Sometimes, It’s all about branding. When you want to sell a product or an approach, using terminology that will "sell" your approach to your stakeholders or the professional community has impact on the chances that it will be accepted .
When Fred Hoyle coined the term Big Bang during a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, he did not anticipate that he is doing a branding service to the competitive theory. According to Hoyle, who favored an alternative "steady state" cosmological model, he used the striking image to highlight the difference between the two models. Probably he did it too well :-)
Markus Gärtner in his post Active vs. passive testing introduce refreshing terminology for what we use to call Testing Vs. Checking or Exploratory Vs. Scripted. He uses the terms Active Vs. Passive testing. He also talk about the role of judgment which is part of being active, but basically, the new pair of active Vs. Passive comes to describe Research, critical, exploratory approach versos executing the planned tests, checking and following defined scripts.
This new terminology has some benefits on the terms we are used to. It's not using a term that we already use to describe wider area like "Testing". And unlike the term exploratory it's not suffer from the "unstructured" public image.
