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thelegendarybirdmonster wrote

Reply to comment by ruin in Does anyone else struggle to untangle the language of academia in order to understand what a person is trying to communicate? by ziq

yes, he distinguishes between:

  • acid words: "new words" meant to make people think, describing something new (or renewed). They're used by the (((nerds))) of anarchism. acid because they have a ting

  • butter words: often "old" acid words, that are used by everyone, without really knowing what they mean, and without much of their original meaning. They're dissolved and are can be slipped in anywhere to make discourse slick (hence butter).

His approach was mostly from an activist side, but I feel like there's a similar phenomenon in science (the only academia I know) where new words appear. for example, I feel like "AI", "ML" were once acid words in CS, but are now butter words in everyday life.

In physics I don't have examples of words who's meaning have been dissolved (except for quantum maybe lol), but more that new words appear to distinguish different cases of some phenomena.

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ruin wrote

Cool. Thanks for the recap and posting the link. I’m definitely going to give it another read.

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masque wrote

I feel like "AI", "ML" were once acid words in CS, but are now butter words in everyday life.

I think "AI" has definitely been diluted to the point of near-uselessness, but ML is still useful for referring to an identifiable class of tools and techniques.

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