Reading this post at "Language Log" about the recent fuss over whether Pluto should be called a planet has led me to wonder: why don't scientists do more work with linguists on issues like this? If they had half the sense of Faraday, Maxwell, or any other of the major Victorian scientists, they would. It's common to find an attitude among scientists today that these purely verbal issues aren't important; but, to be quite frank, this is in most cases just because they have been spoiled by having most of the major terminological problems in their fields worked out long ago by people smarter than themselves. One of the refreshing things about Victorian scientists was that they appreciated the importance of words. They knew from their work, and their predecessors' work, in physics, chemistry, and biology, that good choices of words can simplify scientific work, both research and pedagogy, immensely. Bad choices of words are not trivial; they add up, bit by bit, and they slow scientific progress down. The more your words fit what you are trying to convey, the more durable your word choices are, the more recognizable your terminology would be to an educated person, the better things work: students learn faster, the public misunderstands less often, and a few scientists might be surprised at how much easier it is to communicate ideas when the words you have available for communication are less arbitrary and more sensible.
An ideal example is Faraday. When he chose the words "anode" and "cathode", he didn't choose them arbitrarily. He wanted words that would fit, that would convey at once to most educated people their relation to each other, and yet would be distinctive enough not to introduce confusions. He consulted William Whewell, asking him what he thought of the words 'eastode' and 'westode'. Whewell was one of the foremost educators of his day; he was the major historian of science of the nineteenth century; and his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences has a hefty section closely examining the desiderata for scientific terminology. Whewell suggested 'anode' and 'cathode'. Most educated people would have had at least some Greek and would recognize immediately the opposed root meanings ('path up' and 'path down'), they would be consistent with common scientific naming practices, and they would be distinctive enough not to cause confusion. And 'anode' and 'cathode' it was. (Whewell, of course, had no way of foreseeing a day like ours, in which very few educated persons know any Greek at all, and in which 'anode' and 'cathode' therefore could not pull any weight as terms.)
