Technical terminology





Technical terminology is the specialised vocabulary of a profession or of
some other activity to which a group of people dedicate significant parts of
their lives (for instance, hobbies). Sometimes technical terminology is
termed jargon.

Techical terminology exists in a continuum of "formality". Precise technical
terms and their definitions are formally recognised, documented, and taught
by educators in the field, and are similar to slang. The boundaries between
formal and slang jargon, as in general English, are quite fluid, with terms
sliding in and out of recognition. The relationship between formal and
informal technical vocabularies is discussed in the Jargon File (which is a
collection of informal jargon relating to the hacker community).

Technical terminology evolves due to the need for experts in a field to
communicate with precision and brevity, and is thus unavoidable and
desirable, but this often has the (usually) undesired effect of excluding
those who are unfamiliar with the particular specialized language of the
group. This can cause difficulties as, for example, when a patient is unable
to follow the discussions of medical practitioners, and thus cannot
understand their own condition and treatment. It also causes difficulties
where professionals in different but related fields use different sets of
specialized language and thus cannot understand each other's work - for
instance, substantial amounts of duplicated research occur in cognitive
psychology and human-computer interaction partly because of such
difficulties. However the terms of technical terminology are used to express
a great deal of information in a compact form. This makes it possible for
professionals to speak to each other without having to exhaustively describe
each concept; they can simply use the terms whose defintions are already
known in the profession.

The term 'jargon' can, and often does, have pejorative connotations,
particularly when aimed at "business culture". The marketing and public
relations industries are particularly relevant here, and have made
substantial contributions to the ever expanding lexicon of jargon that
permeates the global business environment.