[Brakenshire]

I think about it from the perspective of computing, when you learn jargon, are you just learning an idiom, or are you learning the model through which you will think? It's definitely the latter to some extent.

In my family, we have the eternal 'coming in five minutes', which is never five minutes, but which may be anywhere from 12 minutes to never. Essentially it's a way of putting a future task on a queue which will be checked at an indeterminate time in the future. This doesn't exactly reflect a precise parsing of the phrase, which might be tempting for a linguist, but I do think that the way you express yourself in language and the way that language is understood by others affects the way you think and behave. The eternal five minutes definitely has a habit of making us late.