Thread by @mattblaze

Apropos of nothing in particular, pedantic insistence on a particular usage of some relatively unimportant technical term is invariably uninteresting. I’m reminded of a few years back when…

… some random stranger here made a big deal about how obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about when I used “cryptography” when I “clearly” would have used “cryptology” if I knew anything at all about the subject...

The truth is that while cryptography and cryptology can be narrowly distinguished (the former refers to encryption, while the latter to the study of the field broadly), virtually no one actually working in the field finds the distinction important, and uses them interchangeably.

But people with little experience in the field, but who have read about it, sometimes (mistakenly) think that “correctly” using these terms is a critical sign of professionalism.

So it is in most fields. There’s often much less precision in technical jargon than you’d expect.

Occasionally, of course, precision matters a lot. When it does is one of the the things people who actually do know what they’re talking about know.