Some BRSer, maybe gprengel if I don't remember badly, posted a youtube video with street musicians (but they actually were professionals) played passages from the Ninth symphony. I was watching it and, when it finished, a collection of videos appeared on the screen, as usual, for one to play one of them. I clicked on one that caught my attention, and was taken to a talk about one of the latest games played by the world chess champion. So in this site everything is not about music or movies or television shows. What if I look for stellar evolution? And there it was: The life and death of a star (I was a bit bored). And here I could witness how even scientists make a mess of the language, not of the everyday tongue, which I am not qualified to judge, but the technical language. Says one of the guest scientists: "Stars are one of the most basic units of mass that are produced when gravity pulls mass together". If this is the clarity of concepts in their minds, I do not think they'll ever come to extend the frontiers of physics much further than Planck or Einstein. But it is no wonder. Once a physician, who teaches pharmacology at the university, asked me what the difference is between organic and inorganic chemistry. The degree of specialization is so big nowadays that scientists not only ignore all fields of knowledge outside there science but even ample areas of it, including what they learned as freshmen or sophomores at college, which is the foundation of everything else.
However this can also be said of musicians. How often it is that they confuse the concept or note with that of note value. For instance: it is false that the famous G - G - G - Eb (the first two bars in Beethoven's 5th) motive consists of four notes. They are only two: G and Eb. It consists of four note values. The distinction is clearer in spanish, where the duration of a note receives the name figura (literally,figure). However we also say here that the motive (or theme, I think it is both things) has four notes.
However this can also be said of musicians. How often it is that they confuse the concept or note with that of note value. For instance: it is false that the famous G - G - G - Eb (the first two bars in Beethoven's 5th) motive consists of four notes. They are only two: G and Eb. It consists of four note values. The distinction is clearer in spanish, where the duration of a note receives the name figura (literally,figure). However we also say here that the motive (or theme, I think it is both things) has four notes.