Astronomers didn't think that "twinkling" was a particularly scientific sort of word and so they made it sound a bit better by calling it "scintillation".
When they make a measurement of the twinkling, they call it, rather grandly, an interplanetary scintillation measurement or IPS measurement. So the next time you have a look at the stars twinkling in the sky tell your friends that you're making an interplanetary scintillation measurement!