Scientific and Technical Neology

Abstract

Our "Knowledge Society" is justification enough for the great interest allotted to scientific and technical neology, as examples of lexical creativity. The paper discusses Chomsky's argument concerning the two forms of understanding pertaining to science and common sense and the chief means of scientific neology, with comments centered on the medical vocabulary as well as on Darwin's Origin of Species. In guise of conclusions, a few questions which seem to me relevant at the beginning of the new century and millennium.