Commonly Misused Words / Very Pedantic

Many of the "common" usages here have become accepted definitions of the words listed. Do not treat a definition as incorrect simply because it is listed here.

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• Accuracy and precision are not the same thing. "Accuracy" is how close to the target one is, "precision" is how close together one's shots are. If one were to shoot at a circular target and all of the shots hit the outermost ring, but are grouped very closely together, then one is very precise but not very accurate.
  • Similarly, accuracy and precision are often confused when describing the merits of a firearm — they are often described as accurate when the correct word would be precise. Only a human operator can make the firearm accurate; a firearm is precise when it can consistently place shots in a predictable location.
  • The distinction is extremely important in the hard sciences: precision is the specificity of a measurement (in practice, the number of decimal places in the value), while accuracy is the degree to which it is correct. To claim that a kilogram of iron has a mass of 70.0000000000000000000000000000001 grams is very precise, and not at all accurate.
• An acronym is a type of initialism which forms a pronounceable word, such as "laser" (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), or "amphetamine" (alpha-methyl-phenethylamine).^note An initialism does not need to be composed entirely of initials; it can contain word fragments or whole words. See The Other Wiki for more information. This distinction is commonly ignored; The BBC and The Guardian are just two mainstream media outlets who are happy to use "acronym" as though it were synonymous with "initialism".
• This one is probably a lost cause, but Adorable technically means "deserving of adoration" rather than just being a stronger word for cute. Most dictionaries still include this as a definition, but notes that using it to mean "cute" is a lot more common.
• Ago means earlier than the present time, not earlier than a more-recent past time. It is commonly misused in contexts where "earlier" or "prior" would be more appropriate.
• Akimbo: The word "akimbo" means "bowed" or "bent", and is most often used for arms bent with hands resting on hips. Perhaps because this pose is often used by two-pistoled gunfighters in media, the word is sometimes mistakenly applied to any situation in which someone has a matched pair of weapons in his hands. The name of the trope Guns Akimbo features this mistake, though that's just following the terminology that had already become commonplace by the time we had a page for it.^note It's likely 1997's Blood which was the first to use the word 'akimbo' in the context of "using one gun in each hand". A noted example of the correct meaning is a one-time Freakazoid! villain named Arms Akimbo, whose arms are permanently stuck in place, hands on his hips.
• An alicorn is the horn of a unicorn, or to be more specific, the substance from which the horn is made. It was believed to have healing powers as early as the 13th century. However, starting with the novels of Piers Anthony (and popularized even further by the massive Periphery Demographic of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic), it has come to mean "Winged Unicorn".
  • This leads to an interesting false etymology: ali- is an existing but uncommon Latin prefix for "wing", in addition to the better-known -corn meaning "horn".
• Alien used to refer to anyone or anything not native to a country. For example, a Mexican in America could be called an alien. Hence the phrase "outer space alien", meaning the being isn't native to Earth. However, the meaning has been muddled up over the years, so that whenever you mention the term "alien" people will automatically think of the outer space kind, and will give you very strange looks when you call a Mexican an "alien" (unless you add "illegal"). Government documents will use "alien" in the proper use of the word, however (such that, for instance, an Uryuom with U.S. citizenship would not be an alien in the eyes of the U.S. government).
• An android is something 'man-like', not necessarily a robot. A shop mannequin is an android, and so would be a hobbit. In some works of Speculative Fiction it means "humanoid robot", in others "robot that resembles a human", in yet others "organic Artificial Human". Androids should also not be confused with cyborgs: androids are completely inhuman, whereas a cyborg is at least partly human (or, in science fiction, partly alien).
  • For that matter, the first use of the word "robot" was in R.U.R.. The robots in the play were organic constructs, not mechanical ones that are often pictured when the word is used. (Specifically, robot is the Czech word for "slave", and the original concept of robots was that they were like slaves in that they were sentient beings working for humans, except they were artificial.)
  • The proper term for a female human-like robot is gynoid — "woman-like". In this sense, the words are still used in context of obesity.
