this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 61 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Fruit the botanical term and fruit the culinary term are just not the same word. Similarly to how theory means something different in science and in colloquial speech. That's just how language works.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago (4 children)

More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.

My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.

[–] SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago

I always thought it was more like overloading, but namespaces are also a good analogy.

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