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Or something like a public forum or google exists, and lots and lots of people continue to hack and talk about things in order to fuzzily define what they think the author meant by a certain term, in the case that it's meaning was lost, relabeled, mistranslated, or otherwise changed somewhere along the way of technological development.

If you understand mostly what everything else is in a system, then people basically swarm around the behavior of something undefined in order to fuzzily define it. It sticks and it does not stick - it depends on whether programmers rewrite the system or the word is forgotten about on some super secure layer of abstraction, or whether it's the word that everyone is teaching and talking about and naming things after.

I don't think words can really express this process, it's pervasive and paradoxical to it's description. You have to assume you understand everything else, before you can label something truly new. Otherwise it's just the same amorphous blob, and the labels keep swapping, and no concepts are really applicable, because they are only observable from a macroscopic perspective of abstraction, except when they are being used, right there in front of the code. It's always the same balance of 'i know some stuff' and 'i don't know some stuff'.



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