Yes, that is what they are, but a generalization of a thing is not the same as the specific thing, and in this case the generalization already had other names (since it has been around for many decades in many other languages). It would have been preferable to use one of the existing names instead of adding a new one and thereby complicating the story.
Yes, but the expansion of the term somewhat dilutes and transforms the original meaning of the term and its original context and usefulness. Similar to what is being done here.
It seems to me a sum should be at least as large as each of its summands (or rather, it once did). The world paid no heed, and life trudged on. I don't see a need to pick one particular archetypal trait or another and say the word "derivative" (or any other bit of mathematical jargon) mustn't ever be extended by analogy to a situation no longer directly manifesting that trait. A web of family resemblances doesn't depend on any one fiber running through all of it.
It's not as though the similarity of terminology is chosen with intent to confuse; the intent is to illuminate. The name for the generalization is chosen to match its more familiar relative because it is often _useful_ to think in terms of the analogy, imperfect though it be. [It seems humans are such that we would never find our way to powerful abstractions without such overloading; the combinatorial explosion of names would be too great to comprehend.]
Yeah. If the new term conveys the actual meaning better than the old term, then why not invent a new term when dealing with the new people? We didn't always fully understand what X was when we coined X as the term for it; sometimes better names are possible. Why not start to use them?
Or, probably more often, a new term for the same old thing is not better, serves no useful purpose, and just confuses.
No, not really. I'm not saying anything about what these things ought to have been called in a perfect world (though I think it actually fits pretty well). I'm observing that they've been called by this name for a while, so even if you can find an unambiguously better one, popularizing it may be hard.
Thank you for clarifying, I see where you are coming from! My background is in research and it is fairly common to extend / reuse an existing terminology, but I totally understand and accept your point of view.
Yes, it's extremely strange that people are looking for new terminology because they've been using the existing, perfectly good, terminology incorrectly.
Sure. At a minimum, it seems some folks find it entertaining to do so. That is a point. But naming them for the conventional purpose of indexing into cognitive clusters doesn't work, obviously.
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