Coping with the words

It’s easy to find yourself reacting against the very words used in study texts, regardless of the subject matter. It often seems as though you are struggling with a foreign language. For example, as I was reading the Collee article, I found myself wondering:

… what exactly is a microbe? Is it the same as a micro-organism? Does it matter whether I know? Do I need to be able to distinguish viruses, bacteria, fungi and protozoa from each other? Does an intoxication have anything to do with being drunk? Do I need to stretch my mind around Clostridium botulinum and all those other Latin names, or can I let my eyes just skim over them? How do you pronounce them anyway, and why are they written in italics in the article? And although I’m as familiar as I would wish to be with diarrhoea, will I ever remember how to spell it?

Difficult words

Should you stop and look up difficult words in a dictionary?

It depends. Of course, it will slow you up if you do it a lot. You have to decide whether a word seems important. Does it come up regularly? Do you seem to be missing something?

For example, even if you haven’t come across the word ‘misnomer’ before, you can probably guess what it means well enough for the purposes of the Collee article. (And you’ll find it isn’t very common in science texts anyway.) With a word like ‘genus’ – you can get by for now without knowing what it means – but it will keep on turning up if you study life sciences. Eventually, if it hasn’t been explained in one of your texts, you ought to check its meaning in a dictionary. You’ll have to make your own judgement as to whether not knowing the exact meaning of a word is interfering with your understanding of the text.

Unfamiliar words not only make it a struggle to squeeze meaning out of the text, they can also make you feel excluded from the ‘in-crowd’ of people who

casually bandy these terms around. Are these terms really necessary? Or are they just a way of keeping ordinary folk off the territory?

Technical language

Everyone finds unfamiliar specialist language off-putting and frustrating.

Yet specialists have to develop their own ‘language’; it gives them extra power in analysing their subject in a detailed and systematic way. In fact, as you study a subject and become more of a ‘specialist’ yourself, you will gradually find yourself using the same language without noticing it.

It is not done deliberately to annoy students. Developing new concepts and fitting new words to them are part of the process of producing new

knowledge. At times, the technical language may be overdone. On the other hand, you cannot hope to enter a new subject area without learning some

‘specialist’ language.

So, don’t let irritation and confusion over words hinder your progress.

Instead, work out ways of tackling the problem.

Scientific vocabulary

When I looked for ‘protozoa’ in my dictionary, I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found ‘protozoan’, which turns out to be the singular of protozoa. That’s one of the problems with Latin names – apart from their unfamiliar look and sound – you don’t just add an ‘s’ to make the plural. ‘Data’, for example, is the plural of ‘datum’, just as ‘bacteria’ is the plural of ‘bacterium’. Yet you hardly ever hear of a ‘datum’, and people often use ‘data’ as if it were the singular, saying ‘that’s what the data tells us’ instead of ‘that’s what the data tell us’. It can get quite confusing. However, as you become used to studying in a particular field, you gradually get used to the odd-sounding words. If there are lots of Latin names in your subject, you could decide to look up a couple each study session and gradually build up your own list of definitions.

You’ll come across difficult Latin names as the proper names of biological organisms (for example, the bacteria mentioned in the Collee article). Don’t feel that you have struggle to pronounce or remember these mouthfuls; as a beginning student, you’ll probably be expected to do no more than use the organism’s common name, if it has one, or refer to it in some other way (for example, as ‘the bacterium that causes botulism’). But remember, if you do use the Latin name of an organism, it must be in italics (or underlined, if handwritten): for example, Clostridium botulinum.

One way to tackle the problem is to buy a specialist dictionary for the subject you are studying (although these are sometimes quite difficult and technical in themselves). It may also be a good idea to keep a good-sized general

dictionary close at hand as you study (for example, The Concise Oxford Dictionary). I looked up ‘micro-organism’ in my dictionary, and it said ‘any organism of microscopic size’ (which is pretty much what it sounds like). The definition of ‘microbe’ was very similar, so that answered one of my

questions.

The definition my dictionary gave for protozoan was ‘any minute invertebrate of the phylum Protozoa’. This wasn’t a lot of help. If I don’t know what a phylum is, I now have to look that up as well. And basically, the definition was telling me that a protozoan is very small, has no backbone and is one of those things we call ‘protozoa’. I didn’t feel that my understanding had moved on. It’s often that way with dictionaries: you keep looking things up, but you don’t always find what you want.

With a specialist science dictionary, much more information is given under

‘micro-organism’. First, I’m told it’s an organism that can be seen only with the aid of a microscope. Then, I’m given a list of examples: bacteria, some fungi, viruses, and single-celled plants and animals, including protozoa. Then, there is some general information on beneficial micro-organisms – the part they play in decay and decomposition, and their importance in food chains in the sea. If I look up bacteria, some information is given on their appearance, how they are classified, how they reproduce, and so on. There are a lot of unfamiliar words, and more information than I need to make sense of the Collee article. It’s important that I’m not side-tracked by words and ideas that I don’t need to grasp at the moment. I can always come back to these entries in the dictionary when I need to.

Dictionaries

A dictionary is an important resource to have handy, but don’t expect it to be infallible. Some specialist words will not appear in a general dictionary – and, as you’ll see in later chapters, words that do appear may not be defined the same way in your subject area. A dictionary is a useful guide when you are lost, but often you can get a better insight into the meaning of key terms from your study texts.

You might want to develop a system for writing down words that seem important as you come across them, so that you can add new clues to the meaning when you see them used in other ways. You could use a card index, starting a new ‘concept card’ for each word you think is worth the trouble (see Figure 2.1 overleaf). If you keep the cards filed alphabetically, you can find them quickly and add new bits of information each time you come across the word in a new context. Try starting your own collection and see whether this system suits your style of studying.

Figure 2.1 A ‘concept card’