Commonly Misused Words / Moderately Pedantic

Many of the "common" usages here have become accepted definitions of the words listed. This page is meant to serve as education, not to prescribe how these words should be used. Do not treat a definition as incorrect simply because it is listed here.

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• ASCII (see Wikipedia) is a character-encoding scheme. Text User Interfaces are used a lot in Roguelikes, and because of that, text-based graphics are often referred to as "ASCII" even if they use a different scheme like EBCDIC or an "extended ASCII"^note The first 128 codes of those schemes are the same as the ASCII ones scheme such as CP437 or Unicode.
  • Likewise, in the Windows world, "ANSI" is used to refer to the Windows-1252 encoding, especially as opposed to "Unicode" (itself actually a specific Unicode encoding).^note It is said that a function has both ANSI and Unicode versions when one version accepts single-byte character strings usually in Windows-1252 and the other accepts UTF-16 character strings. It is not actually an ANSI standard.

• Addict in adjective form is "addictive". However, clumsy attempts to mangle it into this form tend to fall to "addicting" instead, which is actually a gerund (which is a noun) or even a verb, but not an adjective. To put it simply, if you were to say "Cocaine is addicting" you would be implying that cocaine is, right now, in the process of getting someone addicted. While that may be true it's probably not what the speaker actually meant to say.
  • In technical medical terms, "addictive" refers only to substances which, when their use by a habitual users is discontinued, result in physical withdrawal symptoms. Thus you get people insisting that things like marijuana and MMOs are not "addictive," which is technically true for a given definition of "addictive," but does not address the more realistic concern that they might be habit-forming to an unhealthy degree in some users.
  • Even more confusingly, there is a distinction sometimes made between addiction and dependence. Addiction here means that you have cravings for something if deprived of it; dependence means that you will have withdrawal symptoms; but being dependent on something (like a medication) does not necessarily mean you are addicted to it, and being addicted to something does not mean you are dependent on it (note this is almost the opposite of the definition above). For example, a diabetic is dependent on insulin, but not addicted to it.

• The distinction between amount and quantity (or number) is often ignored. You have an amount of a mass noun such as water or money, and a quantity of a countable noun such as dollars or shoes. Note, however, the distinction between "less" and "fewer" is not, and has never been, a rule: they are interchangeable, but in the 18th century a grammarian expressed he thought "less" for uncountable nouns and "fewer" for countable ones sounded nicer, but unfortunately everyone misunderstood him to mean that's how it works.

• Anarchy literally means "without a ruler", coming from the roots "an-" or "no" and "archy" or "rule". Anarchism is a political position opposed to government as well as to other forms of hierarchy or authority. Anarchists believe that social harmony can be more easily maintained through cooperation rather than competition. However, the word "anarchy" has come to mean the opposite: a state of violent chaos due to a lack of central authority. The word "anarchist" has also been used to mean a terrorist or sower of discord, a perception influenced by a rash of terrorist acts and assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were committed by anarchists. And even theorists didn't always agree anyway on what it means:
  "Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal." — Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1938.
  • To be even more precise, 'anarchy' comes from 'an-' (not) and 'arche' (higher/highest), meaning a form of social organization, with no one standing above anyone else. It is a regime without a ruler, but not without rules. A direct democracy, where every conflict is solved by a common voting by people who have equal vote (or a common consensus) is an example of anarchy.

• Animation is, roughly, "lively, vibrant, or capable of movement". The old use is still remembered, especially in the base adjective "animate", but confusion still tends to arise when speaking of things like "animated corpses".

• Anime is Japanese for animation. That's it. There never was a special distinction between anime and other cartoons but in the West, it gets its own category just because animated works from Japan tend to (but don't invariably) share certain similarities with each other that are rare or nonexistent in their Western counterparts. But technically, there's no such thing as "anime art" or "anime style". Likewise, there is no hard and fast difference that makes Japanese animation not "cartoons" — such a distinction would make the term "cartoon" paraphyletic. The Simpsons' or Disney would also be called anime in Japan. On a more pedantic note, even other Japanese 2D media (visual novels, manga, light novels, etc.) get pinned under the "anime" umbrella because they share similar media tropes; if a trope happens in one, expect it to be called an "anime" thing regardless of where the trope originated from.
  • On a similar note, manga just means comics. Any comic. However, neither Chinese nor Korean comics consider themselves manga, although they share similar styles. They are respectively Manhua and Manhwa. And because it's not arbitrary enough, Japan has mirrored the "anime"/"animation" fiasco by loaning "comic" for Western works and using "manga" for native ones.

• Anorexia is often used as a term for a serious eating disorder that causes strong aversion to food, which can lead to severe (or even fatal) malnutrition if left untreated. On its own, though, "anorexia" just means "loss of appetite", and it's generally a symptom of disease rather than a disease in itself. The eating disorder is formally known as "Anorexia nervosa", but it's often called "anorexia" for short.

• Apocryphal means "of uncertain truth." Something cannot be "probably apocryphal" unless you're admitting you yourself didn't check the facts on its general acceptance; the word implies uncertainty, albeit sufficient uncertainty to reject it as historical fact, but not falsehood per se. One or two contemporary accounts or products could (and very often have) rocket most "apocryphal" events into widespread acceptance.

• Non-specialists often confuse archaeology and palaeontology, usually substituting the former for the latter. Archaeology is the study of physical remains of human material culture and activities, while palaeontology is the study of fossil organisms and trace fossils. Also, archaeology covers any time from the beginning of human material culture around 3.3 million years ago^note If that sounds a bit off, keep in mind that human ancestors were creating stone tools long before anatomically modern humans evolved. up to recent decades, while palaeontology studies remains from before the start of the Holocene period about 11,700 years ago. Thus archaeologists don't go looking for dinosaurs (at least, it's not in their job description).

• Archaic does not simply mean old or outdated. It describes a word from an older language being used in a modern language in a specific sense, or something so old as to no longer be in use (for example, steam engine cars are archaic).

• In archery, one does not fire or shoot an arrow, one looses an arrow.

• Arithmetic is not synonymous with Mathematics as it only covers the basic 4 operations {addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

• Artificial Intelligence is, as its name implies, a machine that acts as if it's intelligent: ask most computer scientists and they'll tell you that one big important factor in determining whether a machine can be called an AI is whether it's capable of learning (specifically, being able to change and adapt its strategies when it receives new information). However, outside of computer technology and especially when it comes to games AI has simply come to mean "the computer", which can irk computer scientists as the computer isn't "intelligent" but just following a giant list of "if X, then do Y" instructions.

• Asian is a term denoting an origin in the continent of Asia, ranging from most of the Middle East to the Orient. In British usage, it is a common term used to denote a South Asian origin (ex. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), while those of East Asian Origin would just be referred to by their assumed country ("Chinese", "Japanese", "Thai" etc.) In Australian and American usage, it refers to the Far East (ex. China, Japan, Thailand, Vietman and Korea), and the term Oriental is offensive in North America. Oriental traditionally referred to the countries east of the Middle East, meaning such places as Turkey and India. In fact, the Orient Express only went as far as Istanbul in its heyday.
  • And essentially no one considers Russians to be Asian even though 77% of Russia falls within the continent of Asia (to be fair, though, despite the majority of Russia being in Asia, the majority of Russians live in Europe).

• Before being adopted by 19th-century European and American "racial scientists" and subsquently Nazis and white supremacists, Aryan was originally the term of choice for Indo-Iranian peoples because they called themselves Arya. Whatever Arya originally meant, it was more of socio-linguistic designation than an ethnic one. Some of them may have had blond hair, but the majority probably didn't. By this definition, then, the descendants of the Aryans can be found in countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran^note Should be pretty obvious since Iran literally means, "Land of the Aryans.", Tajikistan and Bangladesh. (In India, Aryan is opposed to Dravidian.)
  • The word itself means something akin to "well formed", from a root *ar- (which survives in the Greek aristos, "best", and English art, amongst others). As applied to the people themselves and their language, it probably carries the meaning "skillfully assembled, rightly proportioned, obeying the right customs" or similar, with the feeling of "one of us" (its precise opposite, anarya, is frequently used to mean "wrong" or "other"). This, along with its status as the earliest attested Indo-European autonym, is one of the reasons it was adopted by white supremacists to label their racial ideal. It's more than likely that none of them had blond hair (this was considered a marker of specifically "Germanic" rather than Aryan heritage), because their origins were likely as nomads on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, where blond hair is rare.
  • The Aryan Dravidian divide of India was deliberately created by Christian invaders as one of many efforts to prevent the areas they occupied from becoming too unified against them. Unique culture and language did develop in the Dravida region, obviously, but prior to colonization they were still accepted as Aryan. As the occupying powers were expelled an ongoing effort to reestablish the whole of India being Aryan began, taken up by Mahatma Gandhi no less, but success has been limited.
  • Speaking of Aryans, the Nazis had a very, ah, unusual (read: arbitrary) definition of Aryan. They could never really decide if "Aryan" meant Indo-European, White European, Nordic/Germanic European, Non-Jewish European, and/or Non-Slavic European. They also classified a number of people as Aryan which even modern white supremacists would find a little puzzling. Many Germans liked Karl May novels, so the Sioux became Aryans. For political convenience, the Japanese were Aryans. Nazi mythology placed the Aryan homeland in Tibet due to connection with Theosophy, so Tibetans were Aryans, too, even though the Tibetans are more closely related to the Burmese and Chinese than anyone else. Perhaps most bizarrely of all, the Nazis decided that their allies the Croats were Aryans whereas the ethnically identical Serbs were Slavic Untermenschen.

