I agree that reinventing words isn’t a good idea and that we should follow established semantics as long as it makes sense. Here my take at “common sense/semantics”:

In everyday, non-computer-science terminology, we use something until it breaks. Then we give it to some recycling facility for the materials to be reused.

I think that’s what we do in software too. We use and use and use a library as we see fit and as the library reasonably permits. When we can’t do so any longer, because things keep breaking, we retrofit (“recycle”) the library by modifying it, thereby reusing it to form a new (derived) library. That new library then we can start using. That’s the same distinction between a collective and a derived work.

My best guess is that this is what you are saying too, except that your comment implies a much narrower context before one switches from using to reusing. I think as long as it ain’t broken (wrt intended use), you can’t reuse it.

In normal English vernacular, to use any tool simply means to employ it for some function. To reuse a tool means that it has been employed before for some function and is being employed again. It is natural then to speak of the use of a software library in another context from which it was originally created as “re-use”.

If we, as a software development community, are to formulate rules about when something should be “used” and when something is to be “reused” as Udi Dahan has attempted to do in his article “The Fallacy of Reuse”, we need to choose a vocabulary that helps rather than hinders the understanding of the ideas we are trying to communicate.

Therefore, we should say you may “use” or “reuse” a software component if you are employing its function without modification to the original code, but that you are “using portions of” or “using a modified version of” a software component if you have taken some library which has portions of beneficial functionality which need modification to be applied to a new context.