In the last week, I have binged nearly 50 episodes of Tea with BVP, and something about the way that BVP himself uses the words 'exercise', 'activity', and 'task' set off some thoughts; a few of those thoughts began crystallizing when I reread my manifesto-like post on teaching historical languages. I included a footnote at the end of my twelve points, specifying that I was using the word 'acquire' (and indeed 'learn') the way that Krashen et al. do, to form a mental representation of a language, i.e. implicit knowledge of the language, rather than to gain explicit knowledge about the language. I reckon I could rephrase that footnote a bit more clearly. Still, what I got across--I hope--was that I was using the words 'acquire' and 'learn' in their technical sense, not the way that they usually are.

And that is what BVP does when it comes to 'exercise', 'activity', and 'task': he restricts the usage of those terms, beyond the normal English usage. The distinction between 'exercise' and 'activity' is not randomly created, because it draws on connotations and associations of the two words; that said, there are many contexts in which the two would function synonymously, or in which either would be an 'accurate' choice of word. In BVP's usage, however, the semantic range of 'exercise' and 'activity' does not overlap, not at all, because an 'activity' is a use of the language that involves communication, whereas an 'exercise' is a use of the language that does not involve communication. Nor do 'activity' and 'task' overlap in BVP's usage. A 'task' is a use of the language that involves communication to some purpose apart from the usage or acquisition of the language.

While intuition and connotations make it fairly easy to remember the distinctions BVP makes with these three words, they are not obvious ones. These three specific definitions are not accessible to English speakers, even native English speakers, unless they come into some kind of contact with second language acquisition researchers or foreign language teachers.

Even then, most contact with those who use these three ordinary words in the technical sense is unlikely to result in more English speakers acquiring these technical definitions, because these are all perfectly normal words. I doubt that any of the hosts of Tea with BVP entirely restricts their usage of these words to the above definitions. There's no way that they've all stopped using the many other definitions of the word 'exercise'; there's no way they don't talk about 'activity' unless they mean 'communicative use of the target language'; there's no way that they've given up the regular meanings of the word 'task'. Which means that even becoming drinking buddies with BVP isn't enough to acquire his technical definitions of any of these words. You'd have to come into contact with him (or anyone else who uses these words in their technical sense) within a relevant context, in order to acquire their technical meanings for yourself. In other words, we might tentatively define 'technical language' as 'the use of language with restricted definitions, within a restricted context'.

What does any of this have to do with my dissertation? Well, I've been thinking about the Greek word ἐξήγησις lately. I've been wondering whether ἐξήγησις counts as a genre of ancient Greek writing. In that sense, one might ask whether ἐξήγησις is a 'technical' word, or has a 'technical definition'. My impression--for which I should eventually come up with some concrete, presentable evidence--is that ἐξήγησις does have a restricted meaning. Sure, we gloss it as 'explanation', but when the word ἐξήγησις is used of an explanation, it comes with some pretty specific conventions and expectations.

That's just a hunch, that ἐξήγησις has a restricted meaning from the obvious one. It will take time to research and argue properly. It's pretty easy to answer the question of whether that postulated restricted definition is linked to a restricted context: yes. If we plug it into Logeion, we see that ἐξηγέομαι is a perfectly nice, normal Greek word--the 1,911th most common in the corpus--used with a variety of related meanings across a wide range of eras, places, and genres (the top listed authors are Galen, Epictetus, Herodotus, Andocides, and Aeschylus). ἐξήγησις, on the other hand? Only the 4, 578th most common word in the corpus, and with a list of top authors far more concentrated in time and genre: Polybius, Galen, Diogenes Laertius, Pausanias, and Flavius Josephus. And indeed, following from that restricted context is an extremely short list of glosses in the LSJ--'statement, narrative', or 'explanation, interpretation'.

There's more work to do another time, and more to be said about why I care that ἐξήγησις acts like a technical word (the short version is that I'm a little obsessed with Hipparchus). For now, though, I feel comfortable suggesting that there's a there there, when it comes to ἐξήγησις as a genre with conventions and expectations worth exploring further.