• Bar mitzvah literally translates to "son of the commandment," i.e. "one to whom the commandments apply", and so it is something that boys become. Therefore you technically do not "have a bar mitzvah", you have a celebration to commemorate becoming a bar mitzvah (similar to the technical definition of "bachelor party"). And as any Jewish parent will tell you, planning one of these parties is like planning a wedding.
  • In addition, the plural, unisex way to say bat mitzvah or bar mitzvah is b'nai mitzvah (or b'nei mitzvah); however, because this is both plural and non-gender, no one "becomes" a b'nai mitzvah. You can go to one, as in, "I'm going to my cousins' b'nai mitzvah."
  • Also, a bar mitzvah is not when a Jewish boy is circumcised; that is on the eighth day, a bris mila (or b'rit mila, in non-Ashkenazi dialects). The confusion comes from the fact that in Africa, boys are typically circumcised at a much older age. And the word meaning "circumcision" is "mila", not "bris" (which simply means "covenant").

• To beg the question is to commit a logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises (e.g. "Of course I had a reason for doing it — otherwise, I wouldn't have done it!"). The phrase, however, is frequently used with the meaning "to raise the question" (e.g. "If you didn't put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder, it begs the question of who did."). The Latin name for it is petitio principii, literally, "assuming the initial point". In general it implies something like "to request that one's opponent concede the initial point".

• Beta is often used to refer to a video game in any development stage before it's released. It's actually the "feature complete" stage, just when it's about to be ready for release. It is tested by a (usually) limited audience outside the programming team to find bugs and improve usability. It is not equivalent to a video game only being part way finished. Alpha testing is (as the name suggests) the testing of the unfinished software by the development team prior to the beta release. Gamma or Release Candidate refers software that is finished and ready for official release, barring any major bugs.

• No species of bat is actually blind. Many species have vision which is as good as, if not better than, a human's, so someone who is as blind as a bat may actually have very good eyesight.

• Bourgeoisie, in the Marxist sense, is sometimes simply used as a fancy synonym for rich people. It actually is a bit more complicated: the bourgeoisie are the people in charge of the means of production (i.e the people in control of factories and the like.) One can be rich without be a member of the bourgeoisie, as some rich people don't actually make anything.

• Casual means "done in a relaxed, unconcerned manner" or "irregularly or occasionally", which fits well with a person that does something every now and then instead of doing it regularly. Nowadays, people use casual, in terms of video games or other forms of entertainment activity, as an insult towards people that do not dedicate their time to an activity and even many video games have begun to use casual to mean "easy".

• The word child has different meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. Biologically, a child is a human who has not attained puberty. Legally, "child" may used in different ways depending on the purpose in question (such as immigration law or the age of consent), but generally refers to an individual under the age of majority — this is generally 18 (as per the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child), but ranges internationally from 15 to 21. "Child" also refers to the offspring of someone, regardless of what age they are.
  • The related term adolescent refers to a human who has reached puberty but has not reached full growth or another developmental cutoff point. What constitutes the end of adolescence varies depending on the purpose. Legally, adolescence ends at the age of majority, whereas medical and psychological definitions often extend it well into ones twenties.
    • The term teenager or teen refers to humans aged 13-19, but is often used as a synonym for "adolescent".
  • Youth is another imprecise term for the period of life where one is young or for young people in general. It often refers to the period of life encompassing childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. It may also be used to refer exclusively to adolescents under the age of majority.

• When people say China, they likely mean "the government of, and areas under the control of, the People's Republic of China". In official contexts however, it's a deliberately ambiguous term that refers not only to the aforementioned entity, but also the Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and even Taiwan. A bit of context: while many think the People's Republic of China just really wants the island Taiwan for imperialist reasons, the truth is that they see it as a rebelling province they never got around to quashing — and the same goes for the Republic of China, who sees what is commonly thought of as "China" as a bunch of rebellions they simply never got around to quashing. The conflict is not two countries fighting over territory, but rather two governments fighting over who is the rightful ruler of "China", which in this context is a geographical term similar to "Europe" — general location known, but fuzzy around the edges. This is also why technically, Taiwan really "isn't a country" — it's an island, upon which the Republic of China sits.

• Censorship refers to a higher power, such as the government or a corporation, suppressing speech, or other forms of information, on the grounds that such material is harmful or offensive. Over time the phrase has been confused with the First Amendment (which doesn't even contain the word censorship), and it is now not uncommon to hear people say that censorship only refers to government censorship, as that is the only form of censorship the First Amendment protects you from.

• The word chef is widely used to refer to any cook regardless of rank, but it is the shortened version of the French term chef de cuisine, the head or director of a kitchen. The word "chef" comes from the Latin word caput ("head" — it helps to keep in mind that "chef" has the same origin as "chief"), so "head chef" really means "head head" (though, if we want to be true pedants, one might argue the "head" in "head chef" means "top" or "most important" metaphorically). Only the highest-ranking cook in the whole kitchen is the chef. This is because most cooks in a professional kitchen are either the Sous-Chef (second in command, literally Under-Chef), a Chef de Partie (head of station, or line cook) or assist the Chef de Partie as a Commis-Chef (literally chef-clerk). Since nearly every position has the word chef in it, it's no wonder it got shortened.
  
  To give an example, Spongebob is both a Fry Chef (as he heads up the frying station) and the Chef de Cuisine (by default). In the episode where Patrick assisted him, Patrick would have been his Commis-Chef (and also Sous Chef by default).

• The word claymore does not refer to a specific type of sword. The word is a corruption of the Scots Gaelic phrase claidheamh mòr, which means big sword. It is commonly used to describe both the late medieval two-handed swords, and the 17th- and 18th-century Scottish basket-hilted broadswords, because both kinds were longer and heavier than the norm for swords at the time.

• Terms collective and commune are often interchangeable and making a distinction between the two is sometimes portrayed as a case of Insistent Terminology. However, the distinction remains useful. In a commune, property is collective, so it belongs to the organization rather than individuals. In a collective, things are also shared but they remain personal property of respective individuals. Also, traditionally, 'commune' means groups that is living together while 'collective' refers to people who live separately and only work together using shared means to achieve their goals.

• Contemporary means of the same time. To use it without a temporal context is to invite the question, "contemporary with what?" If you use it as a synonym for modern, well — do note that "modern day" in an academic context refers to the times from AD 1500 to now. An exception is with the term 'Contemporary History' which is a defined period between 1945 and the present day.

• Complex means that something has many parts and components, and is a neutral term. Complicated means "difficult or challenging to use", and is negative. A car is complex, but it (hopefully) isn't complicated.

• Controversial should not be used to describe people, things, or ideas that are merely "shocking" or "in bad taste". The word literally means "likely to provoke dissent" (i.e. controversy) — and that dissent need not be bitter. That's why "controversial" does not always have to be a "negative" word, even though that's how it tends to be used. Since almost everyone disapproves of child pornography, for example, child pornography is not "controversial". You should use terms such as "scandalous" or "outrageous" instead. (But don't use "uproarious", because that term has incorrectly come to mean "extremely funny.")

• Despite most people treating Coronavirus as the name of the specific virus involved in the international outbreak of 2020, that's actually just the class of virus it belongs to — in other words, it's not specifically named "Coronavirus", it just happens to be a coronavirus. Unfortunately the actual name is the rather less snappy Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2 for short. It is also called "COVID-19" (due to it being a strain that developed in 2019) as well as "New-type Coronavirus" in other languages, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Despite SARS being the familiar name for another coronavirus, the name SARS 2 hasn't caught on.

