Academic vs Technical Vocabulary: Differences & Examples

[00:00:00][Music] hello this is professor kinsley welcome back to my videos in this video i would like to talk about technical and academic vocabulary and how they are different and if i ask you how are they different well you think well they're often bigger longer words and that's often true but there's more to it than that we're going to talk about the jargon of different fields so jargon is the vocabulary that's unique to a particular field whether it's an academic or a journal field so for example footballers have their own jargon tennis players have their own jargon mechanics have their own jargon their special vocabulary as well as academic and technical fields like biologists and and physicists and linguists and psychologists and so on and then within more academic and technical fields sometimes we use the word nomenclature that means the technical and specialized vocabulary of a particular academic scientific or technical field so i want to talk about technical vocabulary today academic vocabulary and go through some examples to illustrate how they are different you often think of kind of words that are really specialized to particular fields that you don't hear about in other fields like if if you're not a linguist you're not going to know words like phonology and morphology and syntax well computer programmers use syntax but they mean something different and that's a good point sometimes words differ have different meanings in different fields and that's part of it so sometimes there are just very unique words but sometimes we take normal english words and we kind of press them into service and use them differently in different fields let's go through some examples first example well the word research what does it mean when you do research an average person might think well i've got a research paper to write for my college class so i go to the library go i go to the internet i read some scholarly articles and i kind of uh learn about the stuff in order to write my own paper and that's kind of more colloquial or common use of research which is okay in in that kind of context another use of research that's really colloquial and which which really bothers me actually is when it comes to like uninformed opinions about politics or popular issues people will say well i did my research and i found that coronavirus is a conspiracy from you know so-and-so government there's often nonsense what that means is not real research it means oh i went to google and i searched for some information that confirms my own stupid opinions or my own ill-informed opinions stuff written on blogs or youtube channels by people who don't really know what they're talking about i went and found information that confirms my own ideas especially people who promote really ill-informed claims will use such a language i did my own research now you did not do research you simply did a google search and found some somebody's information or ideas that fits your own preconceived ideas or biases or such and i want to say oh really you did your research did you have do you have your own research lab did you you recruit your own subjects do your your own statistical analysis no you didn't so that's a really uh abu that's a real abuse of the term research so again in normal kind of speaking normal language research i went to the library and i did some research to write this paper i had to do for my college class or company report or something like that that's okay in a non-academic sense but in an academic context it really is something different it means i did my own original research i conducted my own study i did my own scholarly research or my own scientific research myself for example as a professor as a full-time researcher as a grad student i conducted my own original research and that's an important way we're in which the word research really differs from kind of common or colloquial uses of the term research and it's really important to understand we're talking about original research that follows the established procedures within a field like uh within science you do your own research following you know the scientific methods of your field of study or in a social science like psychology or linguistics you use established procedures and techniques to do your own you know social science research or in humanities uh maybe it's more qualitative or theoretical but you're following the kind of guidelines and established procedures for doing original research in that field of study that would meet strict criteria for what could be published say in an academic research journal that's research let's take another one statistics statistics is another word that gets used very differently in common speech that then in uh say scientific or academic context and kind of more common speech where you're talking about elise and statistics uh here's some statistics and it's often things like frequencies how often something happens percentages like 49 percent of people surveyed say they you know they think this about the president count data ratios those are kind of what we would consider middle school uh statistics is the kind of stuff you learn in middle school or maybe high school and it's kind of numerical or quantitative data but it's not really quantitative research it's simple data that may or may not tell you anything in fact there are ways you can easily manipulate those kinds of statistics we call it descriptive statistics it merely describes things and but it doesn't necessarily tell you if it's really meaningful or not it really depends on the context and who collected the data and such a popular gum commercial in the us used to say well four out of five dentists recommend you use this gum who are these dentists you keep repeating that in your commercial but i mean who are these dentists how did you count them and show us the evidence how did you collect this data they don't say in academic context especially in quantitative research and in science fields social sciences statistics like descriptive statistics uh they're merely descriptive and it's not going to be the the main thing that we rely on in order to draw conclusions especially in quantitative research for example let's say we compare iqs of two groups now i don't quite believe in iqs is really valid but okay let's just take it as an example let's say we have the iqs for a set of maybe several hundred professors and let's say their average iq is 125.

