Safety Fork, the

I sat down to read about sorting algorithms and this paragraph made me laugh:

Although dictionaries of the English language define “sorting” as the process of separating or arranging things according to class or kind, computer programmers traditionally use the word in the much more special sense of marshaling things into ascending or descending order. The process should perhaps be called ordering, not sorting; but anyone who tries to call it “ordering” is soon led into confusion because of the many different meanings attached to that word. Consider the following sentence, for example: “Since only two of our tape drives were in working order, I was ordered to order more tape units in short order, in order to order the data several orders of magnitude faster.” Mathematical terminology abounds with still more senses of order (the order of a group, the order of a permutation, the order of a branch point, relations of order, etc., etc.). Thus we find that the word “order” can lead to chaos.

—Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming Chapter 5