Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Fruit the botanical term and fruit the culinary term are just not the same word. Similarly to how theory means something different in science and in colloquial speech. That’s just how language works.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.
My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.
SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org 39 minutes ago
I always thought it was more like overloading, but namespaces are also a good analogy.
jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk 3 hours ago
Yes, but then where would we be without all those endless squabbles about X which are easily solved by pointing out that A::X != B::X?
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
We’d all be sitting on the back porch, enjoying an ice cold ginger beer at the end of long summer day!