But a good sized business that has a corporate brand effort with logos in ai files and detailed instructions for placement... "some guy" working in department X doesn't know that. When he passes the request up to the right department, to the people who do know about preparing material for print and other uses, what do they call this?

Is it a "comp"? Is it a "for-print capsule"? I want to know what they call this (along with the dimensions) to effeciently ask for the right thing and sound (to them) that I know what I'm talking about.

You should ask for logo ready to be use for printing in CMYK, ideally vector formats. A good marketing department should know what you need and care to give you the best quality possible because they want to look good. To my knowledge, a person who has to send a logo and knows about quality will ask you "what do you want to use the logo for?" and send the right file. Already when you mention "a logo for print purpose", that person will know what are the requirements. I don't know if there's an EXACT term but anyway, trying to find one term to mean a few things might not help you and simply confuse people even more.

People get confused because you say they only see thumbnails.. well the designer who gave them these logos should have identified each of them properly so even a monkey knows what to use.

Have a look at the comments on the following answer, you will see that clarity isn't a concept shared by all designers (Industry standard file format deliverables for logos?) so it's normal the people who didn't prepared the files or don't know a vector is better than a PNG will be confused. So you need to guide them since the designer didn't. As I said in one of my comment, there's people who simply have no clue and you have no choice but to educate them on this.

After asking for a logo in vector or with a print quality (high resolution), the best is to do like most online printers do and prepare a requirement sheet and send it by email with your request. It's very professional, it's precise and there's options.

That sheet should have at least 3 options, starting with the top quality one, and it should be mentioned which one is the best.

1. with vectors, it should be specified which file formats are good vectors, to have the text vectorized or fonts included, and if spots should be converted to CMYK or not.
2. with high resolution, it should be mentioned what's the minimum size, the color space, and file format.
3. for anything else, ask for the native file and a PDF. In worse case you can always try to extract that logo from the PDF or print/scan it.

But a good sized business that has a corporate brand effort with logos in ai files and detailed instructions for placement... "some guy" working in department X doesn't know that. When he passes the request up to the right department, to the people who do know about preparing material for print and other uses, what do they call this?

Is it a "comp"? Is it a "for-print capsule"? I want to know what they call this (along with the dimensions) to effeciently ask for the right thing and sound (to them) that I know what I'm talking about.

You should ask for logo ready to be use for printing in CMYK, ideally vector formats. A good marketing department should know what you need and care to give you the best quality possible because they want to look good. To my knowledge, a person who has to send a logo and knows about quality will ask you "what do you want to use the logo for?" and send the right file. Already when you mention "a logo for print purpose", that person will know what are the requirements. I don't know if there's an EXACT term but anyway, trying to find one term to mean a few things might not help you and simply confuse people even more.

People get confused because you say they only see thumbnails.. well the designer who gave them these logos should have identified each of them properly so even a monkey knows what to use.

Have a look at the comments on the following answer, you will see that clarity isn't a concept shared by all designers (Industry standard file format deliverables for logos?) so it's normal the people who didn't prepared the files or don't know a vector is better than a PNG will be confused. So you need to guide them since the designer didn't. As I said in one of my comment, there's people who simply have no clue and you have no choice but to educate them on this.

After asking for a logo in vector or with a print quality (high resolution), the best is to do like most online printers do and prepare a requirement sheet and send it by email with your request. It's very professional, it's precise and there's options.

That sheet should have at least 3 options, starting with the top quality one, and it should be mentioned which one is the best.

1. with vectors, it should be specified which file formats are good vectors, to have the text vectorized or fonts included, and if spots should be converted to CMYK or not.
2. with high resolution, it should be mentioned what's the minimum size, the color space, and file format.
3. for anything else, ask for the native file and a PDF. In worse case you can always try to extract that logo from the PDF or print/scan it.