[00:08:00]and then we also have iqs for people who are working as engineers and scientists in industries company like computer and tech companies and such let's say their average iq is 120 okay is there a meaningful difference you can't really tell necessarily because in one group you might have a lot more variation the actual scores might be more varied uh or in one group the skew the scores the iq scores might be skewed a lot more toward one end or the other that is you might have a lot more people on the lower end or higher end of the spectrum and you can't necessarily draw any conclusions like are these two groups really different intellectual intellectually we you don't know unless you do some more sophisticated statistics what we call inferential statistics in order to infer that there's a difference and i'll say more about statistics later on in another video so inferential statistics are tests that maybe you may not be familiar with unless you've taken a statistics course in college or in graduate school t-tests anovas correlation regression factor analysis all that fun stuff technical stuff it's more technical stuff that's designed to to actually look at a scientific hypothesis and compare two groups or look at a set of data and see is there something really meaningful going on that we can make a scientific conclusion about let's talk about correlation uh correlation is a relationship okay warm temperatures correlate with people having more time outside okay it's a it's a relationship but in in math and social science correlations more of a specific mathematical or statistical relationship that is you can plot if you remember your high school algebra like an x y chart if something goes up here in this axis it means that there's a correlation a positive correlation as you know this goes up this goes up for example temperatures go up and then heat strokes heat-related illnesses go up there's a mathematical correlation you can express it as a mathematical formula and what's important is correlation does not mean causation correlation does not mean causation in some cases you can say that if there's a causal explanation yeah higher temperatures more people going to the hospital for heat related illnesses of course there's a causal explanation in other cases there could be a correlation but no relationship no direct relationship maybe something else is causing it for example in summer more people eat ice cream more people also die from drowning like in the ocean does that mean ice cream causes drowning no there's a correlation but there's no relationship uh because the drowning in the ice cream consumption are both caused by something else which is the heat high temperatures are causing more people to eat ice cream and causing more people to go swimming and plus drown similarly you can make a correlation between eating ice cream and shark attacks because more people are swimming and happen to have encounters with sharks there's no relationship so there's no relationship we have to say correlation does not mean causation or correlation does not imply causation unless you have some kind of a causal explanation like a clear logical cause for why x would correlate with y let's talk about things like gravity you think of gravity is like you know that things fall down okay sure but you know a physicist would have a different understanding of gravity as an attractive force and depending on their how how they study it they might view gravity in terms of the attractive force on a cosmic scale between like large objects in the universe or in a very micro scale and how does gravity relate to other forces mass is another thing where physicists have a different understanding you think of mass okay as like okay wait 80 kilograms that's my mass well okay but you're thinking of weight probably in mass is something different you can look it up physicists have a so a different definition of mass that's more technical and it has to do with how an object's movement can be changed by an applied force or it's it's a technical definition that's different from your definition of mass you think of mass as kilograms and to physicists different than weight you think of mass and weight is the same to a physicist they don't care so much about weight uh usually they think about mass okay let's move on to different fields self-esteem self-esteem you might think that's how i feel about myself and generally true yes now in order to study it like in psychology though you need a more precise specific definition something you can measure so you need to define it in in a technical way in order to do psychology research especially if you're doing quantitative research and so the average person's definition of self-esteem will be different from how a psychologist defines it you might think of self-esteem as how i feel about myself and that's true but in order to study it you need a more precise definition and so psychologists will have more precise specific scientific definitions sometimes we use the term we operationalize that is we will maybe for the sake of a study will define it in a very particular way or it might be defined in a particular way in a in general in a particular area of research for example in psychology self-esteem is it's defined more like how you evaluate yourself and your worth and your abilities and it's considered a very complex kind of thing because self-esteem is actually has a number of different dimensions to it and there are different dimensions you can define in different psychological theories and you can come with come up with like a a quantitative survey that you can give to people to measure their self their their self-esteem along different dimensions so there's more of a precise technical definition of self-esteem and the different components or different dimensions of self-esteem same thing with happiness i mean psychologists want to study happiness for decades they studied okay what makes you depressed uh important research but there's there are also now psychologists who want us who want to study what makes us happy happiness research and in order to study it they're going to define happiness not in terms of like how you feel at the moment so in colloquial english