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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

For a lot of people, “terminal”, “bash”, “putty”, “cli”, “ssh”, “shell” are all interchangeable and equivalent terms.

I do recall starting my comment with the explicit note that I'm nitpicking.

If, to you, "command line games" just means "something I can run while in a terminal" then cool, but that's not technically what that term means, and we're technical people here on HN. Especially those of us who use (any flavour of) the terminal day in day out.

> and we're technical people here on HN

and quite political it seems

It’s all I use but you can call it the “word window” for all I give a shit, nitpicking is just a synonym for argumentative+stubborn.

Inb4 you nitpick the definitions.

Jumping onto a thread which you see as argumentative+stubborn, to point that out... including "for all I give a shit"

Is a synonym for?

Potential growth / reflection opportunity.

I think the bigger concern is that distinguishing the terms here is more interesting.

There's nitpicking and then there is just making up technical definitions of words that aren't widely shared.

I think a lot of the time that's basically synecdoche and unobjectionable. Other times it's confusion and that matters when it matters, outside of which it can be nice to clarify... if it can be done respectfully.

In this case, though, it's writing in The Linux Journal, and it appears to be promising something it's failing to deliver.

Then the reasonable thing is to educate these people, since they are in no way[0] equivalent. Words are supposed to have meaning, so you know what the hell people talk about.

It's not hard to use the correct terms, and something that tries to be an authority on, say, Linux, such as Linux Journal, could simply do so instead of spreading confusion.

[0] OK, there's some equivalence between a few of the words.

Exactly. "Letting it slide" is how we end up being told that because for most people a "hacker" is a cyber-criminal, it is now the sole valid definition.

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