I'm Probiotic--And I Vote!

Probiotics: Live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host (WH.O. definition)
Sometimes I get to thinking about words because the way they are being used or abused is having some profound impact on society at large, or that society is having a profound effect on the words. Ethnic cleansing bothered me both these ways when it came into vogue in the early '90s, because it provided a linguistic fig leaf for what was in fact genocide and because it forever dirtied up "cleansing", a word which did not deserve this horrible connotation. At other times words catch my ear and eye because they emerge from the underbrush and are suddenly, and for no particular reason on every page and tongue. And every once in a while, a word sticks in my head because thinking about it cracks me up. Right now, the word is probiotic.
What's so funny about that? After all, biotic is an adjective " pertaining to life or specific living conditions", according to the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary (the official dictionary of TLD because it was the first to include the dirty words). So who wouldn't be probiotic? But wait. What about antibiotic? Antibiotics have saved my bacon on more than one occasion, so I would have to say I'm proantibiotic too. And just because I'm proanti- does not however mean I'm antipro. Here's where things start to get confusing. Don't the "pro" and the"anti" cancel each other out? And wouldn't that leave us back at plain old biotic? It's a conundrum.
At the heart of this mess is the way technical and scientific terms are coined. By long and elitist tradition, such words are almost always constructed form Greek and Latin parts. The trouble is that these nabobs use the two languages indiscriminately, and we end up with Greco-Roman hybrids like probiotic (Greek stem, Latin prefix). Some people have contended that the whole word is from the Greek, but the pro prefix in Greek means "coming before", as in prologue. This is obviously not the pro in probiotic, so it must come from the Latin, meaning "promoting or in favor of".
This kind of thing happens often in the world of tech/sci lingo, and is often source of bafflement. Jargon of all kinds is a way of keeping ideas obscure and exclusive. Probiotics (the word seems to have been created in the early 1950s, and attained its current meaning in the '70s). It could just as easily been rendered as "lifehelper" or "good germs", which would have been more readily understandible, but not as impressive-sounding. I understand, but I do not approve.
By the way, while I was researching all this, I stumbled across the creepy fact that the good bugs we have living in our guts far outnumber the cells in our body that are actually us. How do you like that? We're a minority in our own skins. Well, I guess that's what comes of being probiotic.