• Cretin (someone who suffers from cretinism, i.e. severe mental and physical disabilities caused by congenital hypothyroidism) Dumb (unable to speak), Lame (unable to walk), Idiot (having an IQ of 0 to 20), Imbecile (having an IQ of 21 to 50), and Moron (having an IQ of 51 to 70) all went from their respective meanings to both being synonyms for "stupid". And since history likes to repeat itself, the same happened to Retarded, and is currently happening with "LD" for "learning disability" and "ADHD" or "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder", though at least the last one is less meant as an insult and used simply for anyone deemed hyperactive. Yay, progress?
  • On that note, the word stupid itself qualifies. Originally it meant "in a stupor", so calling somebody stupid didn't mean they were unintelligent, but rather unresponsive or comatose. In fact, the terms "struck stupid" (astonished to the point of being unable to comprehend) and "dumbfounded" (unable to reply) come from the original meanings of the words.
  • "Dumb" as stupid and "dumb" as mute both come from "dumb" defined as "lacking an expected property", which is the etymology of "dummy". The OED suggests the Proto-Germanic meaning to be something like 'stupid', 'not understanding' (compare Modern German dumm, tumb).

• Critic, incidentally, is unrelated to either; its root is the same as that of crisis and crime, among others: a verb meaning to distinguish between one thing and another. (A crisis is the moment of decision between two outcomes; criminal law distinguishes between what is and is not tolerated; a critic points out distinctions between good and bad art.) For this you tend to use criteria (which is the plural of criterion).

• Cryogenics is a branch of physics dealing with the production of extremely cold temperatures and the way that certain materials react within those temperatures. It's often mistakenly used in place of cryonics, the practice of freezing organic tissue to prevent it from decaying.

• Depreciate means "to decrease in value." The extremely similar deprecate means "to become obsolete." Something can be depreciated without being deprecated, but not vice versa. Both words can mean "to belittle" or "to disparage", which really just adds to the confusion.

• Detonation is often used to describe the combustion of any explosive, but technically only refers to the combustion of high explosives, which produce shock waves which travel faster than the speed of sound. Deflagration is the proper term used to describe the combustion of low explosives, which produce a flame front which travels much more slowly than the speed of sound.

• Dice is the plural form of the word 'die' (as in, a little cube with dots on), however, it's used by many people as the singular form. For example, someone might say, 'I have a dice' which is equivalent to them saying something like 'I have a hamsters'. (Another word that this has happened to is "data", which is the plural of "datum".)
  • "Dice" as a verb can also mean "to play dice games with", so "dices" can also be the third person present form of that verb (this is where the phrase "dicing with Death" comes from).

• Technically, the term dinosaur only refers to reptiles from the archosaurian groups Ornithischia and Saurischia, but people often use it in a way that could be summed up as "any large pre-Cenozoic reptile that wasn't a turtle or crocodilian." As such, you often hear non-experts refer to pterosaurs (which were fairly closely related to dinosaurs) as well as marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs as "dinosaurs," regardless of how doing so irritates some palaeontologists and fans of the subject. Some go even further and refer to proto-mammalian synapsids (like Dimetrodon) as dinosaurs. And then there are those who refer to dinosaurs as "lizards" despite them being from two different branches of reptiles (archosaurs and lepidosaurs respectively).

• On this site you might find a male counterpart to an Always Female trope referred to as a Distaff Counterpart. Distaff, however, means specifically "female", not simply "gender-switched". This is derived from the distaff, a tool used in the traditionally-feminine job of spinning, as well as the inspiration for the female symbol (♀). The male equivalent would be the "Spear Counterpart".^note And yes, the (shield and) spear is the inspiration for the male symbol (♂).

• In the context of eusocial insects, the term Drone is often confused with worker. A drone is a fertile male whose only job is to mate with a new queen. So describing someone as a "working-class drone" might not come across quite as intended if the listener is an entomologist.

• A dropkick is either kicking someone with both feet at the same time, or dropping a ball and kicking it after it bounces, depending on whether you're talking about professional wrestling or football. It doesn't mean just any kick that makes someone fall down.

• To be electrocuted or to suffer electrocution is to be outright killed by an electric shock, not to simply receive one; indeed, the word was coined by Thomas Edison as a portmanteau of "electric" and "execute", after "to westinghouse" (named after the Westinghouse Electric Company) failed to catch on.

• Emo does not automatically mean anything angsty or brooding. Rather it originated from a genre of music characterized by expressive lyrics both positive and negative. Unfortunately thanks to the Emo Teen stereotype, the word often gets tossed around to denote Wangsty and/or excessive brooding, and can even lead to unforeseen and unwanted implications when used to describe people (usually fictional characters with a Dark and Troubled Past) who suffer from legitimate mental health issues such as depression.

• Enormity is traditionally defined along the lines of "The great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something generally considered to be morally wrong." It does not simply mean "seriousness", and it certainly doesn't just mean "big." For example, "The policeman grew nauseated as he realized the enormity of the crime" is correct. "The crowd stood in awe at the enormity of the tower" is not, unless the tower is somehow inherently evil.

• Entitled means "having title [right] to something," as in, for instance, elderly people or young orphans being entitled to pensions. It's often used a bit more loosely as short for "self-entitled," which means feeling like you have the right to something that you don't. Because this usage is so common, it's sometimes led to people forgetting the original meaning; for instance, a common complaint about the phrase "entitlement programs" is that "They're not entitlements, we paid for them!" — which, in the strictest sense, means "We don't have the right to these, we paid for them!" Most loosely, it's often used as a synonym for "titled," as in "Miguel de Cervantes' most famous book is entitled Don Quixote." You may be able to get away with the latter usage depending on how strict your professor or editor is.

• In cuisine, an entrée is not an appetizer. In traditional French cuisine, the main course was le rotí, which consisted of a roast cut of meat, or a fowl, which was carved at the table, and les entrées were all courses eaten before le rotí. Very few restaurants, even in France, serve rotí-style main courses nowadays, but the tradition of calling the other dishes entrées remains.
  • Note: This only applies to American English. Entrée is the French term for "the dish before the main dish" (while an "appetizer" is an "apéritif"), and Commonwealth English follows modern French usage.

• Epic refers to "epic poetry," which means narratives that are heroic, majestic, or impressively great. Calling something "epic" is to compare it to the scale of something from an epic narrative... which is meaningless if one doesn't know about epic narratives. Since internet culture uses this word to describe anything that is remotely good, that underscores how meaningless it's become. (Of course, great, wonderful, awesome, and excellent have long been similarly drifted in meaning, so this is par for the course.)

• Epicenter literally means "the point ground above the center". It's used specifically for earthquakes — the center of an earthquake is somewhere underground, so the epicenter is the point on the ground directly above the earthquake's center. But because people always heard the word in connection with earthquakes, it's come to have the common meaning "center of something very big and important".
  • Similarly, ground zero literally means "place on the ground below an explosion" — since atomic bombs are usually set to go off in the air for maximum destruction, "ground zero" would be the spot directly below where the bomb went off. But it has come to mean "center of devastation". (During the '90s, the term was often used interchangeably with "square one" to mean "starting point" — as in, "We're going to have to go back to ground zero and start over". But after the 9/11 attacks, when "ground zero" was commonly used to refer to the destroyed World Trade Center site, the term shifted back to something closer to the original meaning.)

• "Execute" does not mean to kill but to carry out. The executive branch carries out the laws, and executables carry out computer instructions. It also executes capital (death) sentences. Its use to refer to capital punishment is basically a Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness version of organized crime using "do" as a euphemism for killing.

• You may have a family crest, if you can trace your family tree back to European gentry. But the crest is only the bit that stands on top of the helm (like the crest of a jaybird). In most European traditions the essential element is the shield, or escutcheon (in Germany, at some times, the crest(s) got much more emphasis than the shield; but in Romance-speaking countries crests were relatively rarely displayed at all; in Scotland all members of the clan have the right to wear the crest, but not the rest of the arms). The full achievement may also include a motto and, for a noble, supporters (a pair of human, animal or monstrous figures standing beside the shield to prop it all up) and perhaps a coronet and pavilion (a fur-lined robe forming a tent around the whole). The original meaning of coat of arms was a tunic worn over armor to keep the sun off, which was painted in the same design as the shield, so the word coat is used for that design or, in the case of a composite shield, each of its quarters.
  • Some popular references claim that each charge (symbol) and tincture (color) has a specific meaning; and some crackpots say the same for each vowel and consonant in a language. The only thing we can be sure of is that arms often make puns (sometimes obscure) on part of the bearer's name. ^note This is called "canting arms" and can be seen (for instance) in the arms of the Spanish region of Castile and León (Castile gets a castle, León gets a lion); the arms of the Queen Mum (containing bows and lions, for her maiden name, "Bowes-Lyon"); and the arms of Munich (whose name comes from the Old High German for "by the monks' place" and sure enough the arms depict a monk).
  • In Japan, crest is a fair translation of mon because the primary emblem was displayed on helmets as well as elsewhere.

