I’m reading Foundations of Linguistics right now — cheap find at Powell’s, and covering a lot of ground on the basic areas of linguistic study (as of 1974, at least), so it’s working out.

But I just came across an odd sentence. This is amidst a discussion of sociolinguistics, talking about the various social subdomains in which language use changes. Here’s the quote:

“Some attention has been given to the special vocabularies of professional groups, including musicians, criminals, drug addicts, and the military.”

Drug addicts are a professional group? The idea seems right — drug culture certainly has its own shibboleths and idioms and modes, and drug production/sales/distribution is arguably a professional domain — but why the phrase “drug addicts”?

Sloppy editing, perhaps; or a touch of editorialization (drug professionals must no doubt be addicts as well? Addicts must be not only patrons but also agents of the drug trade?). Or this could be an alternate technical use of “professional” that accounts for a different set of activities than what I think of in the general commercial/entreprenurial sense.

That last seems unlikely, though, given the book’s general (and admirable, considering its introductory nature) restraint from the casual unremarked-upon use of technical jargon. Every novel term has been introduces IN ALL CAPS, for example. So I’m going with sloppy editing, at least until Franklin Southworth or Chander Daswani or one of the good people at The Free Press offer a better explanation.