Poka-Yoke

"concept" is the closest term with the least baggage, though I admit it's disappointingly unexciting. Perhaps the concept of concepts needs to be defined and named an eponymous law.

"Epistemological atom" is bulky. Some are principles, some are laws, some are aphorisms, some are patterns. Sometimes you see "nuggets" or "pearls of wisdom". The publishing industry tries to froth these ideas into $25 nonfiction hardbacks, 15 minute TED talks, and hour long podcast appearances, but they are without obvious exception small ideas.

"meme" as analogous to gene might have taken root in some alternate timeline. I think one of the characteristics that makes certain ideas compelling in this way is that they seem to be applicable in ways far beyond their origin (cf. design patterns). That's why they feel collectable.

I liked the term "knol" for a "unit of knowledge" from when Google tried to do a wikipedia like thing. There is definitely a shape and scope relatable to a wiki page. The idea should feel unique and complete enough to have its own wiki page but dense enough to fit in the summary.

When I was designing boards, we had 1-2 standard types of connector we were allowed use, that had an even number of pins. So we would use a different number of pins for each connector on the board, even if some of the pins were not used. It looked kind of silly to see 4 wires in a 12 pin connector but it was better then getting them mixed up.

It depends on which dialect of English you're referring to, but either is probably close enough, especially if you speak GA or can imitate it. If you can manage "Yoh keh" as in "moth fret" in General American English it's closer.

Japanese vowels can vary quite a lot, because there aren't nearly as many other vowels to confuse them with as there are in English.

The Japanese "o" vowel is usually close to [ɔ], the General American English CLOTH vowel (from Wikipedia: "cough, broth, cross, long, Boston", or "moth") or THOUGHT in either GA or British Received Pronunciation ("taught, sauce, hawk, jaw, broad") than to GOAT in either dialect ("soap, joke, home, know, so, roll", or "show").

The Japanese "e" vowel is usually close to [ɛ], which is the General American English DRESS vowel (from Wikipedia: "step, neck, edge, shelf, friend, ready", to which we might add "fret") than to [e] or [ej] or [eɪ] or [ei], which is more like the General American English FACE vowel ("tape, cake, raid, veil, steak, day", to which we might add "slay"). RP doesn't have [ɛ] at all; the closest it has is that it realizes SQUARE ("care, fair, pear, where, scarce, vary") as [ɛə].

Other English dialects (AAVE, Irish, Scottish, Cajun, Southern American, Jamaican, Standard Indian, Bangladeshi, Nigerian, Australian) realize these vowels in their own different ways which may or may not correspond well to the Japanese phonemes you're asking about.

Yup, I do this myself just to reduce the number of parts I stock.

I'll try to plan uses for all the pins in advance, like a deluxe version, and then cut down what's needed for the thing I'm doing now. Often I can actually add something useful (like an extra copy of a signal to reduce the need to splice in the harness) at no cost, just by thinking ahead a little.

Another thing I'm proud of recently, is having an uncommitted relay on a board, whose function could then be defined by how the harness was wired. Rather than try to anticipate how it would be used, I just figured it'd be handy. Provided an extra ground too, so you could just put a hairpin wire in the connector to ground one side of the relay since that's a pretty common usage model. And for builds where we knew we wouldn't use it, just DNP at assembly time.

This reminds me of how the diesel spout at the gas station is too big to fit into a car that takes gasoline.