Fair enough, it's more the condescending attitude that rubs me up the wrong way. And if the words regulators use mean to them different things than they mean to everyone else (the people whom the regulations are ostensibly supposed to protect), that's probably interesting in itself! If you are charged with 'theft' under a law that defines 'theft' in a very different way to how you or your peers would define it, that's probably going to be a problem. So I'm all for a discussion on what the jargon actually means, if anyone has any insights beyond making general snipes at the HN community.
Yet my next thought was in the "forest vs trees" direction which as far as I can tell as someone with homemade popcorn watching both this thread, and the "meme stock" story (saw that phrase last night),
I will suggest that as in the case of the peers' ignorance of specific legal definitions,
it's the thought or thrust that is usually being grappled with, and the dimension of argument is usually not e.g. about the specific crimes some person might be guilty of or not, but rather the fact of their wrongdoing. Where "wrong" is not a legal concept full stop.
So too in the case of the GME thing, if not this thread; I suspect that there is a lot of implicit meta-argumentation going on,
and that some of what I see in this thread appears to be missing (or more likely, dis-missing) that, to engage in "tree" level quibbling.
(All said, I do agree words and their meaning matter; and that when we want to use them informally, because specificity in some domain is not germane to our argument, we would do well to be explicit about that...)
