Definitely agree with Chip on that one. As for the boxen that appear in /wp-admin/post.php, I would refer to a single box as the "Publish Box" or the "Excerpt Box". They all have labels and that's the most logical way that I have to describe these nameless entities to others. I know a lot of developers will use "metabox" for referring to these things. I think they do so because the function that WordPress uses to create them is called add_meta_box() and sometimes they are used as an interface for information stored in the "postmeta" database table... I just don't like to use 3 syllables where one would suffice.