Violent terms

[Steve Owens <uso01 -at- EAGLE -dot- UNIDATA -dot- COM>]

David Oberstadt (daveo -at- vnet -dot- ibm -dot- com) said:
>> Johnathan Price asks about violent language in computer terminology. I
>> think our old pal EXECUTE will be around forever, but the tendency is
>> to hold back on such terms.  These may be the leftover verbs used by
>> men who played video games (violent ones) for hours as boys.

Jack Shaw <jsh -at- SOFTWARE-AG -dot- DE> replied:
> It might just be that, when reacting to such words as "execute" and
> "abort", that we have to reconcile ourselves to the nature of our
> being that causes us to conjure up the most regrettable aspects of
> these words, rather than their less emotive meanings.

> Remember when "discriminate/ing" had a positive connotation?

I think Jack hit the nail right on the head here (to use another
"violent" turn of phrase :-).  Common usage of a word changes over
time.  Most of these words weren't as laden with connotations when
they were first used in computer science; reading too much into them
is pointless.

Before we come to conclusions about the personalities of the
programmers, perhaps we should look into the origin of the word?
Execute originally meant "to carry out."  I suspect the negative
connotations came about when people shortened "execute the sentence"
to "execute."

The original meanings of these words are still valid; it's only the
public perception of the words that have changed.  This doesn't mean
that we can't change the words we use in our documentation, but
reading too much into the terminology is pointless.

Steven J. Owens
uso01 -at- unidata -dot- com