  • While the word 'Gynoid' can be used when it is desired to refer specifically to robots resembling females, the word 'Android', depending on the Greek root word used, refers to 'man' in the same way English does, that being simultaneously to both a male person and humankind as a whole. Thus, a gynoid is technically still an android...
• Anal, by itself, technically just means "relating to the anus". While it's often used as a shortening of Anal retentive (stuck up or nitpicky), this is considered slang and not a "proper" definition.
• Anniversary, means a celebration of one year, the root word annus (note the two n) being Latin for "year". However, it's used commonly by young people to refer to any time together from weeks to months to years (A celebration of a month would be a "mensiversary", but that's a highly archaic term). On another note, it's also quite common to disregard "celebration" as part of the word's definition — which could resort in some discomfort when one mentions "the anniversary of 9/11", to say the least.
• The arm technically lies solely between the shoulder joint and the elbow joint. Similarly, the leg lies between the knee joint and the ankle joint. They are parts of the upper and lower extremities, respectively.
• Armageddon and Apocalypse are not the same thing. Apocalypse, literally, simply means "revelation", but since the biblical Book of Revelation (also known as the Apocalypse of John) is mostly concerned with the end of the world, that is what "apocalypse" has come to mean. Armageddon, on the other hand, means "the mountain of Megiddo", where the final battle between good and evil will take place according to the Book of Revelation. The correct fancy word to use when discussing The End of the World as We Know It is eschaton (the branch of theology concerning itself with the end times is hence called eschatology).
• Artificial originally meant "full of skilled artifice" (i.e. constructed expertly), rather than just "something constructed by humans in imitation of something natural".
• Aryan was originally a Sanskrit word associated with India, meaning "noble" or "civilized". The Nazis, unfortunately, used it as their word for racial purity, and in modern times, it is now associated with them and white supremacy.
• When a person is cremated, what their relatives get back are not ashes, strictly speaking. Ashes are the remains of incompletely-consumed combustible material; what is returned to the family following a cremation are the ashes and pulverized fragments of incompletely combusted bones. The word "cremains", a portmanteau of "cremated remains", is sometimes used.
• The phrase as such needs a precedent noun. "I am an adult citizen of this republic and as such have the right to vote in its elections": "such" means "such a person", i.e. "an adult citizen". "As such" is not a fancy synonym for "thus" or "therefore".
• If one is being extremely literal an Audience means a group of people listening to a given thing (as it comes from the same root as "audio"). If it's in a visual medium, they should instead be called viewers. The Latin equivalent would be something like "Vidience", but that's not a word.
• The word average came from the French word for a damaged ship or shipment, avarie. This was anglicized into average during the colonization of the Americas, when there was a lot of English-to-French trade. Every time a shipment was damaged, they would calculate the total amount each person would have to pay by splitting the total up into equal pieces. Taking an average eventually moved from "splitting a sum up into equal parts" to "the most equal division of a certain sum", which is its modern definition. You can see a bit of this old influence in the mathematical average calculation, which still involves adding things up and then dividing them.
  • In statistics, "average" then started to be used for other types of calculations meant to find the "most typical" data point in a set. The original type of average, the one determined by adding up the data points and dividing it into equal parts, is known as the "mean", while the median, mode, and mid-range are other calculations that produce a result that is often different from the mean.
• The word awful used to mean "deserving of awe" (i.e. "awe-full"), and was originally a good thing to call something. In modern times, the word "awesome" has suffered the same fate, having the same meaning as "awful" originally did (i.e. something that is deserving of awe, something that people are awed by), but nowadays it is frequently used to mean "impressive", "cool" or just "really good".
• Begging the question is the logical fallacy of starting an argument by assuming what you want to prove. The phrase is far more often used to mean what is properly called raising the question, which is just a natural result of not all information being at hand to answer a question.
• The scientific definition of a berry concerns how a fruit stores its seeds. Under this definition, grapes and tomatoes are berries, but strawberries and raspberries are "aggregate fruits".
• Bestiality is any sexual act considered "bestial", including incest or sodomy. Sexual attraction to animals specifically is zoophilia.
