Metaphor, simile and analogy do more than decorate language. They map one domain onto another, helping people explain, reason and persuade.
Discover the ideas, history and language behind this featured subject.
Read the featured articleEveryday words became technical concepts in evolutionary biology. Their scientific meanings are narrower, more relational and often very different from popular interpretations.
Attention, memory, intelligence, personality and motivation sound familiar, but psychology turns them into constructs that must be defined, measured and tested.
Why English often has an everyday body word and a separate clinical one, from skull/cranium and heart/cardiac to kidney/renal and skin/dermal.
Physics gives exact meanings to familiar words. Understanding the gap between everyday and technical usage explains many common misconceptions in mechanics and electricity.
Incidence measures new cases arising over time; prevalence measures all existing cases in a population. Learn the formulas, variants and reasons the two measures can move differently.
Two quick ratings, then an optional note.