Overloading words: How can we get Oracle to stop it?
First a definition: By “overloading” I mean using the same word for two
different things. Now in normal linguistic discourse we do that all the time
and most words in the dictionary have numerous meanings. But really, we have
plenty of words, and overloading in the technical arena just causes overhead in
communicating clearly. A relatively recent example is overloading the word “partition”
in usage regarding row placement in storage and again in the completely
different context of analytic functions.
They could have used “section” or even “apartition” (a for analytical),
but no, they had to go and use the same word. Now the ship has probably sailed
never to return to port on paritition, but how can we get them to stop
overloading in the future?
And yes, I’m tossing in a huge presumption here that anyone else
actually cares.
Regards,
Mark W. Farnham