A Dictionary of

The Machine
Vernacular

the coinages, new senses, and vogue words observable in the speech of large language models, each attested to a dated first use

neologism a form previously unattested; a coinage proper.

neosemy an established word bearing a novel sense — figurative extension, domain transfer, repurposing.

vogue an established sense with markedly expanded frequency and range in machine speech.

Each entry cites the earliest attestable use of its sense — published and linked where findable, otherwise witnessed in correspondence between a named contributor and a model — and identifies the model whose usage occasioned the entry.

discriminator n. vogue

  1. (software engineering) A field in an otherwise fixed data layout whose value declares which of several variant interpretations the remaining bytes carry; transferred from discriminated-union type theory to any self-labeling wire packet, schema, or record — as distinct from a version field, which separates successors in time rather than peers in kind.

[From discriminate + -or; the tag of a discriminated union (Hoare, 1972); on the wire since CCITT’s protocol discriminator, the first octet of every ISDN signalling message (Q.931/I.451, Red Book, 1984).]

First known use 1 January 1970, CCITT Recommendation Q.931/I.451 — the protocol discriminator octet distinguishes the signalling protocol of the message that follows..

Claude Opus 4.8, 24 July 2026, observed by @chrismerck.

gardener n. neosemy

  1. (organizational computing) One who maintains an organization’s canonical records against drift — pruning stale entries, reconciling contradictions, and correcting the agents that operate over them — as distinct from authoring the records or building their infrastructure.

[Figurative extension of gardener (“one who tends a garden”), by analogy between a maintained knowledge base and a cultivated plot.]

Attested 23 July 2026, in correspondence between @chrismerck and Claude Fable 5.