I consider it most interesting that these 2 sites are communicating, so to speak...
I have often heard "painting" used in these circumstances, and I am definitely not computer savvy at all. I remember one of my very early posts here on the subject of being computer savvy.
Paint seems a bit misleading in some situations. Double-clicking on a word, selects it. I've always found this to be less error-prone than trying to paint the word from left to right. In some applications, triple-clicking on a word, selects the line of text that the word is in. There are also other ways to select more than a single word in some instances. With the cursor placed to the left of a word, one can hold down the shift key, and press the right arrow. This can be done for as long as you desire, selecting a character at a time. Also, shift-control-right arrow, selects a word or so at a time.
And, if you think about it, painting is not an apt metaphor for what is happening. If I paint over something it is obscured from view and it remains that way, whereas selecting text in a word processor, is a transitory action. What happens when a user selects text, is that the white pixels and the black pixels exchange colors in the area of a bounding box around the word or text, only for so long as the text remains selected. This process is called xor (for exclusive or), a term from logic.
