I have been thinking a lot about this wisdom from Susan Sontag, which I think has a lot of applicability to teaching, especially in teaching statistics and data analysis.
“I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: ‘Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.’” (Sontag, 2007)
Terminology is certainly important: for example, a regression coefficient is certainly a different quantity than its standard error, and it is important to be able to distinguish the two. At the same time, I think that in thinking and teaching about data analysis and statistics, we can lose sight of the deeper ideas in a particular equation or statistical model when we love the words too much, and focus on getting the terminology exactly right, or on parsing between roughly equivalent statistical terms. More important I think is to “agonize over the sentences” that are contained in the statistical equations that we look at so that we can engage with the deeper understandings of statistics.