[crabkin]

Not sure if you're subtly being critical of my use of the word. However I do have something to add to your thought. Richard Feynman has a really interesting quote, I'm paraphrasing, but he says it's hard to learn some things initially because everything is named slightly wrong. At the time I was also reading some Wittgenstein and that got me thinking about words and what they correspond to. I really do think they simply just correspond to the multitude of contexts they exist in now. For instance, if you look up the definition of words, you get more words, and then for those words, other words. It's turtles all the way down, it's all circular. The only grounding is the situation where the noises are made and then consequences follow, that's what I think characterizes them, and so atomic words are meaningless, they only have any discernible meaning in time and place in configuration with certain other words and with certain people.

I think using a word like the matrix in a strict sense when it comes from a movie about just about all the evocative ideas in Western thought is ludicrous. It's pedanticism on steroids.