Quotes About Terminology

How does hanky-panky translate to sex? Who comes up with words like that? Probably people who don't have sex

There ain't no such thing as lumberjack, that must be a Back East expression. Up here we call 'em loggers.

There are three types of words: words we all know, words we should know, and words nobody knows. Don't use the third category.

A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'

In Cal's view, morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn't mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair, and Cal would bet a year's pension that the little twerp would have brought it up if he had.

In Cal's view, morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn't mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair

I could tell you all the medical terminology,' She says. 'But what finally happened is his heart got to big for his body'

Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual?

The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don't come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He'll use his word, and if I understand it, I'll say, "Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?

One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

I was to suffer considerably from the wide acceptance of the dictionary's limited definition of the word, transvestite. Perhaps my discomfort was not without some reason, for since then, a number of medical authorities have posed the question of whether or not it is advisable to apply new terms to cases such as mine.

This is made additionally problematic by the tendency of modern medicine to fall back on the use of euphemistic

the country's designation remained "the United States of America," with its people appropriating the name that belonged to all the peoples of the New World—even though the term "Americans" actually had begun as a pejorative label the metropolitan English had applied to their inferior and far-removed colonists.101

What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik

If there wasn't an English word for it, though, then it was probably work best avoided, at least until she was really desperate. The

the guy said industry slang for flight attendant was Space Waitress. Or Air Mattress.

Evangelical preaching was also characterized by the extemporaneous interlacing of biblical passages with descriptive evangelical terminology that was designed to awaken people emotionally to their sins and cause them to tremble, shed tears, and fall to the ground.

Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene.

By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.

There is in fact no Greek equivalent to our barren term 'sex.' This English word in its present usage emerged only in the nineteenth century, out of clinical discourse. Greeks spoke of what we now call 'sex' by referring to gods - Eros and Aphrodite.

Now the denominator ... why don't they just call it the bottom number? The denominator ... that sounds like a Schwarzenegger movie doesn't it? [impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger] I am the Denominator. I'll give your leg a compound fraction!

Translators need a lot of skills besides fluency in at least two languages; translators need to be excellent writers in their native language and need to be interested in and skilled at terminology research using both paper dictionaries and the Internet.

In the English language, the word "sadism" only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn't until 1897 that it first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) In that sense, "sadism" is like "serial killer": a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon.

I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man. A bachelor, according to the dictionary, is a man who has never been married. An unmarried man is not married at the moment. Many of these terms have fallen into disuse.