Comment by andai
2 days ago
I'm maintaining a document called Tricksy words with multiple meanings that cause endless confusion and strife
Just in the past year I have wasted several months pulling my hair out due to incorrectly named projects.
It really does turn out naming is important!
I've seen a spreadsheet with NATO abbreviations and terms. It's tens of thousands of entries. And the best ones have tens of definitions.
Care to share some highlights?
Forgive me this long list, I hadn't the time to make it short!
Function: a mapping from inputs to outputs, vs "a chink of code that runs and does arbitrary things with global state." Some languages resolve it by using the word procedure (and keyword proc).
(For an amusing read on this subject, see Chapter 5 of Let Over Lambda, which argues that Lisp is actually the least functional language!)
Deserve: can refer to unconditional rights, as well as conditional privileges. (e.g. "every child deserves a safe home", vs. "this person deserves to be punished.")
Positive/Negative have at least 3 separate meanings depending on context (good, present, self-amplifying). e.g. positive feedback can means the system is about to explode, positive symptom can mean "CIA replaced my Shasta again".
Normal can mean "happens all the time" or "is acceptable". Often those two are not in agreement. (People often fuse this one. If it's unusual then it must be bad! If it's common then it must be okay!)
Meaningful: something "means" something if it points beyond itself (as a symbol), or if it doesn't (direct experience).
Example: enjoying a sunset
The experience itself can be deeply satisfying. Or you can project ideas onto it like "I'm blessed", "I earned it", so the experience "points beyond" itself.
(Alan Watts has an excellent video on purpose and meaning, considering our approach to them a uniquely western neurosis.)
Serious: committed, vs overly heavy. People often confuse the two attitudes, which creates a lot of inner resistance. (And ironically produces childishness due to resistance to maturity.)
Selfish: prone to neglect others (bad), vs taking care of yourself (good and natural to every organism, yet often vilified in our culture). You can do both of course but they're kind of independent axes.
Several authors have written in defense of selfishness, but were so abrasive that they did the idea more harm than good!
Meditation can mean 10,000 different things, many of which are opposites (e.g. intentionally directing the attention, vs allowing it to wander freely). (Enlightenment is similarly open to interpretation, even within the same school of thought!)
I've worked at places where it turned out different parts of the organization had a different idea of what a "user" of the core product was.
The team using Salesforce, the data warehouse team, the application development teams, all with different mental models of what "we added 5,000 users today" actually meant in concrete terms.
Oh man. This gets really exciting when in addition the Finance team has to tell the SEC how many active users there are, but they're using different definitions every quarter because they get their numbers in some non-reproducible way from whichever of those other teams has time to help them this month.
Source: my own years on data warehouse and application development teams.