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Bill,
Had you been my student, you would have examined the details. You were
taught (or at least learned) words, not physical phenomena.
I sympathize
with your indictment of poor teaching; I just think that the problem is not
in (or cured by changing) the words, it is in the ideas.
Don't rely on
words (or mathematics) alone to convey or express the physics; they must be
chewed, ruminated, digested, purged of waste materials, and only then
assimilated into our being. Whatever word choices we make, they too are
faltering, incomplete (linguistic) models for ideas (which themselves are
models of reality).
Can a piece of amber store charge? Can two objects store equal and opposite
charges?
A capacitor is a thing; in the most common use of the word it is
a system of two conductors, electrically insulated from each other. Many
things can be done to/with this thing; the two conductors can each be
electrically charged in a wide variety of ways. Such a physical discussion
should be engaged (and played with in electrostatic experimentation - real
and/or gedanken) long before the concept of "capacitance" as a definable
property of a properly designed system subjected to a definite procedure is
created.
I agree with your complaints (I had some terrible teachers, too). But my
biggest complaints are with semantic arguments over non-problems and with
semantic cures for real problems.