I believe you are quite ironically misunderstanding the message of that illustration and excerpted text. It is in fact mocking the very behavior you seem to be exhibiting, when I can only assume you were intending it to mock me and my position.
That said, since it appears you’ve forgone making logical arguments in favor of simply spouting sarcasm and derision, I consider the discussion over.
Nah, easier to start my own ‘religion’.
Language evolves. If the new definition does not sit well with you, I suggest you update your wetware.
You frame the new usage as if it supercedes and eliminates the old. It does not.
The two exist in tandem and, being different usages, are employed for different purposes, and with differing levels of frequency of use, clarity of meaning, and societal acceptance.
The word “wetware”, in a usage analagous to “software”, separate and distinct from the usage as analagous to “hardware”, is indeed a more recent usage, but it also less frequently employed, much less clear in meaning, and far less widely accepted.
You are not going to convince me it is an appropriate usage, and I somehow doubt I’m going to convince you that it isn’t one. I have severe criticisms of the usage, and I refuse to acknowledge it as a legitimate or worthwhile turn of phrase. Toward that end, I entreat you to make yourself better understood by employing a more apt term, rather than arguing that any term is acceptable in any usage so long as it is novel.
Such is the nature of language as a participatory medium. Coin or use all the new meanings you like, if they fail to gain traction among other people they’re still meaningless.
Wetware? Doesn’t that refer to “Bring a Bucket Night” at Hooters? If it does, that MUST supersede all preceding usages. 
Well, RingTFA kind of changed my mind about those two. Kane seems to have made out OK, but Nestor really got screwed, with the IRS demanding taxes on money that the casino confiscated.
Seemed like a perfectly apt term to me, but since you disagree… what is your preferred apt term for what he was referring to? I can’t think of a good one. “It’s a hack on the software running on the wetware” seems pretty clumsy and makes the whole term wetware a little redundant. Wouldn’t that make wetware just hardware that happens to be biological? If that’s all you’re using it for, why not just cede the term wetware and just say “the brain” in all cases, and then there’s no misunderstandings? Whereas using wetware to fuzzily cover both the brain and the emergent behavior that comes out of it serves a purpose, particularly with respect to hardware and software, because generally speaking, there are three parties at play… there’s the hardware, the software, and the person using them, the wetware. Yes, you could theoretically subdivide them, but when we’re talking about the person using them, we very rarely need to be specific about whether we mean their actual brains structure or the behavioral properties that arise from them. So what does it profit us to keep wetware “pure”, and then have to not only create a new word to cover the other half of the equation, but also a new word that covers the combination of both, since that’s usually what we’re talking about?
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
