Notes about Terminology and Nomenclature

Extract

There seems to be a disturbing rate of increase in new scientific and technical terms. The purpose of these notes is to stimulate a discussion of this trend.

When inventing or introducing new terms the following points should be borne in mind: (1) is a new word necessary or desirable, (2) is it apt and well-constructed?

As regards (1) the usual justification is that science and engineering are developing so fast that in order to communicate new ideas and new concepts an increase in the vocabulary is essential. This, however, can be overdone. The very act of coining a new word implies a theoretical assessment, almost an acknowledgment of the fact that a concept or phenomenon, or particle has a well defined identity. The following, somewhat exaggerated examples, illustrate this point. It would have been most unfortunate if spectroscopists at the end of the last century had insisted on giving one and the same chemical element different names according to the wavelength of the light they emitted. I wonder whether the many names allocated to elementary particles today may not become an embarrassment should it turn out that they are in many cases just excited states of one and the same particle. Conversely, one must applaud the restraint of the nuclear physicists for not giving separate names to various radioactive isotopes. After all, as far as nuclear properties go, many isotopes (e.g.⁵⁷Co, ⁵⁸Co, ⁶⁰Co) have very little in common. And, although we have a separate name for the heavy hydrogen isotope (deuterium), physicists and chemistsi have so far resisted the temptation to give the light isotope of helium (³He) a name and we are still spared “trelium”.