Reverse engineering. No, I don't mean backing up a locomotive or designing cars that parallel park all by themselves.

This scientific term refers instead to examining a device or product to discover how it was put together in order to design something similar to it. Picture dismantling a house piece by piece, noting the exact location of each brick and board, so that a replica can be built somewhere else.

"Reverse engineering" first appeared during the 1960s, and its narrow, technical meaning still flourishes today. Popular Mechanics, for instance, recently reported that "China may be reverse-engineering MAHEM, the Pentagon's handheld railgun" (an electromagnetic projectile launcher). Gulp.

But the meaning of "reverse engineering" is expanding. Sometimes it refers not to examining something in order to recreate it, but simply to repairing or revising it.

The Washington Post recently reported that President Donald Trump's tweets "have left his aides scrambling to reverse-engineer information to support his dubious assertions," meaning that the staffers are updating and altering their research and evidence to validate his statements.

Sometimes "reverse engineer" seems to mean "imitate," as in this excerpt from another Washington Post story: "The Sanders left is working to reverse-engineer what the right has done for decades — turning up [to vote] when there's no presidential election on the ballot."

Another creative interpretation of "reverse engineering" surfaced in a p.r. firm's claim that it specializes in "reverse engineering individual thought leaders into breaking news."

What this means, presumably, is that the firm finds ways to insert statements by its clients into timely stories, e.g., "Responding to the banana shortage, Charlie "Chopper" Chatsworth says his helicopter service will immediately begin airlifts of the scarce fruit from Guatemala to American towns."

Expanding the narrow meanings of scientific terms is nothing new, of course. Physicists grind their teeth whenever people use "quantum leap," which technically means "an abrupt but not necessarily large or dramatic modulation," to mean "massive change." And astronomers cringe when "light year," a measure of distance, is used to mean "a long time."

But this understandable and inevitable appropriation and distortion of technical terms will undoubtedly continue for light years into the future.

Oops.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.