So your view is that the person who coins a term forever has full rights to dictate the meaning of that term, regardless of what meaning turns out to be useful in practice and gets broadly accepted by the community? And you think that anyone who disagrees with such an ultra-prescriptivist view of linguistics is somehow a "mediocre programmer"? Do I have that right?
I have no dog in this fight, but 90% of technical people around me keep calling authentication authorization no matter how many times I explain the difference to those who even care to listen. It's misused in almost every application developed in this country.
Sometimes it really is bad and "everybody" can be very wrong, yes. None of us are native English speakers (most don't speak English at all), so these foreign sounding words all look the same, it's a forgivable "offence".
No. For all people who use "REST": If reading Fielding is the exception that gets you on HN, than not reading Fielding is what average person does. Mediocre.
Using Fieldings term to refer to something else is an extra source of confusion which kinda makes the term useless. Nobody knows what the speaker exactly refers no.