Hi Dan,
You have brought up some fine points for new readers to consider and for old hands to argue about.
For me a whipping is always at the end of the line. It may be made and fused in nylon with a zippo or it may be an ABOK whipping added with .100 soft iron wire to a bit of 1.5" plow steel cable. In my view it is applied on a single line with new material or a fire and keeps the “lay” or “braid” intact.
Now the lashing: This is used by scouts and scaffold builders, kite makers and gardeners (and the rest of us) to join:… rigid (poles, canes, timbers and so forth) members held into place with fiberous material. Bolts and fasteners need not apply. Are we in agreement?
Thence to a seizing: Two or three or four or more flexible “ropes” are bound together into a unit where no bulky knot will suffice. It is a lashing in form or a “knot” but not made by fixed knots hosts. Some of the skills used are the same as for lashings. Some lashings look like seizings. So the parting of the terms may be found in the term “rigid componets”?
To me it is a small point in what I do when I am lashing “or seizing” a cleat onto a shroud (a fixed support of a mast or other rigid support)? That may be the turning point. To define our terms.. I want to attach a cleat (for belaying a line) to a fixed line (often of larger and of a size and with little room to move) so I either “lash” or “seize” in the cleat. The number of turns of the small stuff used to make the attachment demand that it (the cord) will be really smaller than the support and since the cleat is wooden or metal then the structure of it counts as “rigid”. So I should “lash in a cleat” but often it is thought of as “clapping a seizing on a cleat”. For my consideration it is still a lashing (that is to say a rigid structure attached by cordage to a cordage structure). I know CWA would turn in his hammock.
I was looking at this post one more time. Then “Temporary” came to my attention. To my vocabulary a “stopping” is temporary. It may be a whipping, a lashing or a seizing. It may only be a round turn and dogged leg. I may stop the end of a line to prevent it from coming asunder, so it is a temporary whipping. I may “stop” two lines to hold them in place or I may stop a line to a rigid memeber (cane, yard or scaffold) until I can put on the proper attachment. Once held in place by the “stopping” the proper cordage will be applied. Whip, Seize or Lash, as suits the task at hand, but often the stopping is present for a moment.