They really missed an opportunity by not calling it the Great Vowel Movement
Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?! What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?
Idiomatic:
A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on.
A specialized vocabulary used by a group of people; jargon.
Since idiom has both the structural denotation of a phrase being semantically 'atomic' (you lose the meaning if you break it into pieces), plus its synonymity with 'jargon', there appears to be nothing added in "term of art".
—but maybe this is a lesser known meaning of 'idiom'.
These words are not synonyms, and should not be substituted.
I think you’re overstating your case though when you say “It does not have the sense of a specific technical meaning for a word, distinct from the ordinary definition”—since jargon is a synonym for one sense of idiom and idiomatic is less specific in the group/individual distinction (and yes it’s an adjective but you can trivially employ it to construct an equivalent noun phrase so this matters little). That said my own case is clearly a stretch here lol.
Maybe more relevant is the fact one could just say “technical term” and they’d be understood perfectly—I’m pretty sure that phrase is the reason I’ve also never come across “term of art”.
I’m curious whether you would consider “domestic partnership” to be both jargon and a term of art (I would).
It’s interesting reviewing definitions of ‘jargon’: while you do find things like e.g. “ specialized technical terminology characteristic of a particular subject” —mostly you find references to incoherent/nonsensical speech.
[edit] I am pleased to see that HN readers as a group love to define things, and also that I need to learn to refresh tabs I've had open for a while before responding
Term of art doesn't really have a clear meaning in general (native English speaker, and this is the first time I've heard this), and it's unclear/ambiguous as to what it actually indicates.
"Domain-specific" is nonsense gibberish to people outside ~computing, more or less.
However, I was already familiar with "start of the art" so it wasn't that great a leap.
"Term of art" only implies that it is the specific phrasing used by practitioners to describe the matter at hand.
Use "term of art" if you'd like. I think "jargon" is a commonplace alternative and I like it.
In Math, lemma is a term of the art.
That's every word in existence
Could a computational linguist chime in please? How many words in how many human languages will never be spoken again in 2021?
> The original method presumed that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or constant average) rate across all languages and cultures …
Unfortunately, the only major discovery glottochronology has revealed is that rates of change vary too much to be of any use:
> in Bergsland & Vogt (1962), the authors make an impressive demonstration, on the basis of actual language data verifiable by extralinguistic sources, that the "rate of change" for Icelandic constituted around 4% per millennium, but for closely connected Riksmal (Literary Norwegian), it would amount to as much as 20%.
And there are other factors affecting replacement rate as well. For instance, a curious trait about the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea is that the word ‘louse’ is practically never replaced: it evolves according to normal sound change, but never gets thrown out entirely. By contrast, many languages have a taboo against mentioning the names of the deceased; this can speed up lexical replacement if those people have names homophonous with common words.
For these reasons, I suspect that a general answer to your question will be extremely difficult — if not impossible — to find.
Term doesn't imply a specialized meaning. Term of art does. And it doesn't have a negative secondary meaning like jargon.
None of these replies justifying "term of art" seem at all convincing to me. "Term doesn't imply a specialized meaning" – but I think it does here: if "clobber" didn't mean something different in programming, you wouldn't (need to) say "it's a programming term". "It's a programming term" precisely means "the term has a meaning in programming different to what it commonly means". The listener already knows it's a word in everyday English, which is apparently all "term of art" adds.
Probably a combination of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and virality (meme).
Is bikeshedding a habit or a temperament?
Glad to see someone managed to get the joke, anyway.