As a linguistics major, may I step in here on the semantics note?
My personal belief, and here I draw from both John Stuart Mill and Ferdiand de Saussure, is that a name is just a placeholder, for the most part. We encounter an object, or an event, or any other thing your English grammar teacher would have you classify as a noun, and we come up with a name for it. At first, it may be very much a description of the thing (onomatopoeia is helpful), or it may just be general (anyone know why a horse is called a horse?). We connect a certain sequence of sound vibrations with an idea, and now that sound sequence, which may eventually become a visual phenomenon known as a written word, can call up that concept in our minds whenever we encounter it or use it. Eventually, it must be said that it is not the nature of the sign that makes it have meaning for us, but rather the connection we make between it and the concept we mean it to represent.
I like the example of the perplexed boxing student and his "front hand grab and push" (although the idea's a bit of a stretch, because jabbing is fairly natural - it's part of the curriculum at my school), but let me offer you another story, one that is oft repeated among language philosophers but one which I can, for that very reason, adapt for purposes here:
The ancient Greeks knew of two particular stars, Hesperos and Phosphoros. Hesperos, when it appeared, was always the sky with the setting sun, and Phosphoros always appeared just before the sun rose in the morning - hence the names Evening Star and Morning Star (a few may know where I'm going already). The Babylonians, centuries before, had this crazy idea that the two were the same, but the Greeks didn't care about ancient ideas. For them, they were two different things. Of course, nowadays, we know that Hesperos is the planet Venus, and we know that Phosphoros is...the planet Venus. They're the same thing. So the Greeks had two names for the same thing? Weird. But they didn't think of it that way. They had two concepts in their mind, and they came up with names for them.
Now replace Hesperos with "front hand grab and push" and Phosphoros with "jab."
So, when we refer to Venus, we're referring to what, to those ever-wise Greeks, were two different concepts. When I refer to hadan mahkee, I'm referring to what, given different circumstances, might actualize as a number of different painful experiences for my opponent.
Which is why we call it hadan mahkee. See my point about why I like a standardized vocabulary upon which we can all agree? When I learned that move, I didn't learn to call it low block first. The first words out of my instructor's mouth were "hadan mahkee," and then he showed me how to do the move. He told me that the English was "low block," so I'd have a handy frame of reference (a basic, surface interpretation of the move is a deflecting block that goes low), but as I learned more, I found out the various other ways that same technique could be applied. (This is why we don't tell orange belts that now they know how to kick someone's butt.)
So really, saying that it creates a "stumbling block" to learning is doing a disservice. The instructor has a responsibility to impart what he knows, and the student has a responsibility to take that and grasp it, learn it, internalize it, and use it to enhance his or her own learning -- and to wait until the teacher says he's ready to take the next step on his own. This is the kind of thing that separates the good student from the not-so-good. Those who want to know will seek after that knowledge. Piling it on only gives you a student who knows (or thinks he knows) more than he can use.
Anyway, just had to get that out. You bring up semantics around a linguist, prepare for a lesson
Tang Soo!
