Jawing about jargon

Creating better communication

Scientists need to be able to communicate with others in their field. They say what they mean (most of them, most of the time, to the best of their ability), but what they mean can’t be said in the English language that people use to talk about routine daily matters.

Like people working in every field, scientists develop vocabularies of technical terminology and other forms of jargon so they can better communicate with other scientists. It’s important that the scientist sending the information and the scientist receiving it both use the same words to refer to the same phenomenon. To understand anatomy and physiology, you must know and use the same terminology, too. The jargon can be overwhelming at first, but understanding the reason for it and taking the time to learn it before diving into the complicated content will make your learning experience less painful.

 

Establishing precise terminology

The second part of the answer starts with a little chat about jargon. Contrary to the belief of some, jargon is a good thing. Jargon is a set of words and phrases that people who know a lot about a particular subject use to talk together. There’s jargon in every field (scientific or not), every workplace, every town, even every home. Families and close friends almost always use jargon in conversations with one another. Plumbers use jargon to communicate about plumbing. Anatomists and physiologists use jargon, much of which is shared with medicine and other fields of biology, especially human biology.

Scientists try to create terminology that’s precise and easy to understand by developing it systematically. That is, they create new words by putting together existing and known elements. They use certain syllables or word fragments over and over to build new terms. With a little help from this book, you’ll soon start to recognize some of these fragments. Then you can put the meanings of different fragments together and accurately guess the meaning of a term you’ve never seen before, just as you can understand a sentence you’ve never read before. Table 1-1 gets you started, listing some word fragments related to the organ systems we cover in this book.

TABLE 1-1 Technical Anatomical Word Fragments

Body System	Root or Word Fragment	Meaning
Skeletal system	os-, oste-, arth-	bone, joint
Muscular system	myo-, sarco-	muscle, striated muscle
Integument	derm-	skin
Nervous system	neur-	nerve
Endocrine system	aden-, estr-	gland, steroid
Cardiovascular system	card-, angi-, hema-, vaso-	heart (muscle), vessel, blood vessels
Respiratory system	pulmon-, bronch-	lung, windpipe
Digestive system	gastr-, enter-, dent-, hepat-	stomach, intestine, teeth, liver
Urinary system	ren-, neph-, ur-	kidney, urinary
Lymphatic system	lymph-, leuk-, -itis	lymph, white, inflammation
Reproductive system	andr-, uter-	male, uterine

But why do these terms have to be Latin and Greek syllables and word fragments? Why should you have to dissect and put back together a term like iliohypogastric? Well, the terms that people use in common speech are understood slightly differently by different people, and the meanings are always undergoing change. Not so long ago, for example, no one speaking plain English used the term laptop to refer to a computer or hybrid to talk about a car. It’s possible that, not many years from now, almost no one will understand what people mean by those words. Scientists, however, require consistency and preciseness to describe the things they talk about in a scientific context. The relative vagueness and changeability of terms in plain English makes this impossible. In contrast, Greek and Latin stopped changing centuries ago: ilio, hypo, and gastro have the same meaning now as they did 200 years ago.

 Every time you come across an anatomical or physiological term that’s new to you, see if you recognize any parts of it.

Using this knowledge, go as far as you can in guessing the meaning of the whole term. After studying Table 1-1 and the other vocabulary lists in this chapter, you should be able to make some pretty good guesses.