No, it is not intended to be badly or awkwardly named. It really is the case that properly invalidating caches is surprisingly hard to do and is the root cause

No, it is not intended to be badly or awkwardly named. It really is the case that properly invalidating caches is surprisingly hard to do and is the root cause of many, many bugs. Of course, the term is intended to be taken broadly: "cache invalidation" includes everything from CPU level cash coherence issues with multi-processors to the maintenance of ACID compliance in a database, and probably even includes cases where a mutable variable is reused incorrectly.