> In the informational theory sense. A word with broad scope will be more used, thus be more frequent in text, and thus, carry less information. A rare word ca

> In the informational theory sense. A word with broad scope will be more used, thus be more frequent in text, and thus, carry less information. A rare word carries more information when it is used, but by nature of being rare is infrequently used (99.99...% of sentences are the unsurprising case of not containing the word). Words that occur frequently typically convey more information in total, and I'd claim that this (opposed to per occurrence) is what it'd make sense to look at when considering redefining a word - among many other factors. More generally - you don't want the language to be unable to (or make it difficult to) convey common, frequently relevant, concepts. > But I don't think the author ever compared binary machine only readable formats, either. All the machine-readable formats that he looked into admin were human-readable too. The only other format the author explicitly names is XML, and it's as an example of a format with "similar virtues" to JSON. The bespoke machine-readable output formats the author is warning against using may very well be non-text formats, particularly with how they "require custom processing that goes well beyond basic grep and awk and other widely available Unix tools".