Professors who use their own idiosyncratic names for things I sometimes have professors who use their own names for things. For example in lecture one kept referring to the &quot;perfect marriage algorithm&quot; but after talking with him I'm fairly certain he was referring to the Stable marriage problem. This is a challenge for me as I prefer to learn a little about a topic before going to a lecture, or read up on points discussed in the lecture after it. Are there any suggestions on how to approach this? The prof from the example above told us not to use Google to learn material for the class. With that said, he's a very reasonable and intelligent man, but I've been in other classes where profs have used nonstandard terminology (such as in math saying solve a problem by symmetry) and it would be difficult to talk to them.
I don't want to offend them by suggesting the name their using is wrong, but it makes studying from other resources hard and I don't think it's practical to try to learn everything just from lecture.
This is a tough one because it is a topic that meanders into psychology. I have encountered similar problems when professors insist on calling, that thing that everyone else calls agrees on as blue, pink. I will also add that I agree that this is an "academia" problem, as it relates to distribution and comprehension of information.

Three techniques for clarification that I have tried. YMMV.


Ask the professor why they feel the need to be an opaque and pedantic prat. Tell them to stop making up new names for things to feel better about their pathetic little existence and use the language of the field. This method has been met with some ... "resistance". :-P
Ask the professor is X has any adjacent concepts or theories that might be good to look up. This is dangerous as sometimes the prof. will decide to wax poetic on the art of Edvard Munch when you started out talking about impedance mismatch. Use with caution. 
Ask the professor about the similarities and differences between X and Y. On a few occasions I have been VERY surprised to learn that I had completely misunderstood the point they were trying to make. All I needed to do was ask the simple question of "is this like such and such?" This has worked several times. BONUS: This approach has also led to some interesting discussions that worked back around to my area of research. 


Jokes aside, the common theme here is 'to ask'. :-) As for "don't use google"... I don't know what to say about that. I guess you could ask for other reference material to gain a better understanding of the topic but google scholar is a pretty awesome/terrible research tool to use as a handicap. (IMHO)

Good luck with your class.