The most valuable idea in that article is to to ask for permision twice before launching into an overcomplicated bad analogy to explain something your wife does

The most valuable idea in that article is to to ask for permision twice before launching into an overcomplicated bad analogy to explain something your wife doesn't really care about. There is no value in explaining a solution to someone who does not yet care about the problem. In this case "what is mapreduce?" is looking just for an explanation of why these words are being used without their common meaning, not the whole algorithm.