Lambda the Ultimate

I wonder whether we can develop a few simple conventions that clarify what we mean by words when we use them, so a single post has fewer ambiguities, and so we might edit a post later for clarification without substantially altering the original post. The idea would be to define the sense of a specific word used in a post. I'll give an example below, involving channel, since that was the word motivating this train of though. But first I'll expand a bit on my general point.

A word can mean something very specific, or very general, often with both a technical computing sense as well as plain English language sense. In particular, a technical sense often shadows the plain language sense, as if technical meanings have closer lexical scope, so you can't use a more general sense by default unless a reader is forgiving. Sometimes I mean both: a specific technical sense and the general idea too, at the same time, because I expect a reader to bind to as many as works, as if executing a search query on a word database (e.g. all the meanings of channel that work here, for example).

A realistic way to approach the problem is to use footnote format, appending a postscript paragraph to a post that explores the sense of a word used, like a dictionary entry, but biased toward exactly what was intended locally in the current post. The first time channel appears it might be shown in italics, with a paragraph at the end repeating the word again in italics, along with a local clarification of the scope of word meaning as used in the original post.

(An unrealistic but funny way to approach the problem is with new text styles, so the way a word is highlighted might imply whether intended meaning is specific or very general, with the latter especially useful when a word has a narrow technical sense.)

channel - means of getting something to occur: a knob to read and/or write an interface to access data or controls, encompassing things as different as dereferencing a variable, accessing an array member, reading or writing streams, calling functions, or using a datatype named "channel" in a language or computing system.