Hi Michael, Great you've challenged the implicit assumption behind the article ! I think DDD's Bounded Contect can be use very effectively here : A context is "the setting in which a word or statement appears that determine its meaning". A context can be a team, a company, a department, a particular software. While very simple it's a very powerful tool to distinguish the different context where the same word but with different meanings will be used. Just think about the "Customer" word that has completely different meaning and concerns about whether you're in a marketing, accounting, logistics company's department. All the strategic design patterns from the DDD's book are also of great use to analyse the interactions between different contexts.

Great article, I learned NVC years ago (Non Violent Communication -> http://www.cnvc.org/about/what-is-nvc.html) and it was the best stuff I learned about human interactions, and that I now use with my young boy. Quite the same thing you describe but with a precise process we -geeks - grasp very quickly. The books by Marshall Rosenberg are good references : http://www.amazon.com/s?keywords=marshall+rosenberg