> Lawyers especially give me the impression that they use jargon to obscure their field from regular folks.
Really? You think that lawyers (and physicians) use Latin/Greek words in order to confuse regular folks?
These fields are very old, and changing the meaning of something Mens Rea or lateral malleolus is going to require A) an exact drop-in replacement which will probably just as obscure, B) retraining of an entire set of people.
Our field is similar in that we have a mountain of jargon that's largely inaccessible to regular folks. The point of those words are not to converse with regular folks but to convey information to others in the field with as little ambiguity as possible.
In England many Latin terms were replaced with English terms in 1998 with the adoption of the new Civil Procedure Rules in an effort to make justice "more accessible" (alongside other reforms). These arguably actually added confusion - for example it's much more obvious that a "writ" is a specialist term versus "claim" which replaced it.
Really? You think that lawyers (and physicians) use Latin/Greek words in order to confuse regular folks?
These fields are very old, and changing the meaning of something Mens Rea or lateral malleolus is going to require A) an exact drop-in replacement which will probably just as obscure, B) retraining of an entire set of people.
Our field is similar in that we have a mountain of jargon that's largely inaccessible to regular folks. The point of those words are not to converse with regular folks but to convey information to others in the field with as little ambiguity as possible.