When I find myself in terms of trouble The complex (or compound) preposition "in terms of" is much censured -- sometimes with good reason, sometimes not. In this post I'll examine some of the ways the phrase is used and some of the criticism it has provoked. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the expression to the mid-18C; its early use seems to have been chiefly mathematical or otherwise technical. In fields with precise figures and relationships, such as physics, statistics, engineering, and accounting, "in terms of" -- typically coupled with verbs like measure , describe , define , or state -- can easily be put to good literal use. As Bryan Garner writes in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage , "in the sense 'expressed by means of,' the phrase is quite defensible": All local four-vectors at the same event in space-time can be expressed in terms of the same set of basis vectors. (I.R. Kenyon, General Relativity ) In a system that encodes information in terms of patterns of activity . . . (Charles Legg, Issues in Psychobiology ) [T]he behaviour of a motor car is to be explained in terms of interactions between fundamental particles (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker ) From the 1940s and 1950s on, the phrase's general popularity soared, and it's now used widely and non-literally as "a useful particularizing device" (Robert Burchfield), and as "a vague all-purpose connective" (Hans Paul Guth). I'll deal with the former usage first. Here, the complex preposition introduces a