WHATS IN A (BIOLOGICAL) TERM - ...FREQUENTLY, A GREAT DEAL OF AMBIGUITY

'Scientific discourse is entirely suffused with ordinary language, wit h terms that bring with them all varieties of the imprecision scientis ts seek to avoid. More distressing yet, even technical terms turn out, far more often than we had hoped, to be plagued by the unruliness of ordinary language. By virtue of their dependence on ordinary language counterparts, techical terms carry, along with their ties to the natur al world of inanimate and animate objects, indissoluble ties to the so cial world of ordinary language speakers. In this way, even carefully delineated technical terms are bedeviled by semantic shadows that insi stently blur their borders.'