Laddy's Anti-Glossary (WIP)

Welcome to this document! In here is a list of terms that I believe either should be avoided or are commonly misused, sometimes suggesting better ones alongside; I call that an anti-glossary. For your information, I did not coin this term here.

This features terms for any topic, mainly the ones I'm invested into most. Note that my intent is not to completely discourage others from abandoning the following ones, but rather to explain the issues with using them. This is mostly based on my opinions, meaning it would not apply to everybody as well.

Please note that I try my best to be civil here. In case I might have accidentally caused an inconvenience here, feel free to criticize. Thank you for reading.

This article is currently under construction, I will add more words to it over time. I will probably consider it complete if it's qualified to be to me.

ad-blocker

With an extension like this, you are able to prevent banner and video ads from displaying in your browser, and... that's it. Advertisements are just one thing that ruins the web surfing experience, with tons of other content that make pages even more cluttered. This is not to criticize advertising but the way they are implemented, and apart from that surveillance and poor optimization remain as other prevalent issues on web pages. A content blocker such as uBlock Origin for example, is able to handle them all at once.

CD

Compact Disc for CD, like Digital Versatile Disc for DVD, is just one of the formats used for consumer optical discs. Most people apply the word "CD" to any type of disc, regardless of the format used. Besides those two that I mentioned, there also exists Blu-ray, Laserdisc, MiniDVD and UMD, among many others.

digital rights management

Abbreviated DRM, it is a kind of technology intended to restrict certain forms of access to digital content. With DRM-protected files for example, you would not be able to play them on the program or device of your choice unless you figure out how to decrypt them.

The word "rights" in this term is nonsensical, because it does not grant any of that to the user whatsoever (not like every software can't come without technical restrictions). For this reason, I suggest using "digital restrictions management" instead to match with its true definition. The reality is that you should not be trusting or endorsing DRM in any way.

I am currently creating an iceberg (available only to registered IcebergCharts users) covering diverse DRM systems: you can assist me in its development whenever you wish.

freeware

This term is solely for software distributed without monetary charge while often being proprietary, but this definition does not technically match its namesake. There is another named "free software", for those that let users execute them at any time and study and change it freely. While it can be applied to money, the primary definition of the adjective "free" is the ability to act as one wishes, which is why free software have this name.

There is a coined term to use which is even more meaningful: "gratis software", with gratis being Latin for "free of charge".

high/low-functioning autism

They are intended to describe the amount of assistance an autistic person needs based on its spectrum (mainly related with intelligence), however the use of "functioning" implies to me that the ones who need more help become less capable. I use instead "low/high support", mentioning only the amount of help a person needs without judging its autistic traits or level of intelligence.

google

"Google" mostly refers to a proprietary search engine, which is notorious for tracking queries that every user makes on it (not to mention being owned by a shitty company). Being the most popular one, it created a verb which is used by many to emphasize the engine they use (back when it used to be probably "the best"), however I'm not one who would want to strictly use Google, especially for reasons I described above.

On an unrelated note, I have also seen a few occurrences of "Google Doc" being used instead of "word processing document". You know the drill: don't use the former, period.

homebrew

I do believe homebrew is an excellent form of creation. Making software for hardware undocumented by the vendor without a license is really lit, it proves that even hobbyist developers can have the control over it. But sometimes the word is used as an alternative verb to "jailbreak", meaning hacking software to lift vendor lock-in. Homebrew is just one of the consequences of jailbreaking, as a subset of the possibility of controlling hardware beyond what the vendor tried to impose. Don't use "homebrew" when referring to hacking.

GIF

I would personally only use "GIF" on animated images encoded in the GIF format. I call anything else simply "animation". There are multiple ones which are less popular but more sophisticated, such as PNG (which is apparently rarely known as an animated image format) and WebP.

MP3 player

"MP3 player" should not be used for devices that are capable of reading audio formats beyond MP3. Even though it is one of the most common of that type, the use of this term leaves behind codecs that may be superior, especially Vorbis and FLAC. It should also be noted that the MP3 codec was patented until 2017, which stagnated its evolution way back when it first rose to popularity compared to the other ones I mentioned before, which are free.

PC

Abbreviation of "personal computer". If you know how sometimes multi-platform programs are labelled "PC & Mac compatible", then I should address the misuse of this word. I like to use it on a specific type of computer to emphasize the amount of control possible on its hardware, however it applies to any OS, including Windows, macOS and Linux. To avoid confusion, use "Windows" instead of "PC" to specify an OS (which is proprietary, by the way).

photoshop

Like with "google", Photoshop is just a single commercial image editing program. Therefore, I do not endorse using this verb to mention the act of editing a digital image, as there are obviously other image editors.

virus

Back then, I saw a lot of people misusing the word "virus" as a type of software instead of "malware". A virus is just one type of malware that inserts code into other programs without the user's awareness, yet it's very often incorrectly treated as a synonym of "malware", which can either mislead, extort, spy on or weaken the security of the user.