INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

This comic from User Friendly does a very good (and funny) job of representing two groups clashing in the process of creating vocabulary and defining words. Each group has it’s own definition for a common word that is a misrepresentation (or partial representation) of what the word means to the other group.

This shows one facet of dealing with word definition and categories: agreement of meaning. Physicist and alchemist are more specifically defined in that they are not really interchangeable. Here they are used to make a point. Hacker and cracker have differing definitions, but cracker in this context is used in a way that most outside the hacker community would not differentiate. Within the community it is a very important distinction. This also shows the ‘living’ aspect of language in the changing definitions pre-existing words (hacker and cracker).