I have to admit, you're doing a pretty good job of playing the devil's advocate. I absolutely agree that any word can be used in creative and novel ways and to

I have to admit, you're doing a pretty good job of playing the devil's advocate. I absolutely agree that any word can be used in creative and novel ways and to express new ideas, I just find this example to be much more confusing than useful. :) FWIW, I've been trying to find examples of things conventionally called algorithms, but which are not in essence imperative (in the sense that there are multiple operations that must happen in a certain order - "procedural" is perhaps a more precise word than "imperative"), but I can't really find anything, so I would like to insist that it's one of the defining characteristics of an algorithm.