Plan: What does lexical mean in stylistic devices? 2

3. Special Literary Vocabulary
a) Terms
Terms are words denoting notions of special fields of knowledge. A term is generally very easily coined and easily accepted; new coinages easily replace out-dated ones.
Terms are generally associated with a definite branch of science. Here are some examples: microlinguistics, phoneme, vocalism, amplitude, charge, antibiotic, penicil­lin.
With the increase of science and technique to satisfy the growing needs of mankind many words that were once terms have gradually lost their qualities as terms and have passed into the common literary vocabulary. This process may be called "determinization". Such words as ' radio", "television" have long been in common use and their ter­minological character is no longer evident.
Generally, terms are used in the language of science but with certain stylistic purpose they may be used in the language of emotive prose. For example, Cronin used a lot of medical terms in some of his books. It is done to make the narration vivid, bright and close to life.
A term has a stylistic function when it is used to cha­racterize a person through his calling.
It is a well-known fact that terms are monosemantic and have not any contextual meaning. In most cases they have a denotational free meaning. But in some situations a term may have a figurative or emotionally coloured mea­ning. When it is used in other styles but scientific it may cease to be a term and becomes an ordinary word. It hap­pens to the word "atomic" (atomic energy, atomic bomb, atomic weight) which lost its property of a term and acqu­ired a metaphorical meaning in the phrases "atomic age", "atomic music". Compare the above given word combina­tions with the following word combinations which are used as scientific terms: atomic energy (energy obtained as the result of nuclear fission), atomic bomb (bomb of which the distructive power comes from the release of ato­mic energy in the shortest possible time).
Here is the extract from the novel by Cronin "The Ci­tadel":
He sat in his surgery one evening towards
the end of April. It was nearly nine o'clock when a young woman entered.
She gazed at him uncertainty...
She puffed off her hands. "It's my hands..."
He looked at her hands, the palms of which were covered by reddish dermatitis, rather like psoriasis. But it was not psoriasis.
"This is rather an uncommon skin condition, Miss Gramb. It's no good treating it locally. It's due to a blood condition and the only way to get rid of it by dieting.
"No medicine? No one ever told me that be­fore."
"I'm telling you now." He laughed and, tak­ing his pad, drew out a diet for her, adding also a list of food which she must absolutely avoid.
In this extract the author uses the following medical terms as dermatitis (skin disease), psoriasis (a chronic skin disease) and common literary words which acquire the status of terms in the text: blood condition, treating, locally, dieting..
Sometimes terms are used with a satirical function. Here is an interesting example:
"What a fool Rawdon Crawley has been", Clump replied, "to go and marry a governess! There was something about the girl too."
"Green eyes, fair skin, pretty figure, famous frontal development", Squills remarked. (Thacke­ray)
The words "frontal" and "development", in addition to their ordinary meaning, have a terminological aspect, i.e. they belong both to the common literary stock and to а special group of literary vocabulary, to the science of ana­tomy. But here they lose their common aspect and become purely terminological.