Comment by somenameforme
17 hours ago
I've also wondered the same thing about healthcare and other fields. All the complex sounding phrases are child-like in simplicity in their "native" tongue, yet completely indecipherable to most people in modern times. Quite a weird and undesirable path we ended up going down through inertia.
It's useful to search for the same thing and get results in different languages
I’ve long considered medical jargon to be Latin Buffyspeak[1] because it’s usually just describing the body part, often simplistically, but in Latin so it sounds fancy.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak
It’s arguable whether it’s weird or undesirable. There are benefits to using unusual words when they have precise scientific or other technical meaning. It helps identify them as terms of art, so that they’re not confused with their native tongue equivalent, which invariably has much looser meanings.
Sure, but I think there's some cause/effect to consider there. The same logic would have applied in Ancient Rome, but I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings.
For example many food dishes we have retain basic naming conventions, yet have well understood meaning. In the US a customer ordering spaghetti is likely to be quite unhappy if they get a cream sauce, even though the order itself is literally just the name of the noodle.
"Spaghetti" is a great example - notice how you have specific expectations of food that happens to be named in a foreign (relative to where you live) language.
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> I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings.
Why would you expect that? It seems the opposite of what we see in practice. Colloquial language typically makes no concessions to technical usage.
Your example works against your own position. “Spaghetti” is an Italian word, much like the Greek portmanteau that started this discussion. The idea that it implies a particular sauce is purely regional, as you noted by saying “In the US”. (I had to ask an LLM what you might mean - apparently you would expect tomato sauce.) Ironically, that would not be expected in Italy.
So here we have a word taken from another language, which has a local connotation which depends on a shared context. As with all language, one has to learn that context. It doesn’t matter that much what the words are. If the word had been “thinnoodle” instead, that’s what you would have learned and been familiar with. (“Noodle” comes from German and entered English about 65 years before spaghetti, apparently.)
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