It’s not nitpicking. The choice of language both demonstrates and constructs the models we hold, and the models we hold deeply influence how we behave.

People fall for phishing attacks all the time because they think of their bank’s Web site as a “place” that they “go to” in order to do some banking. It’s not. Each Web page is a file downloaded from *some* machine on the Internet and displayed by your browser, and files are easily copied from one server to another. So people never apply the model of “Some server just sent me a file, do I now send my password to the same server” and instead apply the model of “I just went somewhere, does it look like the same place I’ve been before and given my password before” and fall for the phishing attack because it does look the same. Physical locations are hard to spoof, Web pages are not.

I remember, back in ‘93, talking about mailing yourself important documents, and automatically bouncing them back to your own email address when they finally arrived at your mailbox. It was a brutal hack to let people to store more files than their disk quota allowed, but it was the closest thing I’ve seen to storing files on the Internet.

Come to think of it, there’s a lot of stuff for which that’s not such a bad metaphor– See snopes.com for lots of examples.