Thanks. I gather it makes sense that Shannon’s model hasn’t made it into the colloquial because people were successfully sending information over electrical wires for a hundred years before he came along. The term had meaning long before he decided its meaning should be more precise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph
Cooke and Wheatstone had their first commercial success with a telegraph installed on the Great Western Railway over the 13 miles (21 km) from Paddington station to West Drayton in 1838. Indeed, this was the first commercial telegraph in the world.
People dealt with gravity and motion long before Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Einstein's Relativity - and people were communicating long before Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications.
When we use terms such as gravity and motion the terms retain the meanings assigned by Newton and Einstein's seminal theories. Likewise, I assert that the term information should retain the meaning from Shannon's seminal theory which gave rise to "Information Theory" as a branch of Mathematics.
By the way, Shannon's definition much more closely aligns to the original late 14th century meaning of the word which was the "act of informing." Modern common usage reduces it to the message itself rather than the successful communication of the message.