Google Trends for parasitic symbiosis etal seems interestingly different for US[1] and Worldwide[2], suggesting the possibility of regionally divergent usage.
It's all fun and games by Lewis Carroll, but given the amount of doublespeak in American cities these days (especially by the Left but also by the Right), I think we need to insist that words have a meaning and you can't twist them to mean the opposite.
I am literally sourcing my definition from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on symbiosis
I totally get it. People usually mean "mutually beneficial" when they talk about symbiosis. But the deeper we go into this Hacker News thread, the more amusing it gets to me that multiple commenters are really struggling to acknowledge the broader meaning of the term. And what's even funnier is that the broader meaning probably originates from biologists and ecologists; people who are very invested in precise language in this space.
> "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
> "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master – that's all."