I don't know how it is with most interviewers, but for interviews that I do: If you don't know a term, just ask. I'm more interested in whether you're familiar with the concept and can apply it than whether you know the appropriate term. Chances are that you're familiar with the concept already and are just not familiar with the name.
If you're in the interview room, I'm not so concerned about book learning and knowing facts, but whether you have the correct amount of knowledge to do the job and the ability to apply it.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of
the world, but when you're finished, you'll know
absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's
look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what
counts. I learned very early the difference between
knowing the name of something and knowing something.
The best piece of technical interview advice I've ever gotten: It's much more impressive to NOT know something, ask about it, and then be able to understand it and apply it to your answer during the course of the interview, than it is to just already know it.
agreed, a few weeks ago I was interviewing and the interviewer schooled me on python generators and cooperative threading (pretty much all my knowledge is around erlang and message passing / explicit threading)
I got the job, and learned something along the way
If you're in the interview room, I'm not so concerned about book learning and knowing facts, but whether you have the correct amount of knowledge to do the job and the ability to apply it.