Paradigm Shift (ha ha schnortle snrmff guffaw)

I am occasionally dumbfounded by the adoption of scientific terms for nonscientific use. This usually happens in business or media, when someone with some experience in (or exposure to) a discipline borrows a word that seems to fit a new context.

This is a common process and usually goes unnoticed. Where I bridle is when users of the imported word don't understand or respect the word's original sense and the discipline it was borrowed from; when this happens, other people in the same sphere laugh at the users because they are perceived as pretentious, but the scoffers are also missing the point, because the word has merit and sometimes a beautiful linguistic penumbra.

Case in point: Paradigm Shift. I was introduced to this in my Linguistic studies; the concept is associated with scientific theory by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift .

The paradigm shift in my field was a change from American descriptive linguistics to Chomskyan transformational/generative grammar, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax,  Noam Chomsky, 1969 http://www.amazon.com/Aspects-Theory-Syntax-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0262530074/ref=sr_1_23?ie=UTF8&qid=1311254841&sr=8-23

(I am decidedly not a Chomskyan; I lean toward stratificational cognitive linguistics; if I had completed my education I might be teaching it now. I studied under David Lockwook at MSU  http://www.amazon.com/Relations-Functions-Language-Continuum-Collection/dp/0826478751/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311261223&sr=1-2 ; I was not, however, cut out to be a linguist, and I'm sure Prof Lockwood is glad I pursued other things.)

It's not the first or second person that co-opts a word that causes the problem, it's the hundreds or thousands afterward, and the few in that social circle that recognize the pretentiousness and start snickering like 5th graders upon hearing the teacher say "penis."

(I'm not disparaging the linguistic process - this borrowing is one of many natural process by which language changes - I'm making a comment on the maturity of those who participate in it, but it may very well be that the unintentional humor is inevitable when certain speech communities overlap; would be an interesting socio-linguistic study: "Humor as a Phase of Lexical Borrowing within the same Speech Community.")