Foundations of Freedom

Terms of Art Words vs. Terms In common language, most words have only one meaning. Those that have more than one meaning can usually be understood from the context.

Terms are words or phrases that have a specialized meaning for a particular group or profession. The tricky part is that the term usually looks like a common word, and seems to represent the common word and people presume its common meaning. Lawyers, incidentally, often use terms instead of words.

This is usually the intent when a term is put in place of a word – for people to presume the common meaning.