"The Tea Act revived American passions about the issue of taxation without representation. The law provided no new tax on tea. Lord North assumed that most colonists would welcome the new law because it would reduce the price of tea to consumers by removing the middlemen. But the colonists responded by boycotting tea."
Department of Humanities Computing

Often, people adopt a "good enough" attitude toward words (one that would not be tolerated by people who deal in numbers), unimpressed with the shades of meaning a word can convey and unmoved by the fact that the same word can hold different meanings for disparate audiences, not to mention distinct individuals.

How many times have you attended meetings where what to name an item (such as a field label or a navigation component) was decided by the flip of a coin, the opinion of a high ranking attendee, or simply mindless concensus? Only to find that a, mostly arbitrary, whim had sealed the findability fate of a task or piece of information for hundreds or thousands of users.

Laissez-faire development and a lackadaisical lexicon can result from: "silo think" - the tech equivalent to ivory tower isolation that tends to limited options and opinions; 'alpha think" - the alpha dog must know all and decide all or jeopardize his status; "group think" - we're ALL smart people, we must know the appropriate language to use; or from "lazy think" - it's almost lunch time, why bother with research. The decisions elicited by silo, alpha, group, and lazy think are often followed by the ever popular disclaimers: "it's only a label" or the equally prevalent "that's what Help is for".

Those disclaimers should send you straight to users. You know the drill - solicit their opinions, gather feedback, record it, analyze it and use it. Because, whether we're talking taxes or taxonomies, users, like the colonists, want to be heard, and eventually, as the importance of their input in the creation of the tools that they use is more fully recognized, they will demand to be heard.

As designers or information architects we cannot afford to be oblivious to nor cavalier with the standard vocabulary of our users or the accepted classification of tasks or information within their domains. The English didn't anticipate resistance or request American input when creating policy - the result was a big brown bay of salt water tea, a lot of animousity, and eventually a revolution.