[wlesieutre]

It certainly makes it easier to find in a book or via search. You have one word for what it's called, instead of having some under "Born without a cerebellum," some as "Missing cerebellum," others in "No cerebellum," "Undeveloped cerebellum," etc.

Plus it's more convenient to say. Not a big deal for us, but to people who deal with crazy medical conditions all day long, describing each one in natural language would be imprecise and time consuming.

[geoelectric]

Though obviously it's not the reason it was adopted, it is kind of neat that using a dead language for scientific terms disambiguates them cleanly for the purposes of searching.

Any live language would have accidental matches (even quoted) where it's just the obvious thing to say, a la "born without a cerebellum".

[beambot]

To expand on that... it also solves the problem of technical terms evolving new nomenclature (or new meanings for old nomenclature!) over time.

[jkdsfhkssfhjk]

not a dead language.. greek language is still alive and indeed it sounds like "born without a cerebellum" (but to be fair the syntax reminds of medical term)

[zarriak]

Latin is a dead language, there has not been a native speaker for a very long time[1].

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death

[lotsofmangos]

It is still in constant use as the official language of the Vatican.

They keep having to invent new Latin words and phrases so they can discuss things like hotpants, which are brevíssimae bracae femíneae apparently.

Have a look here - http://usvsth3m.com/post/95991771713/hotpants-flirt-and-othe...

The cashpoint with Latin in comic-sans is awesome.

edit - translating from the latin, comic-sans is a pretty accurate font name.

[autokad]

having dead languages to imprecisely map to a word (but nobody knows that because no one really speaks the dead language) isn't any better. It also creates barriers and wasted time in learning the practice. The average individual has to deal with that folly even more when it comes to law.