"Adam Heyman" <aheyman at rcn.com> writes: > Mark A Mandel wrote: > || 2. The words introduced in the past four centuries have mostly been > || highly technical words that most of us wouldn't even recognize, let > || alone use. Lessee... pharyngealization, cytochrome, > || intertextuality... well, maybe in THIS crowd, but not to the average > || English speaker. > > Not all technical words are "highly" technical. Car, plane, radio, > radar, stereo, etc. are words that are not considered technical but > have been added to common parlance in the last century due to > certain technologies becoming common. I expect some of the > computer jargon that professionals use will seep into > everyday use (like 'logging on' has). And, to pick an example at random, "cabriolet" is a technical term *now* but was an ordinary, common, term to people back a while, in the same way "car" is to us now. > Balanced against this addition must also be considered the words lost > due to technology gains. The profession of cooper, for example, is not > as important now as in Shakespeare's time and most people today would not > even know what a cooper did. Wainwright is another example of the same. True enough. Of course *I* know both of those off the top of my head without even thinking about them, and most of the people I hang around with do too. Which just goes to show that the range of human variation is *far wider* than most of us know about, because people sort themselves and society sorts people into relatively homogenous chunks. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / New TMDA anti-spam in test John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/ New Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info