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>I don't like using terms whose authors built them with disregard to what is the meaning of word they used. Serialize is, indeed, something that doesn't sound what it's doing; I understood the concept long before I accepted that this is the word to use for it. Because either json or xml or whatever you use are not turning the object's structure into a flat series of items - they are structured, there's containership. Flattening may be a better word, or perhaps betexting.
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>I rather suspect that Cetin might be right, because M$ is the champion of misnomers. They called the node in file system structure a directory, by analogy to a phone directory - except the latter only contains names, not actual telephones. Then they took the word folder after fighting it for a number of years, but that's also wrong - have you ever seen folders within folders ten levels deep? In real life this goes at best one level.
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>And the explorers... first they never said "internet explorer" - that's perhaps allowed for us or reporters to say, but coming from M$ it's always "Microsoft internet explorer" - not a misnomer this time, because it wasn't much use for regular internet, only for Microsoft internet (i.e. where sites run on Front Page and teem with ActiveXes). And the other two... I never managed to explore a single window or a file using those.

Let's also include phrases like 'consuming a file' for processing data. Since definitions of 'consume' fall to the "eat or ingest (food or drink)" or destroy by fire, every time I hear someone say "the system consumes the file" I want to ask if there's a little pile of 1's and 0's next to the server as ashes or other..