlamys ysbryd&quot; one of the only species to be designated with a Welsh-Latin fusion name <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ghost_slug#Etymology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ghost_slug#Etymology</a> I like that they got away with it, but I doubt anyone got from &quot;ysbryda&quot; the slug would look &quot;ghostly&quot;. I can&#x27;t even argue with the use of latin, there is too much stuff to name in just english without it becoming incredibly confusing. There&#x27;s only so many ways you can say &quot;brown beetle&quot;.