Guys, don't get me wrong. As a fellow card-carrying prescriptivist I maintain that broadening or stretching the meaning of a word dilutes the language. For example, "tape" has lately come to mean to record either analog or digital information by any means whatever,...

...eg, including Tivo (which term itself is gaining a broader meaning, but that's the subject for another thread), hard drive, or memory chip. Far superior instead is the coining of an entirely new word that clearly specifies a single function

However, we have to live in the real world, where the average clod (me) drops a word anywhere he feels it will remotely fit, until at length everybody is using that that way, even if the new usage is directly opposite in meaning

If enough of us use it that way long enough the new meaning eventually turns up in Merriam

I call the process "smearing" for want of a better term. There is one though I don't remember it

This is what I feel has happened to "algorithm." If you go to OneLook you will find several defs a liberal interpretation of which seems to indicate that the term can also be used to mean the code constituting part of a computer program and performing a particular job given the appropriate inputs--a routine

Thus if your email got shunted off into my Norton Junk Mail Folder, the expr "Your message got shifted to the nether regions by a Norton algorithm" should be perfectly clear to almost anybody, since it's the principal function of Norton to identify spam

But thank you all for bringing to my attention the original, broader meaning of "algorithm"

dalehileman