I was reading the O’Reilly JXTA book and encountered this: A propagate pipe connects one output pipe to multiple input pipes. “OK,” I thought, “things get put into multiple pipes and they get multiplexed together and come out of one pipe.” In fact, a few sentences later, I realized I had it exactly backward: you output into one pipe and it gets copied into multiple pipes and others can get input from them. I think you can read that sentence either way without much strain. Ain’t language wonderful?