It's similar to the whole hacker/cracker debate. Words become defined by the one that has the most influence over the community and sometimes evolve on their own through places like social media.
The article acknowledges this.
Another unfortunate example is the increasingly negative connotation assigned to the word "algorithm".
bet
And while the general public might not know the fine distinctions between these, I think society does get that there’s a whole spectrum of actors now. That wasn’t true in 2000—the landscape of online crime (and white hat work) hadn’t evolved yet.
Honestly, I’m just glad the debate’s over. “Cracker” always sounded goofy, and RMS pushing it felt like peak pedantry… par for course.
That said, this whole “vibe coding” thing feels like we’re at the beginning of a similar arc. It’s a broad, fuzzy label right now, and the LLM landscape hasn’t had time to split and specialize yet. Eventually I predict we’ll get more precise terms for all the ways people build software with LLM’s. Not just describing the process but the people behind the scenes too.
I mean, perhaps the term “script kiddie” will get a second life?
Ideas, ideas are much sturdier.
If you change the meaning of something too radically, it has a tendency to snap back.
Next one down is dictionary definition (or claim to authority, for example a tweet where the term was first used). But community meaning takes precedence.
Authors are free to use a nonstandard meaning but should provide readers with their definition if they want to be understood.
No. That would make it impossible for someone new to a community to communicate with a community, all while at the same time a community isn't going to accept someone new who isn't communicating. Yet clearly people do join communities.
What happens in reality is that everyone accepts that the speaker's definition reigns supreme, and if there is suspicion – absent of a definition – that there is a discrepancy between the speaker's definition and own's own definition, the speaker will be asked to clarify.
A speaker may eventually adopt a community's definition, but that doesn't always happen either. Look at the Rust users here. They hang desperately onto words like enum that do not match the community definition. But it doesn't really matter, does it? We remember that when they say enums they really mean sum types and move on with life.
"Communities" here also have a hierarchy:
1. All speakers of a language 2. Speakers in a region (dialect) 3. Subgroups like teenagers, engineers, gamers, redditors 4. Sub-sub groups like teenagers from a specific school, engineers of a specific discipline, gamers of a certain game
x. Personal dialect (idiolect), which is a sub group that exists separately to all of these and is most closely related to family and the friend group you had as a child and teenager.
We are all members of many different groups which intermesh, and we seemlessly switch meaning and pronunciation as we do that (code switching).
When joining a community, people start at the top (learn French) then move through subgroups. Dictionaries and textbooks are designed to match as closely as possible to the top level community's consensus of word meaning, which, being large, is also the most static. But any language learner will know that textbooks can only get you so far in learning how language is actually spoken day to day. You have to join the community to learn that.
The same applies as you go down to dialects and other sub groups. You can learn a bit before you join, but becoming a part of the community, linguistically, can only happen after joining.
A good speaker will define the words as he speaks (still relying on some baseline shared understanding of the most common words, of course; there is only so much time in the day...) so there is no room for confusion, but in absence of that it is expected that the listener will question any words that show an apparent disconnect in meaning, allowing the speaker to clear up what was meant, to ensure both parties can land on the same page.
Even more so when it's an author/reader relationship. The reader is free to interpret the book/article/etc. how they want, and if enough agree, it becomes the consensus.
Where audience understanding is important than you will definitely go out of your way to ensure that definitions are made abundantly clear and that the audience agrees that they understand.
But, in actual practice, most of the time the audience understanding really doesn't matter. Most people speak for the sake of themselves and themselves alone. If the audience doesn't get it, that's their problem. Like here, it means nothing to me if you can't understand what I'm writing.
While the work is being written, the author is the only known audience. In practice, if an author cannot find enough motivation to write something for himself, it simply won't get written. Anyone else who happens to become the audience is gravy, but the work cannot be written for them as they only become known as an audience later.
I think we're quibbling over what "matter" means. If you look at it from this perspective, I understand where you're coming from.
In my opinion it's almost exactly the opposite - once something is written the only thing that matters is the audience.
But that doesn't mean the audience came from the same place. It is very possible, and often happens, that they heard/created an entirely different definition for the same word. The speaker cannot possibly use their definition before even knowing of it.
If you are trying to tell something to someone you should say it so that they someone understand what you want them to understand.
It does not mean that the audience can on the fly redefine your words, it just means than you cannot expect them to magically read your mind
I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully.
To each their own. However, we're all in this together.
How would you even know which language anyone is speaking?
Counterproposal: words are a tool for communication and meaning is something we gather from the communication. In this words are no different than hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language.
The parties to a communication can only communicate effectively if they agree enough on the meaning of words/gestures/expressions/actions (which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know)
You can, however, speak a language you do know even when the listener doesn't know said language. Thus proving that the words spoken are defined by the speaker. It must be that way, fundamentally – as you suggest, you can only speak the language you know. If that tells that words have no meaning, sure. That assertion means nothing anyway.
What they are trying to say is
"the speaker defines the meaning of words" -> everybody understand things differently and there is no external absolute authority of meaning
and
"the listener defines the meaning of words" -> people are going to understand their interpretation of what you say, not what you mean
Both are useful and important statement people can learn from while "X defines the meaning of words" is meaningless.
Of course, at this point we're ultimately getting stuck in that nerd thing I spoke of in another comment: "I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully."
So, while hilarious, I will break the cycle and ask you to clarify what you mean by "define" so that I can shift to using your definition. I'd have used it from the start but I haven't quite figured out how to read your mind yet, so I as the speaker, unfortunately, was beholden to defining it as I understand it.