Meh. After years of reading hundreds of essays from people complaining about how others use words ("hacker", "professional", "engineer", "artist", "freedom", a

Meh. After years of reading hundreds of essays from people complaining about how others use words ("hacker", "professional", "engineer", "artist", "freedom", and hundreds of other words, etc), I've come to the conclusion that the complaint says more about the rigidity of the complainer rather than anything insightful about language evolution. It's ironic that the blog's name has the word "consulting" in it. When I was in my early 20s, I hated that word. Whenever I told friends I was a consultant, I'd immediately follow up with a self-deprecation: "that's just a fancy label for white-collar prostitute." At the time, "consulting" to me meant McKinsey or Bain and not your bodyshop of Visual Basic programmers. I preferred "contractor" or "freelancer" to the title "consultant". However, the years have gone by and I no longer care. Anyone can call themselves "consultant" and it doesn't bother me at all. It's just bikeshedding now. Anyone remember the 1990s complaints about the title "webmaster" because (gasp!) it had the word "master" as a suffix? How pompous of those html authors! We should be thankful that "web-jedi" didn't gain any currency and webmaster has already fallen out of favor. The author suggests "business owner" instead of "entrepreneur". I used to not like that label either. "Business Owner" had connotations of being some monopolist crushing the protesters on Occupy Wall Street or the slavedriver paying his workers minimum wage while drinking their babies blood. Maybe I can call myself "unemployed speculator" or some other circumlocution so as to not offend anyone. Personally, I think "entrepreneur" does not convey any false pretenses about prestige or bootstrapping. It's fascinating that some find a word neutral while others perceive it as putting on airs. You can't win. If the author doesn't like "entrepreneur" and I have mixed feelings about "business owner", what's a good compromise? How about other candidate labels such as "wantrepreneur"[1] which is what some of non-HN folks call HN'ers. Or how about "wannabe philanthropist"? If high-profile charity is the apotheosis of the journey from student->businessman->philanthropist, is "wannabe philanthropist" self-deprecating enough while simultaneously conveying bold aspirations? If family & friends have that puzzled look and ask, "what the heck is a wannabe philanthropist?", you explain the transformation of Bill Gates from Harvard dropout -> CEO -> Gates Foundation. As a bonus, you can throw in words like "camel" and "eye of the needle". And after all that, they'll say "oh for fock's sake, just call yourself an entrepreneur!" [1]http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wantrepreneur http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wantrepreneur