Over on Squire to Giants, Steve Schefer, writes about the semantic drift of the word triage in business talk.
I think it can be a really valuable exercise to consider, and align on semantic meaning of words, even words that may seem to everyone to mean one particular thing, and triage is a great example of that. When we spend time agonizing over words in documents, arguing about glossaries, what we are doing is aligning over semantic usage for terms that may have drifted a lot.
And don’t even get started on cultural appropriation of words.
The technical nature of our work means that semantic change, which is already a natural and inevitable process in language evolution, is going to happen. Words that we regularly use acquire new meanings or shift in their usage over time. Look what we’ve done to the poor word leverage or pipeline for just to examples.
Like data, we need word stewards, the keeper of the glossary. This role is in service to the process owners to enforce them agreeing on terms and using them the same way as possible. This is why I strongly believe in central glossaries. The dangers of not doing this can be impaired communication, with the message being lost or misinterpreted. And that leads to inefficiencies, and errors, and history has shown us those errors can get pretty significant.
Investigations of a Dog 