happiness is like how you feel at the moment i feel really happy i just had a nice i just had the most wonderful chocolate i i've ever had i feel so happy uh or oh i got some money i feel so happy now it's momentary now in psychology though they'll they will define happiness more in terms of a longer term kind of mood or attitude that's stable over time so it's not like a momentary happiness but kind of more of your general satisfaction like life satisfaction or long-term emotional states that they can measure they can use surveys to measure your general happiness or life satisfaction in order to study what what makes people happy in life what makes people feel more satisfied with their lives than others now let's look at metaphor okay metaphor here's an interesting word we think you know what metaphor is okay you learned that in maybe high school middle school english or language class literature class sure uh in literature theory literature specialists will define a metaphor in a very certain way it's a specific type of idiomatic expression that has a certain structure in linguistics there is an area of linguistics that also talks about metaphor uh but in a different way it's a and it's a different understanding of metaphor compared to say literature scholars literature scholars will define it as a certain way as a literary device linguists talk about it in more in terms of semantics and pragmatics like the meaning of words and how the meaning kind of gets extended and used differently in different contexts so for example linguists who talk about metaphor will look at things like okay phrasal verbs like prices went up that's sort of a metaphor and a literature scholar would say that's not a metaphor but a linguist who works within say cognitive linguistics will say yeah so there's the literal meaning of go up to rise and then there's a more metaphorical use in things like prices went up this has gone the price has gone up it's a metaphor it's a meaning extension that's based on but not the same as the literal meaning of physically going up and language language is full of metaphors like that in fact when i said language is full of metaphors i use the metaphor full of that's a metaphor as in like physically filled up but i'm talking about something abstract language language is full of metaphors english and other languages are full of metaphors we use linguistic metaphors all the time and we don't use literal interpretation as much as you would think because there's so much metaphorical uses the way we use words in a different way than their original literal meaning that's linguistic metaphor let's take narrative narrative is a term in literature that has a certain definition a sort of sequence event of events like a story a personal experience it's a sort of genre so literature scholars will talk about narrative as sort of a genre or a technique or or mode there'll be a technical literary definition of narrative something story like a story like description of something there's a sequence of events now in psychology there is also the word narrative and it's used differently narrative in psychology is something like this if i ask you okay what kind of person are you what made you the way you are and i would get you to tell me your life story not like the mundane details like i was born like you know in october or in such and such a city but tell me about the kind of person you are and the key events in your life that made you the way that you are the key experiences and events in your life that shaped you and made you the person you are and it's a very complex kind of set of experiences and identity it's kind of your a sense of identity and shaped by your experiences it is a psychological concept of who you are and what made you that way it's a way of talking about your psychological identity your sense of yourself and this word also gets used in other contexts we talk about a political narrative in political science for example politicians have different narratives oh this is uh like conservative politicians might say this is our narrative of how our country came to be and what our we believe in as patriotic citizens of our country this is our history and what made us the way we are this is our character and maybe liberals or progressives will say no it's more like this different focus a different narrative this is our this is what we believe our story is as our country what kind of people we are what kind of people we should be our values and the history of our our understanding of the history of our country that shaped us those are political narratives that's become an important thing because more and more we see real strong differences in the way that politicians on the right to the left talk the way that they understand what they're talking about the way they explain to voters okay this is why the economy is bad this is what the other side has done it's part of their narrative they're the other side they're not patriotic they're trying to destroy a country they're trying to ruin a country well they're thinking within a political narrative a framework a sort of complex understanding of how things are and how things have come to be in their country or in the world another one myth myth you think of as just a false story but in literature and anthropology and sociology and other fields it's a more of a genre is it more of a technical name for genre it's uh some kind of a story or history that's and the focus is not the fact that it's false normally we think of a myth as something that's false in kind of common speech but as a genre in literature in other fields it's more like it is a genre it's a type of story that explains for example where a people came from or extinct lane it explains why things are so a lot of national myths or cultural myths the focus is not so much on the fact that they're not true there's probably some element of historical truth to a number of myths but the focus is it's kind of an old story that explains where this people came from it explains origins or explains causes why things are the way they are where did our country come from so we even speak of american history as being somewhat of a myth because how it's presented to school kids