REJOINDER.

The article presents the author's response to comments about his article on the importance of terminology in sociological research. Richard Dewey suggests that I violated my own injunction to use the simplest unambiguous term for a concept when I offered "terminological overloading." Instead, he says, I should have used "term overloading." A number of comments made were simply not germane to my proposal. I shall respond more specifically to the misconceptions, as I see them found in the comments by my critics. An alternative strategy for presenting my reflections on terminology occurred to me recently, inspired by hearing a song about speaking Jabberwocky. I suggest a two-by-two matrix of language modes involving two dimensions of variation (1) the degree to which a language is intelligible to its audience and (2) the extent to which the audience finds a communication offensive or inoffensive. I must deal with a frequent confusion in the comments on my paper about the defining characteristics of a "glossary," which has to be distinguished from both a thesaurus and a dictionary. A thesaurus contains only a vocabulary, totally without definitions. The most familiar thesaurus, Roget's, contains a classified collection of synonyms which is not a controlled vocabulary. Admittedly, glosaries in the form of a standard to enhance the understanding of interrealted concepts because they use a classified arrangement of entries which facilitates the comprehension of technical definitions. For social scientists, a lexicon is assuredly more interesting and acceptable than a standard. But it is also apparent that the primary users of a lexicon will be language mediators including indexers, translators, and lexicographers, rathern than scholards engaged in the production of knowledge.