Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-188432-20130505035914/@comment-188432-20130508201133

Anoted wrote: Czech, is the title not conjecture because because we're not the ones making the conjecture (though the characters are)? Well, a conjecture is really when you come to a conclusion based upon incomplete information. Red leech poison would at worst be a name based entirely upon the script. It's not conjecture because there's nothing incomplete about it. It is the poison from the red leech, as we're told by Vastra. That she didn't put the words together in that precise order doesn't mean we guessed at a name. It just means that we applied the rules of English grammar to dialogue actually spoken by a character.

This is clearly not in the same league as, say, flying stingrays, which is simply based upon an observation of a creature. No one calls them a stingray. They just look like them. There, we very much are operating out of a lack of complete information, making the title definitionally conjectural. Here, we're using words that are actually in the script.