science

The oldest meaning here was not lab coats and Bunsen burners at all, but simply "knowledge"—the stuff you know because you've studied, sorted, and separated it from ignorance. Latin scientia comes from scire, a verb that may originally have meant "to distinguish" or "to cut apart," which is a wonderfully physical way to imagine knowing: first you divide the blur, then you see the shape. That same sci- shows up in conscience, omniscient, prescience, and the medieval insult nescience, all of them obsessed with who knows what, and who very much does not. English borrowed science in the mid-1300s, when it could mean almost any kind of learning, even craft or skill; only much later, in the 1700s and 1800s, did it shrink into the modern sense of disciplined observation and experiment. So when you say science, you're using a word that once meant "the act of making the world mentally legible"—a very old human trick, sharpened into a method.