Spotted in Blaine Buxton: Positronic Vibrations From Alto Dorado. Blaine has remarked on the use of replacing words in Sci-fi. This is a pretty old practice - back in sci-fi books this was common place too. It started when sci-fi authors had to invent words to describe 'new things' which weren't a reality yet. It follows that in some societies or future societies, some words may have changed or evolved differently. But yeah, sure the meaning is still the same.

My personal favourite is Frel and Dren from Farscape. They change lots of words such as Microt instead of Minute, etc. Frak is a good one. But I think Blaine suggests that this is something new? In fact it was used in the original Battlestar Galactic too.