@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light

> Meanings are not inherent in words, but endowed on them by usage. So I'm not sure how else one could sensibly use language.

Sure, but this is why I say things like "I don't like that term" or "I don't use that term" rather than trying to police someone's use of the term. I say "people" instead of "users" when discussing FSE, for example, and I bristle a little when admins say "my users" instead of "people using my instance" or "people on this instance" or something. I don't like when people call LLMs "AI", because they do not model knowledge, they're just really good at predicting which word comes next. I'm comfortable saying "Don't call it that" when it's a term that has meaning in my profession and then is used sloppily but that's an uphill battle. People used to refer to the box the monitor plugs into as a "CPU" or a "hard drive", and these are incorrect uses of the term because there's not an agreed-upon colloquial use.

People refer to an obsession with detail as "autism" and I don't argue with them. I've got the 'tism and my 'tism flares up and I start taking things apart or trying to analyze systems or gibbering wildly about whatever (usually computers or the CIA or something; someone sends me a Youtube link and I used to dump six paragraphs about Google at them but I do that a little less now) and that is something that can probably be ascribed to mild autism, but they're using the world colloquially, same way "bastard" is used colloquially.

> Yes, of course, as long as you haven't tried to alter them with coercion. Tolerance is not necessarily acceptance.

In the sense that an evangelist tolerates a non-believer, perhaps. But living and letting live is a different thing from persistent attempts to shape someone else; I think it crosses the line from tolerance to soft-intolerance if you persist too much or if you attempt to influence without accepting that you may be wrong yourself. Not saying that's you, just saying I'd call those intolerant; this is one of my complaints about the topic from the beginning of the thread, people with opaque agendas that pretend to engage but are actually just pushing. The issue is summed up by this attempt at dissecting the end of Usenet and a proposal for a future system ( https://archive.is/vJaEG ):

> Conversations became one man with one microphone attached to a thousand megaphones, and replying was like talking back to the national news broadcast, because you could reply to a shill, but the man giving the shill her script was not listening, because he was running a hundred similar shills, and his shill would just stick to her script, the script he had assigned to her no matter what you replied to her script.
> Her replies to your reply would be unresponsive, because they came from a script written by a man who had never thought about or foreseen your reply.
> Conversations came to resemble the conversations you have with a non player character in a video game, a scripted robotic simulation of actual conversation, or the conversations on a help line with an unhelpful third world help line worker to whom English is a second language, and who is reading from a script, a script written by a man whose native tongue is English, but his script is designed to deal with certain common problems that do not in the slightest resemble the problem you have with the product, because the man writing her script did not foresee your problem.