TEXT E 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. In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the number of technical terms in the terminology of______.