One of the advantages I've enjoyed by basing my world on Earth is having the internet to go to on any given subject, such as resources.
Thus, what the books call "dwarven steel", I look up on the internet as high speed tool steel. The reason it's "the superior steel the dwarfs make" is because the dwarves are the ones sitting on the resources to make that particular alloy, in this case chromium I think. And they're the ones who know the tempering process, mainly because they're the ones who can make steel that requires it.
The culture of the humans just east of them is changed in subtle and gross ways by the fact that they can make all the brass they want, but have to trade with the dwarves for the tin to make bronze. There is a certain amount of pretty constant "international strife" over the fact that the humans,
not the dwarves, are sitting on the only
really good source of metallurgical coal. It gives them a powerful bargaining chip, but there's a certain "that should be
ours" attitude in every dwarf that can't completely be shaken off, which makes for rough negotiations.
For trying to put magical bonuses into "common speech", adjectives are your friends. The obvious and easy way to divide it is the way RM chose pretty much from the beginning, eg Minor, Lesser, Greater, Major, that kind of thing. However, you mustn't let your players ever forget that a swordsman unfamiliar with the jargon of the Alchemist is in
the same position grandma is in when she talks to the computer technician. I guess what you are saying is PCs would have less precise info?
The breadth and depth of information the PCs have is rarely going to be
the same as what the players have, that's for certain.
If I'm playing a plasma physicist that just accidentally created the basis for true machine AI, there
isn't any way for the GM to accurately communicate to me what my character has learned and experienced. Even if the GM is an actual plasma physicist himself,
I am not, I'm grandma talking to the computer tech.
Once you add magic into the game mechanics, we're
all grandma talking to the computer tech,
up to and including the GM. Given all that, how the alchemist at the local magic shop describes _____ to the mage, much less to the fighter, is going to be a loose approximation
at best, no?