Examples
A crane at a construction site was given its name by comparison to the long-necked bird of the same name. When the meaning of the word daughter was first extended from that of "one's female child" to "a female descendant" (as in daughter of Eve), the listener might not have even noticed that the meaning had been extended.
The late Admiral, mathematician, and computer pioneer, Grace Murray Hopper, frequently repeated a favorite amusing story in front of many audiences about an early computer that experienced an episode where it kept calculating incorrectly. When technicians examined the machine's hardwired logic (the wiring, in the World War II era computer), a huge moth was discovered such that its body was shorting out one of the vacuum tube and relay circuits and causing the repetitive fault, and so may have played a key role in popularizing the term which was in use in hardware engineering from at least Edison's time (see Computer bug#Etymology). Since the Admiral's speeches, both hardware faults and software errors are now routinely referred to as "bugs", and getting the flaws out of a product is known as 'debugging' the system. Her team almost certainly coined the latter term. A particular type of software program designed to aid software development is known as a "debugger" compliments the program known as a compiler, the first of which was developed by G.M. Hopper.
The use of bug to refer to a computer error in logic was a metaphorical extension that has become so popular that it is now part of the regular meaning of "bug". The computer industry has a host of words whose meaning has been extended through such metaphors, including "mouse" for possessing a 'tail' similar to said rodent now used widely for these computer input devices—even though ironically, the more modern wireless ones have lost the metaphorical tail entirely.
Read more about this topic: Metaphorical Extension
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)