Jargon words are defined once, in an academic paper that introduces them, and then everyone else using the word in the jargon sense keeps using that exact definition. If the word becomes useless, they get a new word, since the old word still means—and will be preserved to forever mean—the old thing.
If you think about it, this is the only way that academia can "work" over a span of generations. We need to be able to differentiate statements about phlostigon from statements about calories; statements about the luminiferous aether from statements about electricity; etc. If we just re-used the word "phlostigon" for the concept of calories, we'd both render a lot of previous papers way more confusing than they need to be, and also make productive debate about which of the hypotheses is true basically impossible.
Anthropology (and so art/music/etc. history) is an academic discipline; words like "Brutalist" are jargon terms in that discipline. (They're also non-jargon words used by laymen like journalists, but that pretty much doesn't affect what the academics do at all.)
It all seems very obvious if you map it to your own discipline. E.g. if laymen, when they say "a matrix", mean some VR simulation thing, that doesn't change what it means when a mathematician says "a matrix", right?
Jargon words are defined once, in an academic paper that introduces them, and then everyone else using the word in the jargon sense keeps using that exact definition. If the word becomes useless, they get a new word, since the old word still means—and will be preserved to forever mean—the old thing.
If you think about it, this is the only way that academia can "work" over a span of generations. We need to be able to differentiate statements about phlostigon from statements about calories; statements about the luminiferous aether from statements about electricity; etc. If we just re-used the word "phlostigon" for the concept of calories, we'd both render a lot of previous papers way more confusing than they need to be, and also make productive debate about which of the hypotheses is true basically impossible.
Anthropology (and so art/music/etc. history) is an academic discipline; words like "Brutalist" are jargon terms in that discipline. (They're also non-jargon words used by laymen like journalists, but that pretty much doesn't affect what the academics do at all.)
It all seems very obvious if you map it to your own discipline. E.g. if laymen, when they say "a matrix", mean some VR simulation thing, that doesn't change what it means when a mathematician says "a matrix", right?