> It might be that industries should not reuse common words, but IMO it’s a little silly to insist that they only use the most literal and etymologically correc

> It might be that industries should not reuse common words, but IMO it’s a little silly to insist that they only use the most literal and etymologically correct terms for each individual action rather than defining categories that have clear meanings even if a specific action doesn’t perfectly match the most literal reading of the name of the category. I am not so sure. Take Linux kernel log levels: 0 = emergency 1 = alert 2 = critical 3 = error 4 = warning As soon as I saw this I showed it to multiple people, and none of them understand how a log level of "alert" can be more severe than "critical". Now, there is probably some greybeards that decided these words way way back and we decided to stuck with them. But if you tell someone "damn, the kernel is giving off alerts", their thought will be "well, at least the system isn't in a critical state or erroring out, right?". Intuition matters.