You make a great point, but is this not a case of distinguishing between an academic level of precision in language, and the need for people in business to say things that sound sexy and help them to sell to or influence others? Even the top professional services firms will tend to stretch language in order to create a certain impression in the mind of the listener. Forensic auditing is an example. Forensic audits do concern businesses involved in criminal activity, where the goal is to find the truth of what has happened and trace the transactions through whichever front companies and lies have been created to hide that truth. In that sense, the use of the word ‘forensic’ in forensic auditing is appropriate. To somebody not aware of the precise meaning though, forensic may be taken to just mean “very good” or “very detailed” because such work has to be very detailed. They blur the edges of meaning, and this is what has happened here, with people just wanting to say the work is or will be very good or very detailed, but want a word that they think will sound better to the listener.

This playing with language happens all around us, of course. Even in the best professional services firms, with people who have real professional qualifications, misuse of terminology can occur for superficial reasons. I can think of a very good example from my early career. When I was a junior financial auditor, I understood the difference between a haphazard selection of a sample and a random selection of a sample. As I am from a mathematical background, it is not difficult to appreciate that something which looks random may not actually be random. Many auditors, when they pick a sample for testing, look at items at a list and, like picking lottery numbers, put crosses on the list in a pattern that seems to have no logic. But that does not mean it is random. In a random sample of ten items, it would be just as likely that you select the first ten items on the list as any other ten items, but nobody would do this because then people would say it did not look random. So they avoid picking selections like this, meaning their approach is biased and not actually random. In my professional training as a chartered accountant, they used the terminology ‘haphazard’ to distinguish cases where people just pick items without a pattern, to distinguish from truly random methods of picking a sample. But, when I was a junior auditor, whilst documenting my work I would often write things like “sample of ten selected haphazardly”, and many managers would say to me “you cannot write ‘haphazardly’ because it does not sound professional – use the word ‘randomly’ instead”.

Of course, in a minor little audit workpaper the choice of the word ‘haphazard’ or ‘random’ is not very important, but you appreciate the principle here. Even if a profession attains an academic level of precision in its terminology, there will constantly be all sorts of human pressures to deviate from that precision. This is part of the reason why professionals need to be part of a continual education process. Even if they attain a certain standard, they need to be constantly retrained, and not just because things change but also to be reminded of the detail of unchanging standards and to keep the quality of their work high. Even the most senior individuals need to be subject to a process of inspecting the quality of their work and keeping the standards high, because even the most senior people are human and may make mistakes. To realize the desired level of precision, we need a culture including mechanisms that reward people for precision, which act as a balance that against the natural tendencies towards imprecision. We do not have those mechanisms yet. That much is demonstrated by the source for this misuse of the word ‘forensic’. However, what you are doing, Güera, is a vital starting point for creating that culture and those mechanisms. To do that, we must begin with individuals raising topics like this and striving for an academic level of quality in every decision we make, including our choice of words. Keep up the good work!