Richard, Chris, There are many fields of endeavour that, for one reason or another, have no words of their own. The banking industry, the internet, baseball, rocket science - and bonsai, for obvious reasons. They all take pre-existing words and give them new or, more properly, additional definitions.
Sometimes art also lacks its own words to describe something: in bonsai art we speak of direction, energy, mood, visual speed, feminine, masculine, negative space, tension and so on, all new applications for the words.
Art is mostly a mental process, and there is much that is thought that cannot be communicated without at least bending the standard usage of some words and phrases. This is not "mystical", just another new use of existing words to describe or define something that has not hitherto required definition.
You both seem sticklers for precise definition yet ignore that the additional usages of existing words that we see in today's dictionaries were not there twenty years ago, and that they were included only after a significant time in common usage. The art of bonsai will never be common usage. Therefore to discuss bonsai as an art you musty accept a certain degree of word-bending or even definition endowment that you will read in no dictionary or thesaurus.
As with banking, rocket science and baseball, to understand bonsai, especially all the arty stuff, you have to learn the language.
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