Somewhere it seams to be called the terminal, but when I look to the right it's called the concole and when I sit down and think about it they start calling it 'command line', and to make things more complicated I read it's actually called 'the shell' WTF??

What do I call it??

The 'command line' is one term for an interface, meaning 'the line where you enter commands'. It's also called a 'shell' because it's a wrapper over the system, in a sense. The 'console' is technically the one device where system messages are output. 'Terminals' are anything you might log into a machine with. There's more: 'virtual terminals' are the multiplexed things you get at a single I/O device like keyboard and monitor. And 'pseudo-terminals' are the things that act like terminals in X via the terminal emulator. Yadayada. Don't worry about it - it all boils down to 'where I type stuff'. (There are even more like vcsa's or whatever but, like I say, it's mostly academic.)

I am going to subscribe to Indiana Jones' "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go along".
There are times when one of these terms is definately not correct and there are times when some are somewhat interchangeable.
And that's the truth.
Pthhhh

Terminal & Console are almost interchangeable. Console is left over from main-frame days when
you had one keyboard actually attached to the main system unit (everyone else used it remotely
or through a punch-card reader). There are usually a few consoles left open when you boot
a system they can be accessed by Alt-F1, Alt-F2... Alt-F6. They might more properly be called
consoles because they are created automatically at boot and just sit there for you. A terminal
tends to need to be spawned or created ... but I'm not sure this is universal.
Command Line -- Is found in a terminal, console or shell. It's the line with the cursor to type at.
Shell -- Is actually a program running in the terminal or console. Even though it's all command line
stuff, the shell provides a customized user interface (you're used to GUI's like GNOME, KDE, etc.)
but the shell is an interface too. Thus csh, bash, ksh, tcsh are all different shells that offer
slightly different user experiences. You can select which of these shells actually runs when
you create a new terminal or console. bash is the linux default.

Finally, terminal tended to mean a dumb window into a remote machine. Linux has such tight
network integration that the distinctions blur. Thus you can open an XTerm into your own
machine, or then ssh into a remote machine and the window on your desktop looks and acts
just the same.

Does this help at all??

I personally refer to them as follows, but this is by no means official

Terminal = While in X I open up a terminal, this could be in the form of xterm, eterm, aterm...

Console = The tty's that you switch to with the CTRL + ALT Fkeys

Command Line = Usually I refer to this when I am trying to get across that you need to use a terminal or console to do whatever it is I am trying to get them to do

Cool