Discourse on Art, Style, and Meaning The Parable of the Artillery Spotter

• At Ft. Sill, an artillery spotter trainee is told not to identify "a barn," but rather to say "what seems to be a barn" in order to not encourage prejudgment by the targeter.

   

• There may, similarly, be many good reasons to say "herpetomorphic" rather than "snake."

   

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Notes:

Trained observers in cases for which it really matters, are taught not to assume too much. As noted here, artillery spotters are trained not to describe what they see in terms that "interpret" those observations so as to prejudice the officer who will need to decide what will be fired upon, and what will not.

Perhaps we can learn from this to be similarly cautious in our own observations and the language that we use to describe these observations. However, having made what I feel is an important point on usage of terms,

I have concluded, however, that such reform in usage is almost a lost cause in cases where terminology has a long tradition, so in the remainder of this paper I will generally use such terms as "spider" and "rattlesnake"; but I will always try to use these terms in quotation marks.