Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33555
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33555
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

People choose words to make distinctions. Sometimes the distinctions they are trying to make are fine-grained and sometimes they are not. In many cases, the people making the coarse-grained distinctions are not even aware that the fine-grained distinctions exist. People tend to choose the most familiar word that makes the distinction they are interested in at the time. This is a reasonable communication strategy because the most familiar word communicates best.

There are two downsides to this habit, though.

1. It can be confusing or upsetting to people who are aware of the more fine-grained distinction and are used to using the word in question to make the more fine-grained distinction. 

2. It can cause confusion in discussions where the more fine-grained distinction is being made, and one of the parties is not aware of the fine-grained meaning of the word.

A classic case of this is the work "Kleenex". As a brand name, it denotes a particular brand of facial tissue. But the word Kleenex is the most well known word in this space and is therefore commonly used to mean any facial tissue. If you asked someone for a Kleenex and they refused on the ground that the only facial tissue they had was Scotties brand, you would not be impressed. For present purposes, the fine-grained distinction between Kleenex and Scotties facial tissues is not of interest to you.

This happens to all sorts of words. Lots of people use "Microsoft" to mean Microsoft Word. Lots of people use REST to mean a general class of web protocols of which actual REST is just one example.

One of the hardest communication problems is to make someone understand and accept a distinction more fine-grained than the one they are used to making. Not only is this conceptually difficult, people also tend to think you are being pedantic about your words rather than making a real world distinction that really matters in the current circumstances.

You are not going to solve this class of communication problem simply by standing your ground on the more precise meaning of the word. Most people are not even going to notice you are doing it. They will hear the word in the sense they are used to using it.

Instead, you are going to have to close in on the distinction you are trying to make by way of stories and examples (like my Kleenex example above). Once you have got the distinction itself across, you can reintroduce the term in its more refined sense and people will accept and use it in that sense if you have convinced them of the importance of the distinction you are asking them to accept. But you have to justify the distinction before you can get the reader to accept the redefinition of the term, regardless of the word's history or original meaning.

Original score: 6