What Is a Grid?

Precision of language is often thought to contribute to precision of thought, and certainly helps to communicate ideas unambiguously. A countervailing tendency, however, causes people to adopt terms developed in one field to stand for analogous concepts that may relate only incidentally to the original. Eventually the meaning of the original term becomes so broad and heterogeneous that we recognize its imprecise use as an impediment to communication, and the community adopts more precise language to clarify meaning. I argue that it is time to apply this corrective process to the term “grid.” This suggestion arises from my own …