Dream on. That was my first thought when I heard that the World Health Organisation was trying to rebrand swine flu as Influenza A (H1N1). The term “swine flu” is such a gift to headline writers — it is short, pithy and emotive, and can shift an awful lot of chip paper when in a 70-pt bold typeface — that nothing short of a keyboard gestapo can curtail its spread. And, in an hysterical news bulletin proclaiming a viral apocalypse, lots of syllables interrupted by parentheses don’t really cut it.

Nonetheless, the effort has turned an interesting spotlight on scientific terminology, which will be the subject of a light-hearted event, Call My Scientific Bluff, at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival tomorrow. It promises to be an eye-opener for anyone who believes that scientists understand each other.

The fruitless WHO campaign was rooted in the perceived need for scientific accuracy and cultural sensitivity. “Mexican flu” was regarded as stigmatising, besides being possibly inaccurate, since the strain might have originated elsewhere. It was later called swine Influenza A (H1N1) because its genes matched those of viruses found in pigs. The name stuck, which upset the Israelis and was not good news for Egyptian pigs. The animals were slaughtered en masse, despite the virus never having been detected in a pig.

The appalled WHO decided that the word “swine” had to go. To no avail, it seems, since I am still getting regular updates from the Health Protection Agency on “confirmed swine flu cases”.

Curiously, the one organisation that has a mandate to name new viruses — the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses — cannot arbitrate because swine flu is not a newly discovered virus, merely a new variant on a familiar one.

When everyone is worrying about sneezing to death, it seems trivial to fret over virus names. But, to scientists, words are all about precision, accuracy and brevity. While some terms may sound like jargon, they encapsulate a precise meaning that would otherwise take several sentences to spell out. I encountered this recently, while interviewing the biologist Lewis Wolpert. I didn’t have a clue what gastrulation — a favoured topic of his — meant. Later, I realised my explanation of it for you, dear reader, took more than 30 words (it is a type of cellular reshuffle in the early embryo). And thus I came to see the point of using the G-word.

Dr Alice Roberts, the doctor who presents a BBC programme about human evolution and who will take part in the bluffing session along with Lord Winston, remained befuddled throughout filming by the terminology relating to tool use. “I struggled with ‘mousterian’,” she admits. “It’s named after Le Moustier in France, where these tools were found, and has come to refer to a whole way of making stone tools characteristic to Neanderthals.” This goes to show that unless scientists are in the same research field they really don’t understand each other’s lingo.

Other scientific terms gloss over a subject. I’m thinking of “mortality and morbidity”, known touchingly in the medical profession as M&M, and to us as death and illness. Simply typing that oppressive phrase makes me understand why doctors, who encounter it every day, euphemise it.

Anyway, back to piggy flu (by the way, flu researchers always call it influenza, never flu). What about precedent? History favours a geographical flavour to flu monikers: we have had the 1918 Spanish flu, the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968. To this day, Dutch researchers insist on the term Mexican flu, which continues to upset the Mexicans (there has been a robust diplomatic exchange).

The best suggestion, in my view, was offered by Dr David Fedson, a flu vaccine specialist. He told Science: “I favour calling it the Schwarzenegger virus. If it leads to a terrible pandemic, we’ll call it ‘the Terminator’. Then everyone will know what we’re talking about.”

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