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7 September 2005: I've probably written about this before, but it seems to me that my field should have been biochemistry. It's very visual, and mathematical, and challenging. What blocked me from it was, you guessed it, the goddamned terminology! All those names of different carbon clusters, etc. I hate specialists' terminology as much as anyone. But the more I try to figure out how things like the human brain and poetry work, the less headway I can make without very specific terms. Many of those don't exist. So I have to make them up. Others are hiding from me. So, I have to make up new names for what they represent. Yet others exist that seem no longer viable because of excessively irresponsible usage. These, I try to replace with terms that, at least so long as I'm the only using them, will keep from sogging into polysemy and losing all usefulness for anything but blab, gush, and propaganda. Others that exist, I try to supercede because they seem awkward. Or for sometimes what seem to others trivial flaws, like "art," which I want to replace as a term for "visual art" because it also means "art in general," which creates problems for me when I try to explain my poetics, if for no one else--for instance, when I tried to make a term that paired nicely with "visual poetry"; "textual" paralleled "visual," and "art as visual art" paralleled "poetry," but the combination, "textual art," didn't work because it suggests too strongly the art of making texts, at least for me; and "textual visual art" breaks the neat parallel.
To make a field's jargon accessible, it needs to be introduced very gradually. That it wasn't in the book I first started reading about biochemistry in was what killed me. The terms should, as much as possible, be made of already existing other terms--and suffixes and prefixes. Interrelating them systematically would be another plus. I would claim that I only have two flaws to any extent as a neologist. One is that I make too many new words, either because I don't know a term already in used that's suitable or because I think I need a term for something too minor to need one. I say so what: I'm able to prune. The other is that I too often introduce my terms in preposterous clusters. That's curable, as well. (It should also be forgivable: better that good terms be badly introduced than not introduced.)
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