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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7584692" data-attributes="member: 4937">This problem is not remotely unique to people reading terms from AD&D.  Much of modern discourse devolves from people regularly using terms with no concrete idea in their head what they mean, or hearing bits of academic technical jargon which are compound words or phrases and assuming that since they are familiar with the words that make up that jargon that they understand what they mean without having to read a book about it.Cases is point: Identity, Tolerance, Left, Right, Liberal, Conservative, Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism, Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism (Hint: Not the same thing is the prior phrase.), Capitalism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Neo-Liberalism, Alt Right, Feminism, Political Correctness, Social JusticeI could go on but I'm already almost certainly inviting someone to political debate that I really don't want to have.  My point being, regardless of your stand on those things, many people on both sides talk about them without any idea what they actually mean completely oblivious to the fact that they can't actually put into words the central idea that they are arguing about - much less that if they did, it would probably be different words than the person that they are arguing with.  Many arguments could be avoided if people refused to use words that they couldn't define.Similar things happen when we argue about gaming.  Out come terms like "agency", "sandbox", "adventure path", "gamist", "cinematic", "rules light", "narrativist", "Indy", "gritty" and so forth and I don't know how many times on the boards it has happened that the person I'm arguing with has a very different take on what those words mean than I do.   In the case of gaming jargon, there is at least the excuse that there is no definitive dictionary of gaming jargon, and common uses have evolved in different ways.  Heck, I'm sure I'm quite guilty on this myself, as the way I define "cinematic" is very different than the way I think the originator of the term used it, based on my own false assumption that since I knew the word that I understood the meaning.I often wish that when people invented these jargon terms they instead of repurposing a word or inventing a compound word, they used some nonsense word like "Varple" or "Zaroomni" instead.  That way misunderstandings would be harder, since no one would assume on seeing the word that they knew what it meant and would instead have recourse to ask or seek a dictionary somewhere.But in the case of the words "school" and "college", I blame this on our deficient educational system and the general dumbing down of vocabulary as neither of those are jargon terms and Gygax was using them in a very ordinary sense - dictionary definition #2, as it were.   Granted, it might be better if in English ever sense of word had a very different sound and spelling for it, so that for the dictionary definition #1 of college we used 'College' and for #2 we used a more Latin like Colleagium or some such, but alas no living language is nearly so orderly.  And granted, I have a bit more sympathy for someone mistaking the usage of a word in first sense rather than the second, than I have for someone that uses a word with no sense attached to it at all or who uses the same word in different senses and rapidly switches between them without realizing it - such as the person who argued that 'liberals' were more generous people because that's what 'liberal' means.  (Again, I don't want to argue that, just suggesting that is not proof of the thesis.)I had a realization of just how disorderly and messy language actually is as my kids were learning to talk.  It's amazing anyone ever picks it up.  So to that end, while a pedagogue like me can very much sympathize with the feelings behind your rant, I also fully sympathize with the person who read "College of Bards" and thought, "It's a building where bards learn bard stuff from bard professors."I also have come to the conclusion watching fantasy evolve that there is only a certain distance into the past an average person is able to reach, and as time passes our sense of what is ancient and fantastic but also comprehensible and relatable progresses forward as well.   For example, most people watching a fantasy setting like those of the Disney 'princess' fairy tales will have the impression that they are medieval, but in fact most of them are set sometime in the 19th century based on costumes, architecture, technology, and so forth.   I've long observed that D&D 'big cities' have more in common with Dickenson's London than they do with 13th century London or Paris.   Or notion of catacombs beneath those cities has more in common with 18th or 19th century Paris than Medieval Paris.  I don't think I've ever played in a D&D setting - including my own despite having studied Medieval History in college - which is really gritty medievalism and not Early Modern sans gunpowder and steam engines.But even that seems to be evolving as more and more settings start to look like the late 19th century rather than the early 19th, or even early 20th century - just with magic in place of Electricity.  I wonder whether in 100 years, it will be normal for fantasy stories to feature computers and mass communication as the 20th century begins to appear to the average person to be the remote and barely understood past, and the language and social structure of say 18th Century Europe becomes as unfathomable as the language and mindset of the 13th century is to almost everyone today.</blockquote>

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