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I'm a programmer and found myself naming an entity, which shows things, as Shower. Of course, the first time I read it, I remembered the freshness of the drops of water and nothing related to what it was supposed to mean. Then I google-translated it into Russian and found no nouns stemming from the verb Show.

So my questions are:

  1. Is it correct to use Shower in the sense I meant?

  2. If not, then what is the closest noun to the definition of a thing that shows something? I came up with Presenter, but it doesn't feel very close.

  3. How did this word, which is evidently a derivative from a verb, evolve to mean an absolutely unrelated thing?

1 Answers1

3

1) If you're using it in code which will be seen principally by you and those after who maintain the code, there is no problem with "shower".

2) If it's going to be seen by the general public, then "viewer" is probably a better choice; in my experience, there is a connotation that a "presenter" is a person. Of course, a viewer can also be a person (especially used with television and other visual media), but it is far more often used for a physical or virtual device than "presenter".

3) "Shower" is not derived from the verb "show". "Show" derives from the Middle English word "schawen", or "scheawen", whose meanings relate to seeing; "Shower" derives from the the Middle English word "_shour", which relates to the North Wind, and the cold, rainy weather with which it is usually accompanied in the Northern Hemisphere. The apparent relationship between the two is a result of spelling simplification, giving them both the similar appearances, but different meanings.

brasshat
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    Thank you, you've answered the third part of my question exhaustively. However I can't yet accept the answers to the first two. I was asking if it's correct to use the word "shower" in that sense without any specific context, because I've seen people use it, e.g., in this question. So is it correct? Also, "viewer" has quite the opposite meaning from the perspective of "subject-object" relationship to the word I'm looking for, i.e., one shows (presents) to a viewer. – Nikita Volkov Jun 22 '14 at 09:45