Listening to an Iranian official describe his region as “West Asia” got me wondering if the word “Middle East” is on the outs and why. I suspect Middle East is eurocentric for some reason, but West Asia also preserves Europe as a continent, which is Eurocentric in its own way because Europe is not a continent and never was. If we’re calling anything West Asia, it should be Spain and Portugal.
I’d argue that this is closer to “don’t put tomatoes in a fruit salad” rather than the Pluto thing.
There’s no colloquial definition of planet that would include Pluto and exclude the potentially hundreds of things like Pluto in our solar system save for “what I learned in school.” Pluto got planetary status because humanity saw it. It lost it because we found out more about it, it’s neighbors, and planets in general. Because no other definition really makes sense the scientific one prevails.
There are multiple colloquial definitions of continents and fruits/vegetables that make sense that are at odds with any scientific understanding therefore the scientific one doesn’t prevail.
That’s all well and good for terms that originate from and remain in science–there’s probably never going to be a conflicting term for “adenosine triphosphate” for instance, but for terms that originated elsewhere first and science had to adopt that’s not gonna happen. My previous comment was to your assertion that continent is a scientific term, when in reality it’s use predates the establishment of geology as a formal discipline by hundreds of years. To claim therefore that it is a scientific term and that you want it to stay that way is predicated on an untrue foundation.
There’s really no way to stop the masses from picking up and misusing scientific jargon, and whereas science is the means through which humanity learns more about the world, continued scientific progress will inevitably lead to more new terms that leak from science into a common parlance. When talking to scientists you just gotta mean the scientific thing; when talking to others you just gotta mean the other thing.
It’s also not just science, BTW. Every field has specialty language that conflicts. If you’re not a programmer you may not know what a string is. If you’re not in IT, you may not know the difference between a CPU and a monitor. That’s fine. That’s just how language works, and that’s what let’s us communicate with each other.
That was an enjoyable and elucidating read! Thank you!