Possibly relevant here: a story about Donald Davies' inventing the work "packet" (in the networking sense) from Katie Hafner's book Where Wizards Stay Up Late:

Possibly relevant here: a story about Donald Davies' inventing the work "packet" (in the networking sense) from Katie Hafner's book Where Wizards Stay Up Late: Davies' choice of the word "packet" was very deliberate. "I thought it was important to have a new word for one of the short pieces of data which traveled separately," he explained. "This would make it easier to talk about them." There were plenty of other possibilities — block, unit, section, segment, frame. "I hit on the word packet," he said, "in the sense of small package." Before settling on the word, he asked two linguists from a research team in his lab to confirm that there were cognates in other languages. When they reported back that it was a good choice, he fixed on it. Packet-switching. It was precise, economic, and very British. And it was far easier on the ear than Baran's "distributed adaptive message block switching." I wish that much thought went into other technical naming. (Looking at you, grep.)