A "term of art" is a word or phrase which has a specific meaning in some specialty, not really known or understood by those outside it, and often entirely different from what they expect when hearing it.

For instance, the term "actual malice" is a term of art in American libel law, defined by the Supreme Court in a decision in 1964, and it has nothing whatever to do with malign intent.

We in computer science have a few I ran into in the last few days which I thought were interesting. One is "brute force", as an approach for solving certain kinds of problems.

Another is "phishing". And there's "honey pot".

These are words with actual technical value to those of us in the field, but they sound weird to those outside it.

ESR actually compiled a huge list of such terms one time, and has been maintaining it ever since. He calls it "jargon" but I don't think that's quite fair. These terms were created to satisfy a need, to describe things for which there were no standard terms previously.

Techies being what they are, it's not hugely surprising that the terms they chose were weird approaching facetious, but they don't exist simply to confuse outsiders.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 11:45 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 211 words, total size 1 kb.