> But why do you have to be able to glean meaning from the phrase alone?
Because it helps me wrap my head around what it is, what it does, and why I should care about it.
And by "me", I more importantly mean a rhetorical "me", i.e. a random layperson who happens to be a politician or someone else with disproportionate power over things like scientific endeavors. More on that in a sec...
> Sure, they could examine the root words [of "polymorphism"] and try to figure it out, but would they be any closer to the actual meaning of the word?
I mean, a little bit, yes. "Poly" = "many", "morph" = "form", "ism" = some kind of state of being, and from that someone could figure out that if something exhibits "polymorphism" it means it has many forms (and this does indeed provide at least some intuitive understanding of e.g. how a function can have many different implementations under the same name, and that implementation being decided by the form of its arguments).
> I don’t think it makes sense to make field-specific jargon accessible to the masses. Instead I think it makes more sense to make it easily researchable and distinct from more commonplace words.
And this is why the masses write off science and "them nerds telling us how the world works" as useless, and in turn why our planet is dying and humanity's decline into stupidity is accelerating. It's precisely why so few people trust science: because they don't understand it, because every effort seems to have been made to make it entirely opaque to anyone without decades of academic background that the vast majority of people cannot afford (schoolwork doesn't put food on the table).
Maybe - just maybe - we could instead try to remove barriers to entry into making STEM some elitist Kool Kids Klub that deems laypeople as unworthy because they don't have the time or energy to memorize the names of a bunch of dead white men, and maybe then we can live in the world we all want: one where science and scientists are taken seriously, and where we don't wait until it's already too late before we even start thinking about addressing a self-induced extinction event.