Once the public adapts a term or practice from an in-group, it is usually futile for members of the group to fight it. Hacker, troll and inline posting (vs top

Once the public adapts a term or practice from an in-group, it is usually futile for members of the group to fight it. Hacker, troll and inline posting (vs top-posting) are a few examples, and there are many more where specialised crypto / computer science / software engineering terms are given more generalised definitions. However, this is not specific to the Internet or hacker community, and some other fields probably have it worse. The words lunatic, maniac, retard, imbecile, moron, and idiot were all once psychological terms used by medical professionals to refer to people with mental illness or intellectual disability, but these words continuously get taken up by the public to be used as insults (against people who do not meet the original definition). The hacker community can probably learn from the response of the medical community here, which is to accept the loss of the term with its original technical meaning from the lexicon, and make up another technical term to replace it.