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?
"A term in linguistics" is imprecise — it's also a term outside of linguistics. The phrase "term of art" means basically "I know that you think you know what this means based on the words, but it is a special defined term that means something particular in this field." It is generally used to correct someone who seems to be viewing a term of art as a common English phrase, so the precision is useful.
Seems like "idiomatic" already fits this perfectly. Is "term of art" in some way different? maybe has a more of a "you can't really understand it as an outsider," sense?:
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.
"Term of art" means that it has a technical meaning in a specific field, while "idiom" just means that a phrase has a meaning. For example, "a dime a dozen" is an idiom but not a term of art. If you wanted to avoid the phrase "term of art" for some reason, "idiom" would be a reasonable alternative.
"a technical meaning in a specific field" is one of the definitions of idiom (as given above)—they literally list 'jargon' as a synonym ("The specialized language of a trade, profession, or similar group, especially when viewed as difficult to understand by outsiders."). That entry was from: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
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'.
To start, “idiomatic” is an adjective while “term of art” is a noun. The word “idiom” in the sense you are quoting refers to the whole language/dialect/way of speaking, not one word. The sense of “idiom” meaning one phrase (maybe shortened from “idiomatic expression” or something?) does not mean the same thing as “term of art”, but is more like a common expression in a particular language / dialect. It does not have the sense of a specific technical meaning for a word, distinct from the ordinary definition.
These words are not synonyms, and should not be substituted.
And there’s what I was looking for :) I did overlook that ‘idiom’ applies to a full language/dialect.
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”.
A lot of things are jargon that are not terms of art. When I was practicing law, a lot of people in my legal circles would jokingly refer to their spouses as their "domestic associates". That's not a term of art, but it is lawyer's jargon or an idiomatic expression.
That’s an interesting example, though I read it as a kind of parody of jargon rather than actual jargon. It’s a tricky case though since jargon also has multiple senses and your classification fits one of them.
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.
I've found that using 'term of art' more effectively communicates 'this word has a domain-specific meaning that might differ from what you would naively think, pay attention' than simply saying 'x is an x term' or the like, which people tend to gloss over.
[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.
It’s pretty much exactly as intuitive as “state of the art”—a term of art I didn’t understand as anything beyond a superlative until I had heard it for 20 years and decided to give it a think. Which is to say, not very intuitive at all, until you just pick it apart and think about how it might relate in context, and then it’s just reflexive.
Terms of art are pre-scientific jargon that survive mainly due to utility. They are common in crafts such as pottery or the Law. They are references to heuristically derived conveniences. They're linguistically cool.
Not a computational linguist (or a linguist at all), but this is an area I know a bit about. The question you ask is at the centre of the study of ‘glottochronology’ [0]:
> 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.
It’s shorthand for “in context, that might not mean what you think it means.” I would use term of art to distinguish something that has a particular meaning for the context. For example “clobber” has a useful meaning, a meaning that many people use, but when programmers use it, it’s a term of art that means something specific and non-obvious.
Yes..it's a term in programming, a programming term.
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.
To my ears, "term of art" has a certain connotation of precision that the alternatives lack. Not just "this means something you might not guess" but "it has a very particular, well-defined meaning you might not guess."
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?