You missed a lot of the conversation Larry. They were always called finger joints until only recently when, as Charley pointed out, the manufacturers started referring to them as something else. The ones with tapered fingers were called just that or were called splice joints. If you find old literature, that will be the nomenclature you find. When I read articles in Fine Woodworking almost all of their contributors refer to a box joint as a finger joint. Most of those guys went through a training period by old masters. One of the very first contributors to FWW was Tage Frid (pronounced Tay) who was a Danish born and educated master. I'm not sure if FWW would have made it without him. He was trained the old fashioned (European) way and started as an apprentice in a traditional European wood shop. That's what he called the joint in his book on how to make wood joints. It's an excellent book by the way, one of the best woodworking books I've ever read. So that was how he was taught by an even older master than himself. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Maybe one day the terminology will change. Ain't was't in the dictionary when I was young but it is now. Maybe one day no one will refer to it as a finger joint anymore but for now you can still find as many or more references to it being a finger joint and those references are from professional sources. In the mean time the one thing that should happen is for everyone to quit correcting people who call it the other term. It IS a finger joint. It also IS a box joint. Both are correct.
