I think you’ve entirely missed my actual complaint here. There would have been nothing wrong with inventing a new term and using it to describe a wide class of structures. The problem is that the term already existed, and already had an accepted scientific definition since the 1960′s (adamantane family materials). If a term already has an accepted jargon definition in a scientific field, using the same term to mean something else is just sloppy and confusing.
I think it’s wrong to think of using a construction obeying the normal English rules of word construction as creating a new term. If I said that a person was “unwelcomable” that wouldn’t really be inventing a new term despite the fact that it doesn’t appear in a dictionary. It’s still a normal English word because it’s a normal English construction.
Yes, diamondoid as referring to the adamantane family might go back to the 1960s but in practice how many people understand it that way, 100,000? In theory everyone who has taken high school physics should understand the difference between speed and velocity but as people use it velocity is still most most commonly used as a synonym for speed and I think it’s useless to try to police that. And likewise “-oid” constructions that happen to collide with some field’s technical usage if the construction isn’t used in the formal context of that field.
I think you’ve entirely missed my actual complaint here. There would have been nothing wrong with inventing a new term and using it to describe a wide class of structures. The problem is that the term already existed, and already had an accepted scientific definition since the 1960′s (adamantane family materials). If a term already has an accepted jargon definition in a scientific field, using the same term to mean something else is just sloppy and confusing.
I think it’s wrong to think of using a construction obeying the normal English rules of word construction as creating a new term. If I said that a person was “unwelcomable” that wouldn’t really be inventing a new term despite the fact that it doesn’t appear in a dictionary. It’s still a normal English word because it’s a normal English construction.
Yes, diamondoid as referring to the adamantane family might go back to the 1960s but in practice how many people understand it that way, 100,000? In theory everyone who has taken high school physics should understand the difference between speed and velocity but as people use it velocity is still most most commonly used as a synonym for speed and I think it’s useless to try to police that. And likewise “-oid” constructions that happen to collide with some field’s technical usage if the construction isn’t used in the formal context of that field.