jputnam

Engineering is just one case where licensing authorities have co-opted a longstanding plain English word and attempted to restrict its use to their narrower meaning.

Some examples are more comical -- the US Olympic committee, for example, has repeatedly threatened businesses in Olympia, Washington, or on the nearby Olympic Peninsula, for using "Olympic" in their names, claiming this infringes on the USOC's right to that name. It doesn't matter to them that it's a generic term in use since before the modern Olympics were founded...

In my humble opinion, licensing boards should be compelled to invent new, unambiguous names if they want to control use of the name, rather than being allowed to privatize parts of the English language.

unterhausen

I think it's clear this is what should have happened in both the Ohio and North Carolina cases, but the boards didn't think hard enough about it to do the right thing.
I haven't looked at the Ohio or North Carolina laws, but the Pennsylvania laws look overly broad to me. Fortunately this doesn't really seem to matter in practice. I probably could get my P.E. without too much issue, but I don't see the point. I was hoping a Ph.D. was good enough, but Pennsylvania doesn't roll that way.