Concerning Michael Barr’s comments on my post on terminology, I remember going to a meeting of topologists in 1965 or 1966 in which people kept spouting nonsense about free groups. The reason it was nonsense was that they were talking about free abelian groups without saying so. That may have been the first time I became aware of default meaning in different groups of mathematicians.

I became aware of default meanings in ethnic and regional groups long before that, when I joined the Air Force after never having been outside the deep south and discovered that other people thought “sweet milk” and “ink pen” were weird things to say.

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