is sometimes inaccurate and it's kind of mythical it gets kind of idealized distorted and and so americans might grow up with kind of a mythical a somewhat unrealistic understanding of their of their origins their national narrative and true for a lot of countries or cultures and such so when we talk about see religious literature as myth literature scholars are not trying to insult it and put it down and say it's not true no they're talking about these stories and say religious literatures with scriptures and religious texts whose function is to explain okay why things are the way they are why is the world bad why do men and women seem to have different roles in this society at least in traditional societies it's because of the founding myths these religious stories that are designed to explain things and that's what a myth is in literature now let's take language it's actually complex what is language depends on who you ask now for the average person language is like oh there's french and there's german there's english okay those are languages but what about language so linguist would think of language as a general human ability all humans are capable of language whether it's english french korean chinese or sign language that's language it's universal human ability and even then there are different ways of understanding it depending on what kind of linguist you are if you're a linguist who focuses on languages a cognitive psychological ability or as a logical system or as a social phenomenon a social system and i'll talk more about that in another video then there are languages and like french and german and english and dutch okay anything okay no problem sure that's easy right well what about this how do you define what is the german language can well you may think well can they understand each other well okay think about this you have standard german down here in switzerland you get some you get this these these really hard german dialects they're considered german um but i can't understand them a typical german from germany can't understand them yet it is considered german and swiss people about 70 percent who identify as linguistically german will call their language german although it's very hard for germans to understand and then going looking at kind of northern germany and holland you've got dutch dutch the dutch language spoken in holland well along the border there are a lot of dialects of dutch that are similar to the dialects of german on the other side of the border and some of these dialect speakers can understand each other dutch dialect speakers and german dialect speakers where do you draw the line it's kind of arbitrary because it's partly based on cultural and national identity uh if you've got the sort of dutch that's spoken in belgium which we call flemish where do you draw the lines it's the same almost as the dutch spoken in holland but sometimes it gets called flemish like it's a different language and it's not it's really like a different dialect defining a language is really hard you could uh you could do the same thing with chinese what is chinese because the chinese spoken in beijing is not the same as what's spoken in hong kong and linguists will consider the hong kong chinese to be to be a completely different language called cantonese and in fact linguists distinguish about five different chinese languages that are separate languages mandarin in uh northern china spoken by especially by educated speakers and various similar dialects in northern china and you've got cantonese and hakka and other dialects in the chinese speaking world people from these different dialects or language groups can't understand each other they're like different languages so how you define a language the way a linguist would consider a language is different from the average person the average person is not aware of these complications but a linguist is going to say well it's a complex thing because it depends on well can you understand each other mutual intelligibility can two people from these different language varieties understand each other but then there are also cultural social political factors involved as well and sometimes the distinctions are somewhat arbitrary like defining dividing up german and dutch it's kind of like a continuum from flemish dutch north german standard german swiss german linguists have a different understanding of how you define a language or how you define language so technical vocabulary academic and scientific vocabulary is different from colloquial english not only because there are a lot of specialized unique words in different academic fields that are not known outside of that field but there are a lot of words common english words that get used differently in academic fields and they get used differently in different academic fields think about the way narrative use their word narrative is used in literature studies versus psychology versus political science for example the way that language is used differently by different types of linguists different types of social scientists for example these are things to be aware of as you are studying in an academic field and as you're learning to write in an academic field because you have to get used to the vocabulary of your field and how words are used differently in your field in your particular field and it might look like a common english word but it might be used differently it might even be used differently by different scholars or different schools of thought and that's something you have to pay attention to as you're learning to write in an academic field as you're studying in an academic field next time i'm going to talk about an important word that's the word theory because it means something very different in academic and scientific english and it's really important that you understand this no matter what academic field you are in because most in the academic field is going to use the word theory in a way that's different than in colloquial common english and as well you might also use words like model and law and hypothesis and it's important to understand the difference more in the next video thank you for listening and i'll see you in the next one goodbye [Music]