When a professional discipline has a vocabulary for expressing the fundamental concepts on which it’s based, then you have a means for how practitioners in the discipline can make sure they’re talking about the same things. The problem with establishing such a vocabulary is that many people have come to use a variety of different terms or, even in those cases where the terms are the same, the definitions used are different. This is why I like to encourage people to think operationally.

So why are so many testers I meet so bad at this? Is this just not something they’re encouraged to do? Or am I just being too picky about how people use terms?