I like Antonio's assumption that the success of a concept in science depends on how it sounds. However, does "neurolinguistics" really sound great?  :)

On a more serious note, one of the reasons for the popularity of terms like "entanglement" in the social sciences may be their origin in the natural sciences, especially in physics. When the term was made a central concept in quantum mechanics (in the 1930s) it served to describe the phenomenon that the quantum state of one specific particle cannot be described without relating it to certain traits of another particle, thus making both (or more) particles parts of a larger system. That would then constitute the phenomenon of "quantum entanglement." - (This is just an amateur's assessment of complicated stuff that he does not really understand).

So there are two reasons that may play a role in the success story of "entanglement":

First, it's an old tradition of modern social sciences to borrow methods and concepts from the natural sciences. This procedure seems to help improving the self-perception and self-confidence of social science as a "serious" branch of the sciences.

Second, the first reason becomes even more attractive when a concept used in modern physics illustrates perfectly how complicated and diffuse even the world of the natural sciences can be. That is because it shouldn't be a surprise then that the social world is as complicated as we know it - for similar reasons why it is so difficult to describe the quantum status of a particle without describing the complex whole it is part of.

The first time I read it, was in a very late eighties article written by Dupuy (actually it was tangled hierarchies or a similar title) and it was the usual product of that decade. Posmodernism, and all that intelectual production about "the plurality of  heterogeneal discourses that might probably be tangential to any dilluted cultural intro-spaces that break down its own possibilities of social reverberance". I am being ironical, of course.

Why is it a trendy word nowadays? Well, it might a revival of those years where the stranger the concept and the more difficult to spell it, the better to be used in anthropological papers. Something similar happen with the word 'resilience' at present. Where formerly anthropologist talk about hegemony (sixties), resistence (seventies), entangled discourses (eigthies) and so on... now they talk about resilience.

Besides, we cannot discharged the fact that it is a word that sounds very well and fills pretty the atmosphere while lecturing in a room or at a conference; phonetically is quite harmonic indeed.

I like Antonio's assumption that the success of a concept in science depends on how it sounds. However, does "neurolinguistics" really sound great?  :)

On a more serious note, one of the reasons for the popularity of terms like "entanglement" in the social sciences may be their origin in the natural sciences, especially in physics. When the term was made a central concept in quantum mechanics (in the 1930s) it served to describe the phenomenon that the quantum state of one specific particle cannot be described without relating it to certain traits of another particle, thus making both (or more) particles parts of a larger system. That would then constitute the phenomenon of "quantum entanglement." - (This is just an amateur's assessment of complicated stuff that he does not really understand).

So there are two reasons that may play a role in the success story of "entanglement":

First, it's an old tradition of modern social sciences to borrow methods and concepts from the natural sciences. This procedure seems to help improving the self-perception and self-confidence of social science as a "serious" branch of the sciences.

Second, the first reason becomes even more attractive when a concept used in modern physics illustrates perfectly how complicated and diffuse even the world of the natural sciences can be. That is because it shouldn't be a surprise then that the social world is as complicated as we know it - for similar reasons why it is so difficult to describe the quantum status of a particle without describing the complex whole it is part of.

I totally agree with you!! Indeed, I was about to include that borrowing from "hard sciences" too in my previous answer. I love it. For instance, going back to the word 'resilience' nowadays and, even, to some drafted ideas I have read about social entropy and cybernetics staff to explain the complexity of social processes.

Given my disciplinary de-formation I am allowed to even sustain that there is something of an inferiority complex behind the use of those borrowed concepts. Too many social scholars keep defining and defending the rigourosity of social science against non-social ones according to their 'order of things and words' (roughly speaking this is Foucault's notion of discourse) and forgetting the scientific honesty claimed by Bourdieu in his famous "The scientific fact is conquered, constructed, confirmed". Besides, the uncritical (because they are trendy) use of these borrowed notions ignore the Weberian idea of purpose and intentionality present in any human action. This is, from my theoretical approach of course, what makes the difference between "you and me writting about these things" and "a stone just rolling downhill". You and me have an intention to write now, but the 'stupid' stone is just rolling down because some external force (my finger or an earthquake) moved it from its place.

But this is a very old and interesting though tiring discussion. I would traced it back, first, to Durkheim's idea on treating social facts as things (1895) and, then even further, to the Kantian epistemological distinction between the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) and the phenomenon... hence troubling the possibility of knowing the first through the second which is --empirically-- the only 'thing' we can perceive and measure,etcétera.