Overloaded (or, the case for a bigger dictionary)

There's a tendency to borrow words and give them whole new meanings in any industry, and the computer industry is world class at doing this. The problem is that there are so many branches of the computer industry all doing the same thing, you really can't discuss something with anyone outside your own little branch without creating misunderstandings.

Take a nice simple word like "provisioning" for example. If I were to talk about it to most of you, you'd think that I was talking about going down the supermarket to buy groceries for the week. In the computer industry it takes on a whole range of meanings.

I used to work in storage networking. There, provisioning meant making network disk shares that people could use. But if I use that word in my current job it means creating a user and adding all the security rights they might need. If we talk to John R, he'd probably think of configuring a phone line.

See what I mean? They all really mean "configuring" or "supplying something in a configured state".

This becomes a problem when you might want to buy (for example) a provisioning system (a computer program that would help you configure whatever it was you meant by provisioning). How do you make sure management understands what they're getting for their money?

One solution is to stop overloading words. If we gave different actions different names we'd all know what was going on.

For example, we could call one type of provisioning "erk" and another "pwill", then we'd be buying an erking or pwilling system, not just a provisioning system. A more universal system might erk and pwill (and even squee or gunge), but at least you'd know what you're getting. Isn't that easier?

The two most logical languages I know are German and Japanese, you can almost guarantee that there's a DIN or JIS standard for naming conventions that they use, and a court for arbitration when the same word is used twice...