What the meaning means?the vocabulary of Science and Technology and its applications

Resumo

The omnipresence of the Media in the life of men has increased their influence in the linguistic habits and the use of specialized terms in the ordinary language of people. The introduction of neologisms is a phenomenon that goes au pair with the endless necessity of the Media to continuously produce numerous and more spectacular news. Science and Technology, as well the cutting edge application of their research disciplines in other tangible fields of the human life, like medicine, biology or ecology, have disseminated new terms in the ordinary speech. Many of those neo logisms, either as new terms, or as metaphorical descriptions of a more complex discovery, are already in use from million of men around the world. Their use is the upshot of a successful ‘endorsement’ of these terms, based on criteria sometimes other than their veracity, applicability and utility. These terms are derived from the specialized publications with the mediation of the Media networks. The mediation process means that every report about a new finding should be judged in order to be decided if makes a good ‘candidate for publication’, then re-interpreted in a most colloquial way to make the news and finally promoted and reiterated—depending of the amount of success such a new linguistic entity might have in the heavily mutable environment of the news. The introduction of these new terms by the media is concluded in such simplistic way that seems to obey in many tenets to the strictly psycholinguistic methods of the acquisition of a new language and the translation to another linguistic code, as well as to the intentional way of the transmission of a message according to the theory of information. The diminished value of the philosophical conditions about the truth- value or the justification of the meaning of individual terms, as well as the metaphysical upgrading of the descriptive importance of the neologisms are some of the consequences of these simplifications and generalizations. The present study examines, under the prism of an overlapping use of the theoretical instruments of the philosophy of language, sociolinguistics and sociology of the Media, the conditions that articulate the procedure by means of a cross reference of examples derived from publications on Science and Technology related articles in major News Agencies and newspapers sources. The study, by making recourse to theoretic and empirical data, tries to highlight the strategies and the hypothesis that underlie in this endeavor, which results to an ambiguous approach and hardly biased management of the original terms and descriptions provided by the science, due to the over- generalizations, simplifications and the hastiness of the Mass Media networks to transcribe even partial or non credible upshots of a research. This tendency permeates also the scientific community, which for its own reasons, of financial and internal competition, is prone to bias and computational manipulations.