I had a conversation recently with another programmer... which was a bit confusing... if only because we kept using terms that we thought the other would understand, but didn't because they understood that term to mean something else. Understand?
Our industry is chalk full of buzzwords, paradigms, and models, and a lot of other things that generate confusion. So what are some of them?
Object: The most overused word of them all! The object of this object is to objectify the objective of this other object. Everything is an object, whether someone is actually referring to a class definition, a physical instance of a class in memory, or a requirement for a class. It's not just women who have to deal with objectification... programmers deal with it on a daily basis.
Metaprogramming: This one got me last night. When I hear metaprogramming, I think immediately of metadata... which makes me think of Attributes being used to mark classes, methods, and assemblies in .NET for use in Reflection. This got super confusing because the other person was talking about metaprogramming in its more traditional sense where one program is used to write or manipulate other programs. In this case, it was using C++ template specialization to do some hard core stuff with the template preprocessor. They are related... but really involve two very different aspects of the same concept.
Modal/Modeless: I discussed earlier what happens when non-technical people try to sound technical by using terms that don't exist. Confusing modal and modeless is a great example of that.
ActiveX: I haven't done COM programming in a few years now, but back in the day I was pretty hardcore into COM/ATL and ActiveX. When I was working at Rockwell Automation... towards the end of the ActiveX reign on the Windows world... it was hilarious to see the marketing guys push ActiveX on us. Everything had to be ActiveX. They wanted to start using it just as everyone was stopping using it. Someone in that department heard the term, love it, thought it was all the rage, and so whether it made sense or not, we all needed to be writing them. Of course they didn't really know what they were for... but that never stops someone in marketing. In reality though, there were lots of programmers who were just as confused by ActiveX and how it differed from COM and OLE. To be clear for those who don't know... an ActiveX control was a specific type of COM control which implemented a specific set of interfaces (there were 13 I believe). If you didn't implement them all, it wasn't an ActiveX control.
Of course... it's hardly fair to talk about terms, without talking about how people pronounce certain terms. You'd be amazed at how serious some people get about it... almost to the point of religious fervor. Is GUID a Gooid, or a Gwid? And should you even use the term GUID anymore... and instead use UUID? Is it Linux pronounced with a long or short i? There are some who confuse matters even more by pronouncing the u in different ways. Is SQL pronounced S-Q-L or Sequel? Is OLE spelled out too... or is it Olé?
Are we all a bunch of geeks for caring so much about something so unimportant? Well... duh.