Thans for your scrupulosity grey_whiskers!
I am going to reiterate a good essay on this topic...
In an hour or so, that is.
Cue to sound of can opener and grey_whiskers sauntering towards the kitchen in hopes of tuna fish...
Cheers!
From Dorothy L. Sayers, in her essay Creative Mind:
It is fascinating to watch the never-ending struggle as language and scientific method develop side by side. The process is always the same. The scientist seizes upon a word originally made by the common poet and endeavors to restrict it to a single, definite meaning that shall be the same in every context. The physicist, for instance, takes a word such as force or energy and uses it to denote a particular factor in physics that can be mathematically expressed. To his horror, the general public refuses to restrict the word in this manner, and innumerable misunderstandings occur. Not only does the common man continue to use the words in metaphorical meanings which they cannot bear in scientific contexts, he also reads those meanings into the scientist's exposition of physics, deducing from them all kinds of metaphysical conclusions quite foreign to the physicist's intentions. Or, if the scientist does succeed in capturing a word and restricting its meaning, some other word will arrive and take over all the former meanings of the original word, so that the same pair of words may be used in successive centuries to mean totally different things and may even become substituted for each other, without anybody's noticing what has happened.
She goes on to consider the words reason, imagination, and reality -- all very relevant to the discussion at hand, btw.
Cheers!