They both grow on trees. They both are juicy, and their juice is drunk as a beverage. They both have seeds in them. They are both somewhat spherical. They can both be tart or sweet, depending on the variety.
Also, all dictionaries say comparing includes differences and likenesses, so this makes comparing them even more easy. Yeah, I know the “idioms don’t have to mean what they say” crowd will want to argue with this.
Whenever I say I’m going to run into the 7-Eleven, my wife admonishes me. “You might slip and fall; at best you’ll look like a fool. Just walk.”
Re: “Hacking”.
Here we go again.
While originally a “hack” meant a cleverish thing at MIT, not everyplace is MIT! (What a surprise.)
At all the schools I was a CS student and faculty member at, a “hack” was a poor piece of junk code. (Think in terms of someone being a “hack” writer.) Hence “hacker” meant a crummy programmer.
Of all the people I knew, exactly one used “hack” in the MIT sense. And that person was from MIT.
So, no, “hack” meaning something positive is very, very far from universal.
Just yesterday we were eating at a crowded food court and I said “I’m going to run to the restroom.” The wife cocked an eyebrow and said "Sure, you go ahead and run…" And I thought of this thread!
People who say “yummers” have “puppers”.
Inevitably, when you finally see a photo or meet them, you’ll think “Okay, I’m looking at two old worn-out coon dogs… are they what she’s been referring to as her sweet little puppies?”
Back in the late 1960’s I interviewed for a job on the West Coast. At one point I mentioned that I enjoyed coding. “That’s what I was waiting to hear,” exclaimed the interviewer. “You’re a hacker!”
The word “Extreme” added to every goddamned thing.
The college-ruled notebooks they provide at work are labeled “Xtreme Notebooks” <- note the clever spelling too!
I also have a box of Kimwipes that are called “Extreme Wipes”.
I could list more but I try not to start drinking before 5:00.
Obviously you didn’t bother to read my cite.
The point is not where the term originated, it was how and why it originated in its modern meaning, and how the meaning evolved (or, some might say, devolved). The idea of a hacker as the writer of “a poor piece of junk code” is actually not entirely inconsistent with the idea of a hack as clever and creative; from the etymology one sees the common thread of a hack as something quick-and-dirty and possibly quite clever, but also representative of bad practice from a software engineering standpoint, the exact opposite of how to create structured, well-tested, reliable software. A software engineer is concerned with structured design, functional isolation, and testing for reliability; a hacker is concerned with a quick and clever way of making a computer do something he wants that it isn’t currently doing. These are completely different domains of competence, and each has their place. If you’re having a major software emergency, you want a hacker, not a computer science theoretician who will tell you what you should have done.
Even in the most devolved sense of “hacker” as someone who breaks the security protections of computer systems, many are very smart people who are doing this as a beneficial service to help improve security. And even those who are doing it maliciously, if they are truly to be called hackers, should be understood to be deploying considerable skills in this pursuit. They may be malicious and may even be criminal, but at least they are skilled criminals and not script kiddies.
Simply declaring that a hacker is anyone who writes “a poor piece of junk code” – and anyone who says otherwise is wrong – glosses over this rich etymological history.
As long as “cool” has endured, there is still an issue about it that can irk me. In my day, the proper pronunciation formed the last letter as a vowel stop. It sounded almost like the word for the sound a dove makes, but with a more abrupt end. Then, sometime in the late '80s, the young’uns began to make it into a two syllable word, sounding almost like “kewel”, which sounded all wrong. Fortunately, that practice faded away, but now people have taken to pronouncing the “L”, which still sounds not quite right, but I can handle it.
The verbal garbage that grates on me is “the fact of the matter is”.
I use “yep yep yep!” on occasion. It just slips out unless I’m consciously thinking about it. I picked it up from watching too many “Land Before Time” videos with my kids when they were younger.
I want to choke myself every time it happens. Every! Time!
“Tactical” doohickey is my current pet peeve.
The doohickey in question doesn’t know a thing about tactics, and has no properties that will help you figure out what the best tactics are in a given situation.
What it really means is “this doohickey closely resembles those used by the military.” And it’s frequently used with devices where a military connection really doesn’t fucking matter, e.g. a tactical flashlight. (And yes, that’s an actual example that I’ve seen more than once.) In what civilian context is a “tactical” (military-style) flashlight going to be more effective than an ordinary civilian LED flashlight?
I’ll also join the crowd that’s annoyed as hell by “reach out to” as a synonym for “contact.”
Up until a few years ago, to “reach out to” someone was a term that had emotional connotations. The pop songs of my younger days were filled with that usage: two that I can think of off the top of my head are the Four Tops’ hit “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” and the mini-sermon in Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” that goes:
And so forth.
So when I’m asked to “reach out” to Bob in the programming branch, I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking something like, “why, is he going through some difficulties at home?” or “I hardly know Bob, isn’t there someone who knows him better who can be with him in this difficult time?” But I manfully contain my smartassery.
On top of all that, it’s not even a shorthand for the terms it replaces - quite the opposite. ‘Call’ Bob or ‘contact’ Bob or ‘talk to’ Bob are all shorter than ‘reach out to’ Bob.
You mean 
like this?
I mean, I mean, I mean, I’m sitting here on the bench,
I mean, I’m sitting here on the Group W bench… 
Yeah, it’s been around that long. I don’t think we’re gonna get rid of it any time soon.
Cute words that end with an “e” sound. My college-age daughter used to subscribe to Seventeen magazine, and occasionally, I’d flip through it to see what was what with the teen world. They wrote vomit-inducing sentences like, “Take a selfie with your bestie and post it to Insty!”
One that’s really starting to bug me is ''X things you need to know about Y."
Seconded!
(Most of the time, I need to know exactly zero things about Y.)
The fifth one will shock you!
I was genuinely puzzled by the Numbered List School of “Journalism”, as were my students (they consider it all just clickbait).
But I came up with a theory that it fits in with shortened attention spans… “Hmm, I don’t have the patience to read a whole article on technology, but I bet I could handle ‘Seven Things You Need To Know About Your Privacy’ … seven sounds doable.”
My 83-year-old father has started complaining about “grab” being used in situations that don’t involve … what, physical seizure of an object or person? I don’t see the problem. It’s a useful word with connotations distinct from “get” or “acquire” or whatever.
When say I will “grab” something, I mean that I will get that thing quickly, without wasting time, because I have other important things to do. (This is a common situation when you are around an 83-year-old with Parkinson’s.) But if I say it around him, I get shit for it. Well, I don’t know why it bugs some of you, but with him it’s probably the meds making him cranky. 
And along those lines, the clickbait headline of the form “She did THIS on a plane!”. CNN has been doing this a lot, sometimes on behalf of “sponsored” links, but often for their own stories. My attitude: if the perpetrator of this excitement has to be described by a meaningless pronoun that requires an antecedent but doesn’t have one, and if the action of that entity can only be described as “THIS”, then I’m going to assume that what “she did” was likely something like “opened a bag of peanuts”, and I’m going to move on without clicking.