Sometimes You’ve Got to Call a Thing, a Thing…

I learned an enduring lesson from an old professor many years ago. What he said to me, in Fall of 1981, has stayed with me to this very day, and I reference it often, sometimes daily. Long dead, his name was Prof. Leonard A. James and the words he spoke to me are as follows, “…one can define a thing in terms of what it is, but very often a more precise way of categorizing a thing is in terms of what it is…