Linguistic not-quite-jargon - searching for a word to describe this

Edit: 14 Mar 2023:

Cleavage is a great one! These are exercises I like to bring up whenever I am talking about communication with scientists. My faves?

- cell (can have 3 meanings can you guess them all)?
- protein
- stem (also 3 meanings)
- fatigue https://t.co/7argpwpdgp

— Heather Doran, PhD (@hapsci) March 14, 2023

 

Edit: 7 Jan 2021: I was chatting with my friend / colleague Jane yesterday evening after a computing training event we'd run in which she'd mentioned (she was the course leader) an interesting observation about teaching programming to young primary kids: use 'task' instead of 'problem' and 'run' instead of 'execute'. I mentioned my notion about everyday words causing more problems than jargon, because at least jargon tells you it's jargon (see post below) and she said that educators have been using the word 'overloaded' for ages, so I'm adopting that with immediate effect :)

Edit: 1 May 2014: Just spotted this rather good tweeted picture showing 'what scientists say' versus 'what the public hears' which I think makes the point that fairly dull, ordinary-looking words can mean different things in different contexts (but still sufficiently similar to cause more confusion perhaps than if the meanings of the words were vastly different?)

What scientists say and what the public hears. http://t.co/DVpu0ZME8L pic.twitter.com/Ku2bAXEyda
— Austin Frakt (@afrakt) April 28, 2014

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Original post

If you don't know what phosphatidylethanolamine is you might at least reasonably guess that it's a bit of scientific jargon. It flags itself up to you as something to pay attention to because it's not an everyday word - hopefully whatever you're reading that contains it would explain what it means (it's a membrane lipid - it's a component of the double-layer protective flexible shell that covers every single living cell).

But what about words and phrases like 'theory' or 'protein' or 'model' all of which have a certain meaning in a scientific context but another meaning in everyday language ('hunch', 'dietary nutrient', 'small boat/train or clothes-selling person'). These don't particularly flag themselves up as 'words to be aware of'.

They're not jargon, they are everyday words but they're not being used in an everyday sense - what word describes this class of words that have this dual purpose? I thought about 'Janus words' but that term's already in use to describe words like 'sanction', or 'cleave', which mean both one thing and its exact opposite http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/sanction-cleave.aspx

I can't have been the only person to come up against this so am assuming that the universe has already given this class of words and phrases a name - what is it?

Thanks!

Later that same day...
@alex_brovvn has suggested 'false friends', @sciencebase suggested 'dualisms' and @inspiringsci came up with 'sensu stricto' and 'sensu lato'. I think the winner though, also suggested by @inspiringsci, might be 'polyseme'.