• While farther and further are interchangeable when referring to distance, only further is acceptable when referring to extent.

• Regarding the word fetish, most people use it in the way it's defined on dictionary.com as well as in a few other dictionaries. That is, it's something normally unassociated with sex that that causes "habitual sexual arousal" in the observer and isn't something that needs to be present in order to become aroused. On the other hand, other dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster, explicitly state that it does. Those that use this definition argue that most people who claim to have a fetish actually have a kink instead, as it's rare for it to be that extreme. All of of this, of course, necessarily postdates the original use of the word; i.e., an idol or other artifact to which is ascribed supernatural qualities.

• The concept of a fictional universe (especially as it relates to discussions of In-Universe details in works) just means that a work has a consistent setting and continuity. It's sometimes misunderstood to mean that the creator intends the work to take place in literally a different universe from our own (when real people, places and timelines can be part of a fictional universe), or that a creator thinks their work is part of a vast, interconnected setting like The DCU. The announcement that HBO was working on a Parasite series that would take place in the same universe as the movie but focus on different characters and storylines drew a lot of snarky, confused comments along the lines of "So HBO thinks a film that dealt very seriously with capitalism takes place in some alternate universe?" or "The universe of Parasite? Isn't that called 'South Korea'?"

• Fundamentalist: Denotes somebody who puts a particular emphasis on the basic tenets of a doctrine as opposed to ideologies that might have a basis in that doctrine but are willing to question some basic tenets. It's really more a statement against revisionism than a statement for tradition and bigotry, it just usually ends up that way. A fundamentalist is, strictly speaking, somebody who emphasizes the fundamentals of an ideology, so it's not hard to see how this purist approach could lend itself to extremism.
  • Similarly, evangelical, in terms like "evangelical doctrine", just means "practicing evangelism". By that definition, many churches are evangelical, even if they don't consider themselves so and don't have the traits that most people consider "evangelical". Unfortunately this word has lost most of its usefulness by coming to mean the kind of church that still condemns dancing, throws fits about interracial marriage, and steadfastly maintains that the world was created in 7 days 6,000 years ago. (And in case you forgot what evangelism is, it means an emphasis on conversion and recruitment, literally to "spread the good news." In this way, even Hindus and Muslims could technically be evangelical, they just wouldn't use this word.) "Evangelical" also shouldn't be assumed to imply "politically conservative"; most evangelicals were on the political left until the 20th century, and some still are.
  • Also, radical means "pertaining to the root" (from radix, the Latin word for "root"), not "extreme". Radical movements seek to make radical (i.e. fundamental) changes in basic social structures, or they attempt a return to the "root" of a movement which they feel has diverged from its original purpose. Of course, radical movements are often prone to extremism.

• Gay originally meant something closer to "carefree, with undertones of being unrestricted by social conventions". Later on, it was used to describe sexually active women, who were most definitely of the kind referred to as 'straight' today. It now describes homosexuals and is technically gender-neutral but mostly used for men. To top it off, it's seen heavy use as an insult lately.
  • Some people that use Gay as an insult and are called out on it attempt to weasel out of the mess by saying they were using the "happy" version of the word.

• Gene is often used to mean "allele". An allele is one of multiple forms a gene assumes. For example, there is no human gene for brown hair; there's a gene for hair color in general, and one of its alleles results in brown hair. A valuable distinction for biologists, but not one that most people care about when they're at the movies.

• Gimmick originally meant something that is designed to draw in attraction and amusement. People today now use gimmick as way of saying "this has a gimmick, therefore, it sucks." While there can be misuse of gimmicks that make it bad overall, most people that slam something for being gimmicky or relying on a gimmick do so because there's a gimmick and not because the gimmick itself was bad.

• To draw from a Biblical parable, a Good Samaritan is someone who helps even those that persecute him. In Biblical times the Samaritans were an ethno-religious group that was shunned heavily by the Jewish people. This was the entire purpose of the parable: a Samaritan saved the life of a dying Jew, thereby proving that goodness is not constrained by ethnic, cultural, or religious boundaries; even people you hate can do good, and you should still do good even for people who hate you. However, due to a lack of context, many people simply assume "Good Samaritan" to mean any person who does good deeds for any reason. Even worse, some people drop the "good" and just use "Samaritan" to refer to any good person, even though it originally meant the opposite. To put it in a more nerdy way: the X-Men, who fight to protect humanity even though humans despise them, are Good Samaritans. Superman, however, is not a Good Samaritan because he rarely if ever faces public persecution.
  • Furthermore, considering the ethnic/religious group known as the Samaritans still exists, calling someone a "Samaritan" is the same thing as saying that they are a part of this group. Calling someone a "Good Samaritan" could be considered the same as calling someone a "Good Jew" or even a "Good African." Not necessarily an insult, per se, but still very likely to offend some people.

• The use of Gothic to mean "dark and spooky" dates only to the late eighteenth century; the word originally was not supposed to conjure up ghost stories, let alone the punk, heavy metal, and emo genres of music. On the contrary, "Gothic" architecture first appeared in northern France in the twelfth century (in the town of Chartres, specifically), and — paradoxically enough — was originally conceived to allow stained-glass windows in church to admit more natural light. Earlier than that, the Goths were an ethnic group: a people living in eastern Europe and speaking a language distantly related to German; they even had their own alphabet for a time.

• The word hack originally meant "to chop at something without a discernable pattern". When it first got used in computing, it meant "to come up with a creative solution to a problem", which later became "to find a way to use something for a purpose it was not originally intended for". "Life hack" thus uses the term valid, as long as you're not pedantic enough to insist it only means its original chopping definition.
  Of course, the dictionary definition of "hack" is now "an attempt to gain unauthorized access to proprietary computer systems" (though that does not necessarily imply malice; hence the term "black hat" and "white hat" hackers). Therefore, to use someone's computer while they're using the bathroom and firing up their browser to post things under their Facebook account that is already logged in constitutes hacking, and, yes, technically illegal.
  • Hacker is also heavily used in video gaming to define someone that cheats. Very rarely do online video game cheaters use any actual hack. Most people that cheat in games use 3rd party programs that simply alters the game's coding. Hacker is also used to insult other players that are suspected of cheating, even if the accused are not cheating.

• Human: This is a tough one because, here on Real Earth, several possible definitions all collapse to the same group. The term is widely taken to refer specifically to Homo sapiens sapiens, i.e. "us". However, among the accepted dictionary definitions include any member of the species Homo sapiens, which would also include the now-extinct archaic varies of H. sapiens, such as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens idaltu. Others include the entire genus Homo, picking up more of our ancestors, or even any member of Hominidae capable of speech. Whether species outside our branch of the genetic tree (i.e. sapient aliens, robots, magical beings, future species descended from H. sapiens sapiens, etc.) could be properly called "human" is entirely up for debate: as it hasn't come up yet in the real world, we have not come up with an agreed-upon definition. As a result, many phrases and idioms use the term "human" in a way that will be incorrect if a decision in one direction or the other is ever made ("Human rights" vs "Human anatomy" for example). Person, particularly in the legal sense, is even more ambiguous. And while we're at it, the word homo comes from Latin and means man. The completely unrelated word "homo" comes from Greek and means "the same". "Homo sapiens" means "Wise man", not "The same sapients".

• Hysteric(al) reactions may be funny to onlookers, but its original meaning is not "funny." "Hysterical" was originally used to describe a woman suffering from "hysteria", a psychological state of excessive emotion, especially fear, originally believed to be exclusive to women and caused by disruptions of the uterus (the term comes from Greek and literally translates as "womb-fury"). Specifically, the ancient Greeks believed that the uterus traveled around the body and attacked the other organs, presumably for no reason other than to make trouble for the men who would have to put up with the results. Even forgetting its unfortunate origins, today "hysterical" is often still used to mean that someone is temporarily out of their mind. As late as the 1940s, hysteria was commonly used to mean, roughly, PMS. As late as the 1970s, reprinted house and garden handbooks from the 1940s included home remedies for hysteria. Its meaning of "funny" has been attributed at least partly to the fact that it sounds similar to "hilarious." On a related note (and possibly also contributing to the misuse of "hysterical") the phrase hysterical laughter originally meant something like Laughing Mad — i.e. laughter as a symptom of hysteria — but today is often used to just mean an extreme laughing fit caused by finding something really funny.

