> How did this horrible reversal of vocabulary occur?  It seems predestined
> to cause confusion in this present age of "client-server" architectures. 
> I think we need a popular decree "normalizing" the X nomenclature.  It's
> like saying I own a 1995 Honda Highway and it drives me on the car.

If you program for X you'll understand. The idea is that the machine
running the X server is *serving* the display resources out to the
client programs. If the clients were "servers" what would be the
resource they were serving? 

Consider this as well: You start up one display server and many clients
connect to it sporadically. Just like clients log into an FTP server
sporadically. 

If we "normalized" the X architecture it would be like saying the FTP site
logged into my machine and uploaded the software I requested ;-)