Here’s what I love about technical and scientific work: it brings with it a fantastic and varied vocabulary and creates new associations for common words. What makes writing fresh and exciting? A new voice, a new way of describing something we all can recognize. A new phrase made out of old words. Every discipline has its own specific lexicon, exotic and utilitarian at the same time.
Below is a brief sample of borrowed terms that are entertaining me at the moment. Want to play along? Start reading things outside of your usual choices. Pick up a magazine about astrophysics, knitting, veterinary medicine. See what you can find and steal for use elsewhere. If you find something great, add it in the comments.
Axiom of countable choice: This is “an axiom of set theory [that] states that any countable collection of non-empty sets must have a choice function. Spelled out, this means that if A is a function with domain N (where N denotes the set of natural numbers) and A(n) is a non-empty set for every n ∈ N, then there exists a function f with domain N such that f(n) ∈ A(n) for every n ∈ N.” Straight out of Wikipedia because I can’t explain it any better than that without screwing it up. One thing I can tell you is that it is not inductive, because countable choice is not the same as finite choice.
Chain of custody: This is a form that accompanies field samples on the way to a laboratory for testing. It provides a record to guarantee that the samples were not compromised. I love the idea of a metaphorical chain, a written tale of an item changing hands from creation to disposal. Imagine if every person had one.
Doctrine of signatures: Not a science term anymore, but this was cutting-edge medicine in the Middle Ages. First discussed by Dioscurides in Greece and Galen in Rome and later written about extensively by Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme, the doctrine advances the idea that living things will heal or affect parts of the human body that they resemble. For example, liverwort looks like a liver and is used to clean the blood. Earwigs were believed to make a fine remedy for earache. The idea is that of some divine pharmacist signing everything with its proper function for us, the alleged stewards of creation.
Shadow price of carbon: This reminds me of the Shadow Parliament or Shadow Ministers in the Westminster system of government, which sounds terribly sinister but is really just a form of checks and balances. If it makes you think of the Shadow Proclamation, well, I’m right there with you. The actual definition of the SPC is the long-term environmental cost of using or avoiding the use of a unit of carbon in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly everything has a shadow price: say, for example. you slip out of your office to grab a cup of coffee and miss a call from a client, who then offers a $40,000 job to someone else. The shadow price of coffee just became $40,002.