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Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Some of them were definitely highly specific jargon to medical fields and the like. I'm betting fewer of them are made up than you think.

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Are they un-googleable jargon? I googled all of them, and about half of those searches yielded bupkis. Phoropter was the only medical term I found.

I wonder if there's jargon in the intelligence services that's classified?

Certainly some jargon is typical in spoken environments but rarely necessary in written contexts, just as vice versa. Not that I have any specific proofs on the specific words in the survey, but given at least one example of curious slang ("fleek"), I wouldn't put it past Randall to attempt to find some.

Also, the fun thing about pronounceable neologisms is even if Randall made them up, there's a curious tendency in English at least to actually start using some of them.

I checked them after I'd submitted the survey. The only real words that I hadn't ticked were "regolith" (I was almost sure it was a real word, but I didn't know the meaning of it), "phoropter" (I believed it could be a piece of engineering terminology, but again didn't know the meaning) and "peristeronic" and "apricity" (I would have given better than evens that these were made up).

Mmmm... no.

* Phoropter * Tribution * Slickle * Cadine * Fination * Apricity * Revergent * Unitory * Trephony

These are not words. They are not highly specific jargon either. They are just made up nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoropter https://wordnik.com/words/apricity

Seems you're right about the rest.

I'm not sure if it has been removed from most dictionaries, but apricity is commonly accepted as "The warmth felt from sunlight". Wiktionary lists it as obsolete though.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apricity

Because guessing games are fun:

Slickle is clearly onomatopoeia for something I probably don't want to know what.

Cadine is a name (which is certainly a type of word): http://www.babycenter.com/baby-names-cadine-891835.htm

Tribution and Revergent are likely plays on con- prefix removal and substitution (contribution, convergent). If they are not part of some jargon, they will be. Similarly, the morphological construction for Unitory (-tory is the latin agency prefix) I can certainly believe it to have jargon usage.

Trephony could be a form of this noun for different grammatical situations: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trephone That would suggest to me that it may be a biosciences jargon term already.

I would argue as a descriptivist that revergent is a legit English word - something that was previously divergent that is now tending towards convergence.

"Slickle" has an entry as slang in the urban dictionary.

"Revergent" gets a definition here[1] as "a mutation that precisely restores a mutant DNA sequence to a WT DNA sequence".

[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slickle [1] http://www.flashcardmachine.com/questions-set-2.html

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