well yes exactly. i just dont think people have a good grasp on what these terms mean just vague and ambiguous associations...one of my passions was mathematics and i guess from that direction i automatically try to make words mean something more precise than most people. tactical....decisiveness...imbalance...and even difficult all mean different things to me. while other people i belive lump them all together in a rather unclear way. some of the critical lines of some sicilian positions are affected by some rather difficult tactics...necessarily difficult tactics because white usually has to invest some material in them from the very start. i guess people spend a long time on those specific lines and then decide the opening is tactical...out of respect for their time investment. but in my view thats confusing language especially when many of these tactical lines can be reasonably avoided by both players. for me there are certian positions where my state of mind is analysis of concrete variations...i go here they go here etc etc...which is generally in open games. in other positions im just thinking of long term manouvers and deciding the logical move from a general principles and strategic standpoint..this would be line kid or sicilian positions. naturally if they open up i go into concrete analysis mode but not until then.
Yeah... and I feel like there are so many terms that would benefit from being used/defined more precisely, not just chess terms. Even love for example is a funny term... because we will use it to describe feelings with our family, and feelings with strangers, each of which are actually quite different feelings. They're similar in that they're both desirable, sure, but as far as the internal structure of what's going on in them, they're very different. Really every feeling we have with everyone is distinct from another, and if we wanted to we could make up a new word to describe each one. But instead we have to recycle the same words and so it can make things look more similar than they are, if that makes sense.
Anyway, that's sort of what happens with chess. As you said, there may have been associations of the sicilian with tactics because you could find some weird knight d5 sacrifices or something like that. In reality that's only for specific sicilian variaitions, but since we call those the sicilian all the same, words blend in and instead of saying "there are lots of tactics in this line of the sicilian" we say "there are lots of tactics in the sicilian."
FiveofSwords, you don't even know how to quote or paraphrase people. You claim I made any statement associated with "pointing out that a closed position can become tactical after it becomes open".
BALONEY! I NEVER SAID THAT!
What I said was that a Closed Position can be tactical in nature and that tactics are often used to open up the position, NOT that they are tactial AFTER becoming open!
Actually, I've had numerous positions be just the opposite of your "mis-quoting". Position is closed, I use some tactical combination, often started off by a piece sacrifice, where when all is said and done, and I've likely won my piece back, the end position is open with myself having an extra pawn or two, and a longwinded manouvering game with little to no tactics to be found AFTER it's opened up. Far more often, it's I have a Bishop and 4 pawns to your Bishop and 2 pawns with an ending that is 40 moves long, but 40 moves ago, my opponent could just as easily have resigned! But the tactics occured BEFORE it became open, and opened as a RESULT OF THE TACTICS, NOT TACTICAL AFTER OPENING UP!
Time for you to take 4th Grade English!