February 18, 2026
When buzzwords go brrr, meaning goes bye-bye
Semantic Diffusion (2006)
Buzzwords gone wild: ‘agile’ vs reality, and the comments are on fire
TLDR: A revived 2006 essay warns that trendy tech words like “agile” lose meaning as hype spreads, hurting real-world decisions. Commenters erupted: some blame overzealous followers, others say language naturally evolves, while jokers dragged in AI and Latin—proof the fight over words is very much alive.
An old-but-spicy post from 2006 is making the rounds again, warning that catchy terms get hollowed out by hype—“semantic diffusion.” Translation: words like “agile” and “Web 2.0” go viral, their meaning gets fuzzy, and suddenly “agile” means “no planning” while “Web 2.0” becomes just AJAX (a web trick for updating pages). It’s the telephone game for tech lingo, and the crowd has feelings.
The comment section split fast. Blame the fans camp showed up first: one poster torched “Martin Fowler zealots” for stretching concepts beyond recognition—“not his fault, but your followers.” Then came the let it evolve squad: “Nonsense,” snapped another, arguing language changes and trying to freeze definitions is a fool’s errand. Caught in the crossfire, a self-professed term coin collector chimed in—simonw’s list of handy phrases like “slop” and “cognitive debt”—adding a nerdy, playful twist to the pile-on.
Meanwhile, the memes wrote themselves. One reader saw “Semantic Diffusion” and immediately thought of AI image models—proof that words migrate with trends. Another wagged a dictionary, saying “your vocabulary is limited, not ours,” urging raids on archaic English and Latin for fresher labels. The stakes? Not just word games—when buzzwords drift, teams make bad choices. And that, dear reader, is why everyone’s yelling.
Key Points
- •Semantic diffusion is the weakening of a term’s original definition as it spreads through the community.
- •“Agile” and “Web 2.0” are cited as current examples suffering from misinterpretation despite clear source definitions.
- •The diffusion process resembles a telephone game, amplifying distortions through successive retellings, especially during hype phases.
- •Popularity and desirability increase the risk of diffusion; concrete tools and practices reduce it (e.g., Ruby on Rails, Extreme Programming).
- •The author notes past overuse of “object-oriented” and suggests such cycles are familiar, even as some consider abandoning the term “agile.”