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Terms on the road Terms are not always able to stay in the use of a certain specialty, but they move from one specialty to another and across the boundaries of general and specialized languages. A term created in a scientific field can be adopted into the general language, and on the other hand, words from the general language are also taken as terms, which thus become specialized for use in the scientific field (e.g. Pitkänen 2008). Terms can take on metaphorical meanings when borrowed from one discipline to another: for example, valence has found its way from chemistry to grammar, and morphology , i.e. the theory of shape, is examined both in linguistics and, for example, in botany.
Thus, words end up in different environments during their wanderings and have Australian B2C Email List meanings – everyday or specialized – because the meanings change when the environment changes. For this reason, writing the context open can be important when introducing terms, so that the reader can get to the bottom of what kind of meaning is involved at any given time. A juicy example of a wandering term is a meme , introduced in a nonfiction book about viruses as follows: Richard Dawkins introduced the term meme in his book The Selfish Gene.
However, memes were not the actual theme of the book, but only a side plot in Dawkins' argumentation – – . But what is a meme? It was introduced semi-stealth in The Selfish Gene , and it helps us understand both the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel. According to Dawkins' definition, a meme is a gene of culture. (Jalasvuori 2015 p. 103–104.) A noteworthy point of departure is that the author names the meme specifically as a term.
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