Simon Morris's Blog

June 2007 Archives

A Rose By Any Other Name

Oscar Wilde once famously remarked that Britain and America were two nations divided by a common language*. Of course, we've all heard the urban legends of Brits innocently employing their vernacular to ask for cigarettes in America, and the misadventures of American tourists dealing with the twisted logic of British place names, remnants of a few millenia assimilating every passing Viking, Norman, Celt, and Roman — not to mention a large portion of the German royal family. (Yes, it's written "Leicester Square", but it's pronounced "Throatwarbler Mangrove".)

[*] = Some credit George Bernard Shaw, although it seems neither man actually used quite those words. [The Top Three Quotation Origin Requests]

Yes, language can be a slippery thing at the best of times. The potential for ambiguity is high even when all parties agree on the terms in use, but when terms are subject to malleability, discourse can quickly descend into a babble of cross purposes and conversational blind alleys. Fabrizio Giudici recently fell foul to such polysemy in his blog, in which he is troubled by an imprecise definition of 'Rich Internet Application'.

It highlights an interesting question: what do we mean by Rich Internet Application? And, more importantly, which of the many and various solutions which go by that name is the most likely to succeed?

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