• "I could care less" is incorrect according to the literal meaning of the words. The phrase you're looking for is "I couldn't care less"; by saying that you could care less, you're saying that you do care.

• The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably. The Internet is the network itself, over which all network protocols operate; the Web is just one of its applications, the set of servers that use Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). If you open an instant messaging program or go play an online game, you're using the Internet but not the Web. This has become pedantic in that often the word Internet is used in place of Web — correctly, since a website is necessarily on the Internet. It's much more noticeable when switched around: if someone says Web or World Wide Web in reference to anything other than a website, you can expect anyone who understands this distinction to be all over it.

• Isekai literally means "another world", as in the tropes Trapped in Another World or Reincarnate in Another World, whether be an Alternate Universe, inside the world of media, or on a different planet. Thanks to the boom of fantasy media featuring the trope the 2010s, the term often gets used to mean "trapped in a fantasy world", or just plain "fantasy world" (implying the world is the "other" because it's different from ours).

• Isotope. The proper term for its common use is nuclide — that is, a substance with a fixed number of protons and neutrons. Isotopes are two or more substances with the same number of protons and different numbers of neutrons — that is, the difference is like between a boy and a brother — the latter can only be used as a comparative to something else.

• The term Ivy League is commonly used to refer to the eight private universities in the Northeastern United States that are generally considered the country's most prestigious academic institutions. ^note  Harvard University in Massachusetts, Columbia University in New York City, Cornell University in upstate New York, Princeton University in New Jersey, Yale University in Connecticut, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Brown University in Rhode Island, and the University of Pennsylvania in...Pennsylvania. Officially, though, it's a sports term that specifically refers to the collegiate athletic conference that those schools compete in. And before it came to have connotations of elitism and academic excellence, "Ivy League" was a fairly neutral grouping; those eight schools just happened to compete in the same conference because they're in the same geographic region. These days, though, the term has been widely adopted as a general term for the schools, and nearly everybody recognizes it as such.

• If you're talking about whether two facts are in accord, you might ask whether they "jibe with" each other. ("jibe" is a nautical term.) You wouldn't ask whether they jive with each other, unless you're asking whether they're grooving to that funky music.

• Lay is a present infinitive transitive verb. A homonym "lay" is the past tense of lie, which is a present infitivive, intransitive verb. The simple past, and the past participle, of the transitive "lay" is "laid", while the past participle of "lie" is "lain". Or, in laymen's terms:
  • "I lay bricks."
  • "I lie down."
  • "I laid bricks."
  • "I lay down." (Past tense)
  • "I had laid bricks."
  • "I had lain down."

• Leonardo da Vinci. Common usage refers to his works as "da Vincis" as though it were his last name, but Vinci is a location; Leonardo da Vinci literally translates to "Leonardo of Vinci." It's like saying something by Jerry of New York is created by "of New York." His full name was Leondaro di ser Piero da Vinci (Leonardo, son of Piero, from Vinci.)

• A Libertarian and Libertarianism has been a synonym/euphemism for "Anarchism" as far back as the 1890s. Libertarian Athenaeums gave thousands of people access to basic education — including pioneering sexual education — and Libertarian Unions stood against the State and the Capitalist establishment. All this hasn't stopped the U.S. right-wing "libertarian" movement — which started in the late 1950s and is a staunch proponent of Capitalism — from claiming exclusive rights to both terms. While in a vacuum libertarianism shares most of the anarchist values, such as personal freedom with no state intervention, within mainstream politics libertarians normally are saying they want those things, but only as far as is reasonable within the current political system. They aren't incorrect to say that they are "supporting liberty", but they don't want to tear down the democracy for it either. In essence, any political term that is used in the modern political mainstream needs to come with the rider "but without wrecking democracy". It would probably be more correct to call such people "Democratic Libertarians", as they support the democratic system and individual liberty, but since they are a part of the democratic system it pretty much comes as read that they are OK with democratic politics.

• If an outcome of a scenario is likely, that isn't necessarily the same thing as it being probable. If it's "likely", that just means that one can reasonably predict that it might occur. If it's "probable", then one can reasonably predict that it might occur based on principles of probability, a branch of mathematics that uses numbers to weigh multiple possible scenarios against one another. Probability assumes that (all other things being equal) outcomes are more likely if there are a greater number of opportunities for them to occur.^note  When rolling a pair of dice, for example, it's more probable that one will roll certain numbers if there are more combinations that will result in those numbers. Many events are "likely" for reasons that can't necessarily be expressed mathematically, but an event isn't "probable" unless its likelihood can be expressed mathematically.

• Literal is used often for emphasis, regardless of whether the situation described is a concrete demonstration of an expression that is meant allegorically or whether the term has both concrete and allegorical meanings for the definition to apply to.

• Longswords are not arming swords, and broadsword is not a synonym for either. The typical arming sword have long since been called longswords or broadswords in tabletop games, video games, books, films, and so many other forms of media, but in actuality you could not find bigger differences between the two. A longsword has more in common with a hand-and-a-half bastard sword except longer, having gotten the name due to their length. A broadsword, likewise, is descended from a rapier and boasts the same type of intricate hilt and handle, but with a much broader blade. Worse, now they're starting to become the "normal" term, as people are generally far more familiar with the term of "longsword" or "broadsword" than "arming sword".

• Lowkey: Not only is it not an adverb, but it's two different words, that are not one word, that are "low" and "key".

• Mail is often used as a synonym of 'armour' (e.g. 'plate mail', 'scale mail') but this is an old name for a chain armour (only!) that comes from French word maille meaning 'chain'. This means that 'chainmail', although not an error per se, is a pleonasm at best. The latter word has been first used by sir Walter Scott and so the common misuse began. Use of the word 'mail' when referring to any kind of armour other than chain is incorrect.

• A man is, loosely, defined as "a rational (i.e. sapient) animal". In its earliest days, it simply referred to any human, period, owing to humanity not having encountered any other species that fit the definition. A male is a werman, while a female is a wifman. The related term human meant the exact same thing as "man". The only reason we have both is because English (for whatever reason) decided to loan the latter from French, despite already having a cognate.
  • This is why in science fiction, the term gets adopted to apply to a variety of species, eg. Klingons / Turians / Ctarl-Ctarl / etc., while "Terran" or "human" becomes the term to refer specifically to us.

• A manger is a feed trough. The little display with Jesus and Mary and Joseph in the stable can be called a "manger scene": there's generally a manger in it, but the whole thing isn't one.

• The phrase mano a mano is widely, but incorrectly, used to mean one-on-one (usually in the context of a fight or contest) — "man to man." This likely stems from "mano" being a false friend for the English word "man." However, "mano" is actually Spanish for "hand." The phrase means "hand-to-hand," such as fighting in close quarters, and has nothing to do with the number of parties involved or the genders thereof.

• Manipulation is not inherently insidious. It means "to influence, direct, or control something to one's advantage", which need not be negative or even self-centered, just that it produces a net benefit to you (though sometimes it is inherently negative when paid with another noun, such as "data manipulation"). Dextrous manipulation, for instance, means to use your hands to make an object do what you want it to do. But one way of using the simplified meaning is for categorical opponents of genetic research to insist on referring to the practice as "genetic manipulation" to make it sound desirably sinister.

• Grams are a measure of mass, how much stuff something has, while weight is a measurement of how much force it exerts. An object on the moon would weigh less than it would on Earth due to the difference in gravity, but its mass would remain constant.

• Melee means a confusing, chaotic hand-to-hand fight (possibly free-for-all — the word literally means "mixed", implying that the two sides fighting one another are mixed amongst themselves). In most Video Games however, it seems to be applied in a way that just means 'close-quarters range/fight'. If you're playing some sort of strategy game in which fights of a one-on-one nature are rare if they ever happen, the word may have a reasonable context. In other games, probably not.
  • Most video games (and tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons) just flat out refer to 'melee' weapons as the opposite of 'ranged' weapons and 'melee' itself as the opposite of 'casting spells' and/or 'shooting firearms'. In other words, in modern gaming parlance, the word 'melee' just means 'hand to hand'.

