[ Imprecise ]

Peter Morville writes, in a book called Ambient Findability (2005), about the slippery slope of semantics (the meaning of words):

“It’s all about words.  Words as labels.  Words as links. Keywords.  …And words are messy little critters.  Imprecise and undependable, their meaning shifts with context.  One person’s paradise is another person’s oblivion.  Synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, contranyms; the challenges of communication are part of the human condition, unsusceptible to the eager advances of technology.”

When designing structures to organise knowledge or to store documentation, or when trying to standardise, there is an inescapable link to the words.  Those messy little critters.