On 1 Nov 2003, at 6:20 pm, Jan Coffey wrote:
The overloading of words has some serious consequneces to comunication in
english. Unlike other languages we seem to refuse the creation of new words
and so, old words get reused in new ways. This has seriously obsfiscating
consequences to the transmision of ideas and consepts. One must gain an ever
more precise insite into the intended meaning rather than the possible
meanings of the resulting message.
Take the word "depricated" for instance. It holds two meanings the most
prominant to an engeneer would be to make something obsolete. But to a
writter saying something is depricated means that it is of poor quality.
'Deprecated' is an odd word. Although every software engineer uses it, it seldom seems to get put in the spell-checker (although it actually is in this one) and so gets mutated into 'depreciated' on most of the software lists I am on.
In the software feild one might use the word "this", "self", "construct",
"entity", "class", "object", "aspect", or any of thousands of words to mean 2
or more very specific things. Without previous experience and specific insite
into the intended meaning converstaions about software can become quite
confusing.
I was going to add some amusing examples, but my brain stopped working :(
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
Misuse of IMPs leads to strange, difficult-to-diagnose bugs. - Anguish et al. "Cocoa Programming"
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