Hi! I just had a random linguistic question. I was thinking of terms like “alma mater” and graduation designations like “cum laude” etc. and even in academic writing we commonly have phrases like “ad hominem” or “ad nauseum”. Why have these terms persisted in English societies, and where did integration of them with academia come from?
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The reason we don’t invent new words from whole cloth to replace existing ones is that people are used to the existing ones. Imagine someone told you that from now on a telephone is a farspeaker. Would you start saying farspeaker or just roll your eyes and keep saying telephone or just phone?
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