The Word State Is Overloaded
From application data to the Department of State.
The word state might be one of the most overloaded words across both the humanities and STEM.
Even within software engineering, it’s a pretty nebulous term. You have client-side state, server-side state, application state. It often comes back to data, but that still leaves a lot open. Which data? Where does it live? How long does it stick around? It’s a word you use all the time, but it’s surprisingly hard to explain exactly what you mean by it.
Then you go over to politics, and state means something else entirely. A state can be one of the fifty states in the United States, or it can refer to an independent country.
And then there’s the Department of State, which handles diplomacy. You have statesmanship, which is about skill and judgment in handling public affairs.
Outside politics, you have states of matter. Solid, liquid, gas. You have your state of mind. And you can also just state your name.