Ah, words… Simple audio utterances that contain meaning. Well, except when they don’t. Or when each of us parses a different meaning out of a given collection of phonemes, making even morphemes morph.
In our world of technology, in particular, we deal with inordinately complex concepts, and we have to find shorthand ways of referring to them, or else we’d forever be locked up with convoluted phrases like, “a single binary unit of information” instead of “bit.” And, in most cases, for purposes of communicating in the English language, we borrow from the vast English lexicon (or occasionally from other languages, but English has a rather large vocabulary from which to choose). We take words that mean some specific mundane thing – like “bit” – and leverage them for some technical concept that evokes the simple meaning of the word.
Read more at EEJournal.
