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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

"oral exam" sounds funny. I can't help but imagine a person (whom I visualize as Bryan Cranston for obvious reason) examining someone with their mouth or having their mouth examined :-]

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It's how it's described in the UK system, so you get people taking their "French orals" which always sounded funny to me.

People don't say viva any more? For viva voce. I must be getting old.

Are all oral exams vivas? My (distant, secondhand) impression was that it was mostly used for the thesis defense.

Well the original topic was Heisenberg's doctoral defence. And yes, it is mostly use for that even though the term itself is quite general.

It's how it is in the US as well.

When I was in school, all of my teachers referred to language listening exams (a tape is played, you have a sheet of questions to answer) as "aural" which mirrors calling the spoken exams "orals". Having not heard the word before, I could barely even tell the words apart when mentioned.

Hes correct. It should be "verbal exam".

In fact, though, it's "oral exam." But it does sound funny.

language, in fact, evolves. a rectal exam involves examining the examining the rectal cavity, so a oral exam should be reserved for examining the oral cavity.

I agree in general, but disagree on the details. In an oral exam, a student answers questions orally. That's how language has evolved so far. I can't imagine a situation where a committee of professors would need to examine a granduate student's rectum to evaluate knowledge, so the "rectal exam" above is poorly named. To further advance linguistic evolution, "rectal exam" should be reserved for occasions when the student is required to pronounce words rectally in response to questions in his or her field of study.

That happens more often than you might think, plus it makes everything consistent.

No, oral is more clear. We also say something is an oral tradition not a verbal tradition because one of the definitions of oral is “Spoken rather than written.”

One of the mean songs for Verbal is “Of, relating to, or associated with words.” So a written test could be a verbal test.

“verbal” can be applied to either spoken or written word, but I get the sense that people default to “verbal” over “oral” just out of discomfort.

'Oral' is also ambiguous. 'Vocal' might be better than either, though it sounds awkward, perhaps simply because it is not used.

Then there's 'interrogation', which Heisenberg might have concurred with...

No, verbal contrasts with written, as in verbal instructions versus written instructions. Is English your first language?

Yes, first and effectively only.

First definition at MW:

> of, relating to, or consisting of words

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verbal

https://www.lawdepot.com/blog/are-verbal-agreements-legally-...

> When two or more parties come to an agreement without any written documentation, they create a verbal agreement (known formally as an oral contract).

I think that alone demonstrates that verbal contrasts with written.

The fact that many people use it in opposition to written is insufficient proof that all dictionaries are wrong. Eventually it may only mean oral, but today it doesn’t.

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