History

Academics use special words because they have specific meanings that are unaffected by the changing meanings of casual use. This is why engineering terminology often sucks, because people already have an idea of what power, work, stress, strain, etc. mean, but often they are wrong, from the standpoint of physics. A layperson may think that pushing against a wall and becoming exhausted means that they have done work on the wall, when from a physics standpoint this isn't true, because the meaning of work in physics and everyday life are different. If you try to explain the term work in everyday words, you end up spending a sentence every time: the act of force applied across a distance the object moved, measured as the crow flies from the beginning to the end point. That is why most scientific fields come up with their own terms. They are shorter than explaining it every time, they are specific, and they are unambiguous. It is not gatekeeping when Google exists, comrades.