Pete Warden writes:
Where am I right now? Depending on who I’m talking to, I’m in SoMa, San Francisco, South Park, the City, or the Bay Area. What neighborhood is my apartment in? Craigslist had it down as Castro when it was listed. Long-time locals often describe it as Duboce Triangle, but people less concerned with fine differences lump it into the Lower Haight, since I’m only two blocks from Haight Street.
When I first started working with geographic data, I imagined this was a problem to be solved. There had to be a way to cut through the confusion and find a true definition, a clear answer to the question of “Where am I?”.
What I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that geography is a folksonomy. Sure, there’s political boundaries, but the only ones that people pay much attention to are states and countries. City limits don’t have much effect on people’s descriptions of where they live. Just take a look at this map of Los Angeles’ official boundaries:
Pete is onto a more general principle.
Semantics are folksonomy, the precision of which varies depending upon the reason for your interest and your community.
Biblical scholars split hairs, sorry, try to correct errors committed by others, by citing imagined nuances of languages used thousands of years ago. To the average person on the street, the Bible may as well have been written in King James English. Not that one is more precise than the other, just a different community and different habits for reading the text.
The question which community do you hail from and for what purpose are you asking about semantics? We can short-circuit a lot of discussion by recognition that communities vary in their semantics. Each to his/her own.