• For the most part, a mime means basically the same today as it did 2,000 years ago — an actor who performs silently. However, back then it did not mean "a silent clown with a blank white face"; that sense came from the French theatrical clown Pierrot, who was originally not silent. And the original Greco-Roman mime performances were not totally devoid of sound; they were more like ballet, with the actors dancing or making similar stylized movements to the accompaniment of music, and often also a chanting chorus narrating some kind of story. Most importantly, the original mimes were not clowns, not always supposed to be funny. They also did not wear makeup, but grotesque, oversized masks that made them appear inhuman (the "masked humanoid" sense survives in many traditional Asian forms of drama, such as the kathakali performances of southern India, although modern-day kathakali actors do not wear masks per se, but layers of thick-crusted cream makeup that simulate a mask and can be difficult to remove after a performance).

• Miracle is often misused to mean a really lucky event, typically one so lucky it seems like it must be magical. It actually means an event that's impossible without breaking the laws of nature/reality (a literal Deus ex Machina, if you will.) Thus, if you fall out of an airplane without a parachute and land just right so you are unharmed, you're just really lucky. If, however, you survive due to God teleporting you to safety or sending an angel to catch you, that's a miracle.

• Moonshine is an American term for any alcohol produced and sold illegally, without any government oversight or payment of taxes. The type of liquor isn't specified, but it's most commonly corn whiskey due to the abundance of corn in the US. But nowadays many American liquor stores (especially in the Appalachia region) sell "moonshine" that's just whiskey in a mason jar, produced under all the same regulations as the other liquors on the shelves. In this case, "moonshine" specifically refers to high-proof corn whiskey with sugar added during the mashing process, the most common way backyard moonshine is produced. But it can still refer to whatever concoction your brother's girlfriend's uncle's neighbor brews up in a still behind his toolshed, whether it's the traditional kind or not.

• Moral equivalent: often, this phrase is used in the context of considering the metaphorical "scales" of ethics to be balanced: neither is more good (or bad) than the other. This is based on a misunderstanding (almost an inversion) of the intended meaning. William James wrote of "...war, or its moral equivalent." James meant that in modern societies war serves a purpose; the "moral equivalent" would be something which provides a similar function, but (unlike war) is not immoral.

• As many an English Literature teacher or lecturer will remind you, the ve in Must've (must have), along with Should've and Could've, is never short for of. The confusion likely stems from the way the ve (/v/) syllable, a voiced labiodental fricative, is sometimes pronounced like a voiceless labiodental fricative (/f/).

• Netorare and its counterpart netori get subjected to this treatment by Western internet fans. Originally referring to a specific scenario of cheating (that is to say, a woman/man being stolen away by another for shaming the cuckold and sexual titillation), it since evolved into a catch all term for when a character's crush doesn't return their feelings and dates someone else, no relationship or shame required. It also sees usage when a character first starts out liking another, but falls out of love with them for whatever reason and looks to another.

• A nymphomaniac is specifically a sexually compulsive woman. The male equivalent of nymphomania is satyromania, both respectively taking their names from notoriously randy all female and all male Greek mythological creatures.

• Osmosis is the process by which water moves through a semi-permeable membrane^note Something the solvent can pass through, but not the solute. from a highly concentrated solution to a lower concentrated one. Because plants use this process to absorb water, it's sometimes used to describe anything being absorbed. In cases where a substance other than water moves through such a membrane, the word "diffusion" is more appropriate. In other situations, such as a plant absorbing minerals, the correct term is 'active transport'. It all depends on whether the movement of the substance requires energy or not.

• Otaku. In the Western world, this somehow became the word for "anime fan". In Japan, it's a (pejorative) word for geek or someone who's a little too into their hobby (the stereotypical railfan would be a train otaku, for example). The etymology gets muddled too since while it does mean "house", it does not refer to a literal house (as a result of this confusion, people thought the word was a reference to shut-ins) but a more apt translation would be "clan".

• Parkour is getting from point A to point B while conserving energy. Free-running is getting from point A to point B while doing fancy acrobatics.

• Penultimate means "next to last," but is sometimes incorrectly used to simply mean "last". Antepenultimate means "next to next to last," (or more simply, third to last), but is seldom used these days. The original word for last was ultimate (paene means "almost": compare to "peninsula" from paene and insula — that is, island — thus "almost an island"); however, all but the ultimate pedants have given up on convincing people that it means anything other than 'maximum'. Students of Latin are taught about the ultima, penult, and antepenult when it comes to placing the stress on the correct syllable of a word — but then again, students of Latin probably don't need "penultimate" explained to them. And many people seem to also be under the impression that "penultimate" means something along the lines of "even more ultimate", which doesn't even make sense.

• PMS is short for Premenstrual Syndrome, occurring about a week or so before a menstrual period begins. However, because the common symptoms in the leadup to the period (bloating, irritability, cravings) are so popularly associated with the period itself, PMS is colloquially used to describe both the symptoms before and during one. Medically, however, its intended definition still holds.

• Potion really just describes any kind of mixed liquid meant to be consumed by drinking it (think "potable") and can apply to any perfectly normal beverage, but is usually used in fiction specifically to describe a formula with magical properties, even if said "potion" is obviously not in a liquid or even ingestible form, like a capsule or a poultice.

• Pristine is typically used by most people to simply mean "clean," as opposed to the word's actual meaning which is "a thing which is virtually unchanged from its original form." In other words, a dirty hunk of raw hematite ore fresh out of the ground is "pristine" but if you smelt it into a geometrically perfect iron bar and polish it up really nice then it is no longer pristine at all.

• Prodigal means "wasteful", not "wandering" or "long-lost". The Prodigal Son was the one who squandered his money; the wandering-and-returning happened in the process of his doing so. However, because of this parable, the word is very frequently understood to mean "lost".
  • Alternately, some people use prodigal to mean that someone is bad family. Again, while the prodigal son could be considered to have been a bad son and a bad brother, that is still not the meaning of the term.
  • Some people also use prodigal as an adjective form for the word "prodigy." While this is a bit understandable, as the two words do look similar, it is very wrong as the two words have nearly opposite meanings. For the record, the actual adjective form of prodigy is "prodigious."

• A prototype is commonly used to refer to "an experimental early version designed to test what can and cannot be fit into a furbished model". In actual engineering, this is the definition of a Concept Model (or Concept Car, as the most famous examples are from the automobile industry) while a real prototype is supposed to be as close to the final production model as possible.

• If something is Pumpkin Spice-flavored, that doesn't mean it contains pumpkin. It refers to the seasonings one uses in pumpkin pie: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice (or just cinnamon and nutmeg if the company is cheap). This combination is often used in deserts and drinks to invoke the taste of pumpkin without having to include the squash itself. If actual pumpkin is present, then it's usually labelled Pumpkin Pie-flavored if it includes the spices, or just plain Pumpkin if not.

• Pure wrestling normally refers to a game or contest where the participants will only use grappling techniques designed to control and move each other to a desired position. Only in the context of Professional Wrestling would it be appropriate to describe matches that make use of chokes, bone breaking, ligament snapping and kicks as "pure wrestling".

• Queer's original and proper meaning is "strange" or "suspicious", but over time it has evolved — or devolved — to mean the same thing that "gay" now means, "homosexual". It is used in other contexts to refer to other kinds of abnormal sexualities and gender types (as in "New Queer Cinema").
  • On a related note, the word abnormal itself is often negative, but it just means "deviating from the norm". So a queer person is abnormal, but saying that is likely to cause offense. A safer word to use here would be "atypical" or "non-common".

