Kudos on his attempt to abstract out the engineering problem. It appears that he's taken very literally the words of Claude Shannon in paragraph two of "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948. [http:/
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design."
Though to your point, he not only missed the boat on the semantics of the lemon, but it's also technically a glass and not a cup. At least he didn't give you a lemon donut, or you'd have known for sure that he was a topologist.