etymology - Is 'bug' a term or a slang word?


In my answer to the question about the opposite for bug in programming, I referred to 'bug' as a slang word.


Shaun Wilson, in his comment insists on 'bug' being a term that derived from a historical process:



"bug" is not "slang for error", "bug" is a historical term derived from the process of fixing old vacuum tube based computers from yesteryear, where a moth or similar would find its way into the computer causing a short (and an error in programming). Thus the term "debugging" was born, and still, today, we refer to programming errors as "bugs". Often users refer to things as bugs which are not, such as feature changes, or unexpected behaviors which are not bugs (but were otherwise unintended.) This is also why we have a running joke about certain bugs being features



While the above is a great note on the etymology, I still do not agree 'bug' is a term if used in computer programming; the term is something that is singular, singularity is a property of a term. Something other than one official term may be slang. In case of a live bug in vacuum tube it was the term describing the object literally. In case of computer bug, error is implied, and 'bug' is a figurative description.


So the question is: if a word used to be a term because it described an object literally (real bug), now is used figuratively (computer error), does it remain a term or is it a slang word?




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