This is interesting if indeed it was due to Steenrod. In that case, it was certainly not intended as a putdown (as Lang clearly intended it). Sammy Eilenberg told on a number of occasions the story that when General Theory of Natural Equivalences was published, Steenrod said that no paper had ever influenced his thinking more. He had been searching for years for an axiomatization of homology theory, but had never thought of using the induced homomorphisms as the basic tool. The result was, of course, the Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms. (The rest of the story is that P.A. Smith said he never read a more trivial paper in his life. Sammy commented that both reactions were valid.) On Tue, 19 May 1998, Tim Heap wrote:
pareigis writes:
Bodo> Hi - who coined the expression Bodo> General Abstract Nonsense Bodo> as a synonym for category theory? Where did it first appear in Bodo> print?
Lang, in his book `Algebra' says: "The terminology is due to Steenrod."
tim