4 ms·

Changing what something has been called for a long time because the word has (relatively) recently been coopted to mean something else sounds like a really bad

• Osmium 11y ago
  > Changing what something has been called for a long time because the word has (relatively) recently been coopted to mean something else sounds like a really bad idea to me. It's how language change works though. Very few words still mean what they meant several hundred (or even tens of) years ago. The people who write dictionaries are perfectly pragmatic about this. What is the aim of journalism on a mainstream news website? To communicate? If you want to communicate with someone who doesn't have a science background, a member of the public, you have to be sensible about it. So what's the alternative to "organic" in that context? "Carbon-containing"? The latter is far less misleading to the average person. And to people who understand both, either works. So why wouldn't you want to do that? It's pure stubbornness on behalf of scientists (and I say that as a professional scientist myself) to be prescriptivist about this sort of thing. And, again, I'm not suggesting we stop using the word in technical contexts (the classroom, textbooks, journals, etc.). It's just that I've been at a few outreach events recently, and I talk to people casually a lot, and so many people read "organic" in a headline and think "signs of life" that it's obscene. It's a real problem. We can either choose to try and communicate better, or we can carry on misleading people–because we are misleading them, whether we like it or not. Burying our heads in the sand and just pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.