> See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but you've simply failed on step one to identify how humans communicate. No. There are two distinct ways in w

> See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but you've simply failed on step one to identify how humans communicate. No. There are two distinct ways in which humans communicate. • Humans create and use words, whose usage stretches and spreads and grows and can only be defined descriptively. • Humans (doing professional/technical/scientific work) also define-into-existence jargon terms — the meaning of which is set in stone at the moment of creation. Jargon terms are verbal handles we use to grasp parts of particular, well-defined mental models — models that are taught and learned as coherent systems of such terms; models that exist to enable their users to think rigorously, and collaborate without corruption of meaning/loss of rigor, to "get things done" in those professional/technical/academic contexts. Jargon terms, therefore, can always be said — definitively, objectively(!) — to have been employed correctly or incorrectly in any given text, per the mental model in which the jargon term is defined. Sometimes, professionals/technical people/scientists are dumb and silly, and attempt to invent a jargon term made of words, where those words, put together in that order, have such an obvious, novel, and useful lay usage, that it is inevitable that anyone who hears the term will already think they know what it means, before ever being formally taught what it means. "Begs the question" is an example of this — there is something so uniquely useful about the lay meaning of that phrase (essentially "a situation that demands that an unstated question be asked"), that whoever named (or more likely, translated from Latin into English) that logical fallacy, made a mistake by choosing to use those words to name it. But that situation is rare. Most of the time, professionals/technical people/scientists make up a word all on their own, to be jargon, entirely for their own use. (Often they use Latin for this, as an intentional way to dodge the aforementioned problem of the word "seeming like it has an intuitive meaning" in any living language. But they don't have to. They can also just make up a nonsense word, perhaps one inspired by a Latin prefix or something — a word like "gene.") And then, through a pipeline of scientific discoveries, to science journalism, to pop-science, to regular people just talking about how their aunt has asthma due to "that bad gene she got from her father" — somewhere along the line, someone screws up in how they're using the jargon term; and that screwed-up understanding proliferates. But jargon terms — at least the ones that are part of mental models anyone still employs any more — must still be used to do work. And they cannot function to do that work, if people can't use them with the implicit understanding that they are communicating an exact, precise, well-defined idea. Such words are not merely words; they are professional tools. The professionals that use these tools, cannot allow them to be corrupted, to have their meanings diffuse. And so, at least the professionals themselves, will always be taught that any jargon term they learn has one specific meaning — that it acts as a handle for a particular concept in a particular mental model. And those professionals will insist on this strictness when working with any technical writer or editor. And this strictness diffuses from there, into any editorial context where editors consider themselves to be professionals, working for a publication that expects professionalism — whether that publication is technical or non-technical. In professional editing, is always expected that if any term (word or phrase) is used which is known to be a (unique, non-colliding) jargon term rooted in some technical/academic mental model, then that term should only be permitted if it is being used with its original jargon meaning. Any other handling of such a term is considered a usage error, effectively a typo. (For non-unique/colliding jargon terms where lay usage exceeds jargon usage, the lay-usage is given represented by plain printing, while the jargon usage is represented by italic printing. This only ever comes up with phrases — "begging the question" again — because even the most ivory-tower academics know that overloading the meanings of single extant lay words is a stupid way to invent jargon.)