• Race, species, phylum, and basically everything else from Taxonomic Term Confusion. Using "race" when you mean "species" is often forgivable in fantasy settings; even in Real Life, we have expressions like "the human race." Using "phylum" when you mean "taxon" is worse.
  • Doubly so on the fantasy setting point, as while "species" is fairly well defined in terms of viable reproduction, and while individual races, families, orders, classes, phyla and kingdoms are well defined in terms of particular phenotypical characteristics, there is no clear abstract definition (unlike for species) of when you should consider some novel set of similar creatures to constitute a new phylum (as opposed to a new class), meaning that the terms have little clear meaning outside an Earth biology context. If you say two distantly related alien species are part of the same phylum and I say they are merely part of the same kingdom, there is no principled way to resolve the dispute.
  • Historically, the word "race" has been used to mean anything from all humanity to a single family line. In The Luck of Barry Lyndon, the title character at one point laments that it was not destined that he should leave any of "my race" on Earth after his death — meaning, not humans, nor white people, nor Irish people, but people of the Barry family. On Wikipedia, one old map depicts "Races of the Austro-Hungarian Empire" — meaning, nationalities, or ethnocultural groups with a common language — Germans, Hungarians, Ukrainians, etc.; all of them would have been more or less the same colour. Before the mid-twentieth century, "race" could be applied to any group of living things that perpetuated itself. In the 18th century, people wrote of the "race of labourers" and the "race of tailors". That's why whenever we see a pre-1940 use of the word "race," we mustn't simply assume that it refers to skin color. When people of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spoke of "racial purity" or "racial improvement," they could have simply meant advances in medical technology for a particular country's citizens. In particular, the full title of Charles Darwin's opus is "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". The "Favoured Races" here pretty much means species, not the kind of "Favoured Races" Hitler was talking about.
  • In modern times, a "race" is any group of people identified by specific physical traits that are deemed socially significant (as opposed to "ethnicity," which goes by cultural traits). With this in mind, race is a cultural construct, a judgment that the observer places on the observed, and not something with any basis in any somatic or genetic interpretation. Any attempts to create a taxonomy for race on the basis of physical appearance fails pretty quickly; after all, how black does one need to be "African," bearing in mind people of similar skin tones live on different continents. Are Indians Asian, with their dark skin and western facial features? The more specific the classification, the more members of that "race" are excluded; the fewer used, the more inaccurate such classifications get.

• Rape means to commit sexual intercourse on a person who either did not legally consent (as in, they said no) or could not legally consent to the act (as in, they were drunk, asleep or too young), or to plunder or raze a country in a violent manner. For centuries the word "rape" commonly meant "take by force" and could be applied to both people and objects (whence came "The Rape of the Sabine Women" and Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock"). People now use rape to describe someone utterly destroying another person in a game, despite the fact that there's no sexual activity involved at all (the usage is entirely figurative here, but still laced with unfortunate connotations). The "plunder and raze" definition, while still correct, is rarely used these days. It's still recognizable, however, in "Rape of Nanjing".

• Reboot often refers to any remake of an old tv series or film franchise. Technically it's only a reboot if the new show starts from the beginning with fresh actors and the story is revamped for modern audiences. If the show is a continuation of the previous series with the old actors returning and the storylines picking up where they left off, that's a revival.

• Regime or Régime simply refers to any state government: the United States (a representative democratic republic) and North Korea (an odd mix of a de facto absolute monarchy, a totalitarian police state, and a pharaonic cult) are both regimes. In general usage, it is now mostly used to refer only to tyrannical, authoritarian, or repressive governments; political scholars have other definitions. In political theory it continues to mean "any form of government", and in international relations, it has come to mean "any political order of any kind, even if it isn't the government of a state" (e.g. "arms-control regime",^note so the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and other treaties together form the "global arms-control regime" "river-management regime",^note e.g. the various interrelated international agencies designed to manage the Danube from various angles: trade, environment, water supply, tourism... "regional security regime",^note For instance, NATO and the various bilateral and multilateral security arrangements between the US, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe together make the North Atlantic/Western European regional security regime etc.) — this latter use of "regime" is the focus of "regime theory," one of the more important movements in international relations since the late 1990s.

• People are not released from hospital, they are discharged. Illness is not a crime!

• A rimshot is a percussion technique where a drummer hits the rim and the head of a snare drum with a drumstick at roughly the same time, slightly altering the sound of the drum stroke. That famous series of drumbeats used to sarcastically punctuate jokes ("Ba-dum-tiss") is technically called a "sting". Granted: when it's used to punctuate a comedian's jokes, a drummer's sting can often contain rimshots—but it often doesn't.

• Robot comes from Czech, originally meaning "forced labour". It got adopted to mean "an autonomous device", and made no comments about their appearance: a mechanical arm in a production line in a factory classifies as a robot. The term has now come to mean any humanoid machine, even though a more apt term might be "mech" or "power armor".

• Sacred, sanctified, and other variations of the word do not mean "good". The term "sacred" has two major accepted meanings by religious scholars, neither of which has the meaning of "good."
  • 1. Set apart, usually in regards to land which is set apart for some special (usually religious, but not always) use and considered to be inviolable. So land set aside for the building of a temple or cemetery is sacred, but technically so is land set aside for a national park. It can also refer to any other thing or belief which is considered inviolable. For example, someone holding their marriage sacred.
  • 2. The spiritual world and everything that exists within it. While the Sacrum does include Heaven and is considered to be a superior and more pure plane of existence, it does also include Hell, Purgatory, and all those who dwell within.
    • Related, profane refers to the non-spiritual, or material world and everything which exists within it — Earth, the Sun, humanity, animals, plants... basically everything which exists within our perceivable reality. It does not mean "evil" or "corrupt" or "blasphemous." The devil and demons are certainly not profane, since as established, they exist within the Sacrum.

• Scrum is derived from the words scrimmage or skirmish which mean something to the general effect of "disorganized fighting". In Rugby a scrum is one of the most organized things that can happen during play. The eight (in Rugby Union: six in Rugby League) forwards from each team bind against each other in an extremely organized fashion and perform a sort of reverse tug of war to contest the possession of the ball. The formation is very organized and players deviating from their position within the scrum will result in penalties. One of the most common things a non-rugby sports commentator likes to say is "that's an old fashioned rugby scrum!" when a play turns into chaos and the players pile up on top of each other. The funny thing is, if they took out "rugby" they'd be accurate as the rugby definition of a scrum deviates from the standard "skirmish" route. It's kind of a double subversion.

• The word Selfish is often used to mean "acting in any way that benefits one's self". While that is correct as an extremely literal definition, most dictionaries note that it usually means being excessively concerned with the self, as well as showing disregard for others, not just doing anything that's even vaguely in one's self-interest.

• Semester is sometimes used for schools that have three terms, such as those in Japan, and western colleges often have an optional summer "semester." Technically, that word refers to a half-year term, and the appropriate word for a 3-term school year would be trimester. However, trimesters have become inextricably associated with the stages of pregnancy, to the point that using that word in any other context would sound odd even if it's technically correct.

• The word sewer, though it depends on how you look at it. Its original use is "conduit" from the Anglo-French word "sewere", got refined to refer to conduits that specifically carry waste, but has since been un-refined (re-expanded?) back to refer to any form of drainage system. In the UK (or at least in England and Wales) 'sewer' denotes a public drain/channel rather than a private one.

• Shall and will, the two auxiliaries used to form the future tense, are not completely interchangeable with each other. The traditional distinction is that to express the plain future, one uses shall with the first person and will with the second and third persons. But to express one's volition, one uses will with the first person and shall with the second and third persons. Thus, "I shall die" is a statement about the speaker's opinion of his fate, whereas "I will die" is a statement about the speaker's determination to die. Another example: "Bob will lose the game" is a statement about the speaker's opinion of whether Bob will win the game, whereas "Bob shall lose the game" is a statement about the speaker's determination to ensure Bob's losing the game.

• Siege is often used in media to mean simply "we're being attacked/invaded." To be under siege is to be surrounded by troops, and cut off from supplies so as to slowly starve until surrender. Unless the person is being surrounded or cut off from supplies, this doesn't really work. This probably originated from the concept of the siege mentality, which is to have such a severe persecution complex that one interprets even the slightest disagreement as unceasing work to destroy the believer and all they stand for, and thus cannot even tolerate the existence of dissenters. This term is metaphorical, based on the fact that the victims of a literal siege would feel this way about their besiegers, who actually were trying to destroy them utterly.

• Socialism refers to an economic system wherein the "means of production" are owned or managed in common, to some degree or other. Communism originally meant "revolutionary socialism" in general, but since Karl Marx's time, it has almost always been used to identify adherents to Marx's theories, or of his and his successors (such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, or Mao).
  • As with all such terms, there's a wide range in how they're used in practice. Policy positions that might be called "socialist" in one country would not be seen that way in another.^note For example, a Canadian-style health care system — where hospitals are privately run, but all people's health insurance is provided by the government — would be considered "socialized medicine" by the standards of the US, but not by the standards of the UK, where hospital employees work directly for a government agency. And any move towards increased common control over any industry could be called a move toward socialism (by its supporters if the term "socialism" is popular, by its opponents if the term is unpopular).
  • The terms are also used differently in specialized areas. In Marxist theory, for example, "communism" refers to the end state of socialism, in which production is so abundant that neither government nor money is needed. "Communist" governments, by their own self-understanding, did not govern "communist" countries, but rather governed socialist countries that (it was believed) would progress towards communism.

