Henry Pratt Fairchild - Dictionary of Sociology - 1961, Paperback

From the "Every science must have its special vocabulary or terminology. Sciences deal with ideas, thoughts, and concepts, and these must be expressed in words. Even the facts which are the groundwork or science mus be set forth largely in words. No science, therefore, can have any more precision and exactitude than the words or other symbols, such as mathematical or chemical formulae, in which it is embodied. Quite generally, this situation calls for a special dictionary or glossary for each particular science. The foregoing is perhaps even more true for sociology than for many other sciences. Since sociology deals with matters of commonplace experience, the thoughts, ideas, and concepts which it must express are, with relatively few exceptions, included in any standard general dictionary, and most of the really important terms are already to some degree familiar even to the immature members of society and are frequently used in everyday speech. Scientific accuracy demands that precise and limited meanings should be assigned to these terms, in order that they may be used uniformly alike by specialists, students, and amateurs in the field. In the case of some words, a sufficiently precise sociological definition may be found in a general dictionary, and what is needed is an underscoring of this particular interpretation. In other cases, the requirements of the science call for specialized definitions which do not occur in the precise form in any ordinary dictionary. For both these purposes, a special volume is indispensable. If this process occasionally appears to do violence to the preconceptions already held by users of a given word there seems to be no escape, and one who wishes to deal scientifically with sociology must resign himself to the effort of accommodating his use to standardized practice..."