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by kortex 2259 days ago
Could take a page out of the biologist's book. "what's this thing?" Transcriptase - enzyme (-ase) which transcribes - DNA to RNA. "What about this" Reverse transcriptase - does the reverse of transcriptase.

Angiotensin-converting enzyme - does exactly what it says on the tin. You can lex it even further:

- Angio - heart (from ango, vessel)

- Tens - from hypertension, vis tendo, tendere, to stretch.

- (-in) - suffix associated with polypeptides:

- Convertere - turn around, from:

- Con - with

- Vert - turn

- En - inside

- Zyme - from zume/zymē - leavened, loosely, biological thing which causes leavening

It just makes so much sense! Lexemes are so cool. Like digging into linguistic source code.

3 comments

We suffer here from lack of classical education. Greek and Latin would probably help.
How did they get people to agree to it? Mathematical terminology is a crime, but the problem is that it's very hard to get people to coordinate on different terminology.
Why not call the DNA to RNA enzyme reverse transcriptase and the RNA to DNA one transcriptase?