"Alternative"

At work thinking about words today! It's interesting how the word "alternative" has evolved to carry extra meaning these days. In the past the word simply meant "another choice", i.e. if you ask for a particular product in a shop and it's not available then the shopkeeper might offer you an alternative. These days it means so much more, for example if someone is talking about an "alternative lifestyle" it means alternative to a normal lifestyle but the concept of lifestyle is so nebulous that quite often it is used to mean "hippy" or "hedonistic". Similarly the term "alternative medicine" is used to describe a set of substances that aren't actually medicine, i.e. they are not alternative medicines, but alternatives to medicine. Then we have "alternative energy" which is actually an alternative energy source to carbon based fuels and not an alternative to energy! This kind of flexibility in our language makes it very powerful but makes my job, i.e. writing software to understand it, very difficult indeed!