Nominalisation: turning difficult ideas into wordsīut science isn’t simply about labelling phenomena in new ways. From “insect”, we can make all kinds of cool words, such as insectile, insectarium, insectivore, insecticide, even insectiferous. Greek and Latin not only loaned us words but also their “morphology”. To know “insect” you need to understand “arthropod”, and that means understanding “invertebrate” and “phylum” – the list goes on. Small air breathing arthropod having the body divided into three parts (head, thorax, abdomen) and having three pairs of legs and usually two pairs of wings.Īn insect, unlike a bug, is a scientific concept – it’s an abstract bug. From Latin came, among many others, the word “insect”, which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is a: Way back then, English was preparing itself for its part in the “Scientific Revolution”.įor the newly-emerging disciplines of science to get past their L-plates, they needed a special kind of language – new kinds of words, words that declared themselves to be distinct from those of everyday experience.Įnglish borrowed from Latin and Greek and produced a specialised, technical vocabulary. To fully appreciate Munroe’s achievement, we need to go back at least a few centuries, to the later period of the Renaissance. Thing Explainer: Complicated stuff in simple words.
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