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The author kind of cheats by picking phrases that involve multiple words. I think if you examine a single word the whole concept falls apart. An example from t

The author kind of cheats by picking phrases that involve multiple words. I think if you examine a single word the whole concept falls apart. An example from the HVAC industry: we have something called a reset. An operational sequence for an AC unit will say "the unit supply air temperature is based on an inverse outdoor air temperature reset." I'd challenge anybody in any other STEM field to look at this and correctly intuit what a reset is. You won't find a specific definition that matches in any ordinary dictionary. It turns out that a "reset" is a linear mapping from one range to another. Literally just a scale and offset. You are picking up a range of numbers and "setting" it on a new range. No state is involved, just a 1-1 relational mapping between ranges. So is that an improper noun just because there's a more popular meaning of the word "reset"? I don't think so. It's just an unpopular definition for the word. If you are unaware of this definition you will misunderstand the sentence but that's true of all words with multiple meanings. Also the phrase "improper noun" has the existing meaning "a noun that describes something general (rather than that which is purely unique)", so there's an painful irony in defining a new specialized meaning for the term. I'm not sure if that irony is intended but it annoys me. Edit: Why is the article even about nouns? This happens with verbs all the time. Every three minutes I'm thinking of another reason this article is a vague and largely incorrect waste of characters.

justin_oaks 4y ago
Such single words with different meanings in different contexts are probably best described as industry-specific jargon than improper nouns. Even so, I'm still greatly upset when people take word and give it a more specific meaning in a technical context. For example, the term "container" such as in Docker container or LXC container. Container is such a generic term, but has a much more specific meaning in computing. I wish someone had invented a new term for it. As a good example, I take "blog" which was basically a new term for a new thing. I know that it has it's origins from the term "web log", but now everyone just says "blog". It's nice to have a new a term instead of taking old words and putting them into a new context.
Bakary 4y ago
Amusingly enough 'set' has the largest number of different definitions in the English language! To steelman the author's argument, I think it would have been better to focus the blog post on how people can sometimes deliberately or carelessly obfuscate discussions when using technical terms or technical uses of common terms. For instance, a user elsewhere in the thread mentioned how the word 'racism' can have at least three distinct meanings in North America that are used in cavalier ways sometimes.

justin_oaks 4y ago

Such single words with different meanings in different contexts are probably best described as industry-specific jargon than improper nouns. Even so, I'm still greatly upset when people take word and give it a more specific meaning in a technical context. For example, the term "container" such as in Docker container or LXC container. Container is such a generic term, but has a much more specific meaning in computing. I wish someone had invented a new term for it. As a good example, I take "blog" which was basically a new term for a new thing. I know that it has it's origins from the term "web log", but now everyone just says "blog". It's nice to have a new a term instead of taking old words and putting them into a new context.

Bakary 4y ago

Amusingly enough 'set' has the largest number of different definitions in the English language! To steelman the author's argument, I think it would have been better to focus the blog post on how people can sometimes deliberately or carelessly obfuscate discussions when using technical terms or technical uses of common terms. For instance, a user elsewhere in the thread mentioned how the word 'racism' can have at least three distinct meanings in North America that are used in cavalier ways sometimes.