Technical and casual terms in color photography

On DPR’s Photographic Science and Technology Forum, a member said the following in a thread on raw files and whether they specify color. What I’m struggling with is using the word ‘color’ as a noun for anything other than the human assertion in their respective head. Used as an adjective though, the term ‘color information’ to my little way of thinking can be ascribed to the intermediate entities encountered in the workflow from spectral measurement to assertion of color in a rendition. This post is my long-winded reaction to that statement. I sympathize. When working quantitatively, terms that can be loosely defined in casual speech need to have those definitions nailed down and metrics established. That often results in the technical terms being used differently than the casual ones. Examples in photography besides color are exposure and sharpness. Color science does this in spades, and it can be confusing. I’ve been working with digital color reproduction for, gosh, 27 years, so…