• The large majority of sporting industries are also in the business of entertainment. Only in professional wrestling does "sports entertainment" mean someone cares more about entertaining than looking like a sport instead of sporting event people pay to watch.

• A Statute of Limitations is a law which lays down how much time you have to bring a civil action, or for there to be a criminal prosecution. It is not the time period itself. "The statute of limitations is about to expire" is invalid unless the law itself is about to get axed. This confusion, if you can call it that, is likely since the more correct "that is about to expire under the statute of limitations" is rather clunky and carries an unwanted implication that the expiration is intentional, so some style guides might prefer the former while acknowledging the inaccuracy. Indeed, within the legal profession, "the statute of limitations has run/passed" is not only perfectly valid, but is preferred usage (in the US at least) when talking about time-barred actions. (In informal legal usage, lawyers will usually abbreviate it and say the action is SOLed — meaning not only "statute of limitations" but also "shit outta luck.") Statue Of Limitations is simply a spelling error, unless you're talking about a statue that was erected to make a statement about limits or something.

• A Tailor isn't just the Spear Counterpart of a Seamstress, as most people think (that would be a "seamster"). While they both sew garments out of fabric, tailors specifically make garments to suit an individual's specifications (hence the term "tailor-made"), and usually only make formal wear.

• Tempering is a word often used to denote process of making something harder, literally or figuratively (e.g. 'tempering courage in the heat of battle'). Metals and alloys are hardened in the process called hardening and consisting of heating the object to high temperature where the metal is malleable and then quickly quenching it. Tempering is a process or heating in relatively low temperatures (~500 F for steel) for a longer period of time to make the object slightly softer but way less brittle and more elastic.
  • Related to this is the idiom of "losing one's temper", which means that a person has lost some amount of self-control, usually in a fit of anger. However, when someone says "he has a temper" or "he has quite the temper", it's meant to imply that the person frequently "breaks", which is the exact opposite of what the phrase actually means. Saying "he has a bad temper" would be more correct.

• Trap has had its use hotly debated about over the years. Among Anime/Manga consumers, the term originally meant a boy of the Otokonoko Genre variety, i.e. a very convincing crossdressing male. Over time it devolved into simply any male that looks effeminate enough regardless of what clothing he's wearing, or more peculiarly as a derogatory slur/ alternate nickname towards Transgender people. Its Distaff Counterpart term "reverse trap" is treated much the same way, however it also gets used for short haired girls or Tomboys regardless of presentation.

• Triggered is when someone who suffered a traumatic event has said event replay in their minds when something "triggers" that specific memory. While having someone triggered generally does get them upset, it does not apply to people who are simply upset or angry at something that just bothers them, such as getting angry that their takeout order was wrong (though since its original meaning is simply "to set in motion", strictly speaking, you can say that it triggered their anger).

• Tsundere originally was a term created on the Internet to designate a character's personality change over time, usually catalyzed by a love interest. However, the term has been expanded to cover characters that have two distinct personality modes, harsh and sweet, whether or not the character actually changes as the story progresses.
  • Yandere, when used to describe males, is often used to describe any abusive boyfriend. It originally referred specifically to an obsessive love. Anakin Skywalker is a yandere for his obsession with trying to save Padmé, not because he chokes her while Drunk on the Dark Side. It's also misused on females to imply a Psycho Knife Nut or crazy-murderous girls in general, even if love isn't part of the equation (Such as Asakura Ryouko). Meanwhile, cute, innocent, Ax-Crazy women (and sometimes men) are Cute and Psycho, since that does not require an object of affection to be yan over.
  • Kuudere is often thought to mean "Emotionless Girl". It's actually more of a "cool" approach to the tsundere character type. (That is, they may appear to be emotionless, until one gets to know them)

• UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, meaning that there's something moving in the sky, but you're not sure what it is. If it's obvious that said object is an extraterrestrial spacecraft, then it has been identified and no longer qualifies as a UFO. The Bastard Operator from Hell lampshaded this one when it was pointed out that there was an "extortionate penalty payment for remaining at work after a UFO sighting in the vicinity of the building" written into his contract, which he later invokes by asking "is that a 747-200F or a 747-200C?". Though, if you think about it, even calling something a UFO can be considered a form of identification, therefore nothing can be technically considered a UFO.

• Venerable. These days, the word has come to mean "old", but that's not the correct definition. Venerable (literally, "worthy of veneration") refers to something that has achieved respect through age, wisdom or character. So, it's entirely possible for an 18 year old boy to be "venerable" if he shows great character and wisdom, but these days, you'd probably get a funny look from people if you use it as such.
  • The Catholic Church uses the term in its original sense; when they refer to (for example) the "venerable Fulton Sheen", they are saying that they're fairly sure Archbishop Sheen lived a life of heroic virtue (and is therefore worthy of veneration), but they aren't (yet) prepared to say with certainty that Sheen is a saint.

• A warranty is a promise made by a manufacturer that their product will perform as expected and not fail within an X number of years. Therefore, to buy a warranty makes no sense, since an object's lifespan is not going to change just because you paid someone money. What you can buy, however, is a service contract. (This distinction however seems to be going away, since even many big-scale manufacturers use "warranty" is a term for everything.)
  • On this note, some people further make a distinction between a promise and a guarantee in the legal field. A manufacturer has no obligation to honor a promise. It is not legally binding. A guarantee, however, is, so if a manufacturer guarantees their product will work for 5 years, and it fails at 4 years and 364 days, they are legally required to do whatever the contract says in the event it happens.

• White (the common racial term) is one of those words that is universally employed but that nobody has been able to define with total accuracy. If you stopped people on the street and asked them what, exactly, made a person "white", you wouldn't be very successful. Notwithstanding those people who would look at you like you were crazy and hit you with a Mathematician's Answer ("You're 'white' if you're a white person!"), you'd be bound to get one of three common "definitions", each of which is fallacious.
  • Most people would probably say "a person with light skin." Really? That will come as a shock to the many Japanese, Koreans, North Chinese, and Tungus and Manchu peoples who sometimes turn up fairer-skinned than most Europeans. And how, then, do you explain the light-complexioned Arabs (who, having Semitic features, are technically of African stock) of the more northerly parts of the Middle East? Or albinos, who can be of any race but are always lacking pigmentation?
  • Those who respond in a more pedantic way might say "a person displaying Caucasoid facial features instead of Mongoloid ^note  here meaning "looking like a Mongolian", not "suffering from Down's Syndrome" or Negroid ones." Trouble is, that category would include most of the indigenous peoples of India, who are typically light-red- or brown-skinned, and in the tropical south can have complexions as black as the night. And then, on the other hand, you have light-to-medium-colored Ashkenazi Jews with their decidedly un-Aryan "hooked noses"; or part-Cherokee American "whites", who display the telltale Amerindian curling incisors and elevated cheekbones.
  • People for whom "white = European" would probably respond with something along the lines of "a member of any ethnic group claiming political representation or national sovereignty in Europe." Okay...but Eurasia is tectonically one big continent, so where do Europeans start becoming Asians? Historically, Eastern Europe has been said to end at the Ural Mountains in the north, in the Caucasus region (just beyond Ukraine) in the center, and at the Strait of Bosporus in Turkey in the south; but people's physical features do not automatically shift at these borders. And even within the generally accepted boundaries of Europe, what about the Finns, Lapps ^note politically-correct term: Sami, Estonians, and Hungarians — all of them Uralic peoples, and thus of Asian origin (and occasionally displaying subtle Asian facial markers), and in fact were at one time prohibited from living in certain neighborhoods in the United States because they were deemed not white? What about the Romani, who are usually considered nonwhite but were living as naturalized Europeans long before the modern borders of their host countries were set? What about Bulgarians, who are genetically half-Turkish? And on and on and on...
  • For all of the above reasons, modern-day anthropologists tend to avoid using the word "white" unless it is spoken or written with caveats, preferring the much less racialist terms "European" or (for North Americans and Australasians) "Neo-European." Otherwise, they would have to constantly waste time explaining "whiteness" with the convoluted definition of "light-skinned people genetically linked to the westernmost part of Eurasia who are not Uralic, Roma, Bulgarian, etc."
• A Pitched Battle originally merely meant any battle where both sides agree where to fight it, and still does in a strictly military context. These days it can also mean any battle that is fierce or even metaphorically used for any intense struggle.

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