  • Also note that "bestiality" refers to an act, while "zoophilia" refers to an attraction on which one may or may not act (that said, an act may be a requirement of formal psychological diagnosis). Partly because many humans experience sexual attraction as a powerful compulsion, people tend to conflate attraction and action, but they are distinct (see similar notes for "pedophilia" below).
  • "Sodomy" itself is a very vague term, as it's not exactly clear what the "sin of Sodom" originally was. (In The Bible Sodom is associated with a number of sins, some of them non-sexual, such as inhospitality and cruelty to the poor.) Nowadays the term is commonly understood to mean "anal intercourse", but in law, it can mean a variety of purportedly deviant practices.
  • Same goes for the word 'buggery', which had originally meant "heretic". Its meaning and usage changed to be synonymous with 'sodomy'.
• Big Ben is the name of the bell at the top of the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster in London. The tower itself was simply known as the Clock Tower until 2012^note some old sources call it "St Stephen's Tower", but this is more often than not a confusion with the Palace of Westminister's public entrance, when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower for Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, not Big Ben.
• A bigot isn't a racist or sexist or any other kind of "hater" you can think of. In fact, a bigot doesn't judge people at all — or at least not their intrinsic natures. When the word first became common during the 18th-century Enlightenment, it was used to mean someone who wouldn't tolerate other people's opinions — particularly a person's religious beliefs, or lack thereof. The play Inherit the Wind uses the word in its original sense frequently. It was probably the TV series All in the Family that was most responsible for shifting the definition of bigot all the way to "hater".
• Bishōnen (美少年^hiraganaびしょうねん) is only supposed to mean androgynously attractive underaged (specifically, under 18) males — a bishōnen is, after all, by definition a shōnen or teenage boy — with 美男子^hiraganaびだんし^romajibidanshi addressing of-age examples. Of course, outside Japan, very few care about this distinction, and bishōnen is the blanket term for any prettyboy character.
• Black and white images contain shades of grey. The technical term in the image-processing business is greyscale, with "black and white" referring to images that have been reduced simply to those two colours, such as the images in many newspapers.
• The meaning of boat is highly variable. On the Great Lakes, any vessel that floats on the surface of the water is a boat — from the smallest rowboat to the largest thousand-footer. Visiting oceanic vessels are called "salties". Also, in naval use, a boat is any watercraft small enough to be taken aboard a larger ship. The use of "boat" for a submarine — the largest of which are the size of old battleships — comes from the origin of the type: when military submarines started appearing in numbers in the late 1800s, they were classified as "submarine torpedo boats" — i.e. underwater torpedo boats.
  • Related to the submarine example, any ship or craft regardless of size that uses only one weapon or one system is sometimes called a [weapon name] boat. For example, a craft that has nothing but missiles for weapons may be called a missile boat.
• Technically, the proper idiom for being highly eager to commence is champing at the bit, not chomping at the bit. Champing at the bit is an equine reference when horses to chew on the bit when the animal is impatient or eager. Horses do chomp at the bit sometimes, but for entirely different reasons, usually when they're upset or angry. However, thanks to the verb "to champ" being archaic these days, people interchange "chomp" for "champ".
• To chastise isn't to tell someone off; it's to administer Corporal Punishment. Castigate is the same.
• Chauvinism originally meant extreme patriotism and nationalism, and the belief in one nation's superiority over others. It has since evolved to mean a belief in the superiority of a specific group of people (not necessarily a nation) over other groups. One example of such is male chauvinism, which is probably the most common meaning today. The term is also often confused with sexism, which is prejudice and discrimination based on sex.
• A Commoner is just a person who isn't nobility or royalty, they don't have to be poor. Thus, most billionaires are technically commoners.
• Computer originally comes from the verb "to compute", which means to calculate. In the early 20th century, people who calculated the exact time were called computers. The meaning the word has today is derived from this, as computers were originally built to calculate mathematical equations. On the lowest level, that's all a computer does, even today. Browsing the Web, playing an ego shooter, or writing texts in a word processor ultimately amounts to nothing but basic mathematics plus the copying of data — plus conditional jumps, which again amount to the calculation of an address, and setting some data accordingly. On top of that, it's layers upon layers of abstraction.
  • In the 19th century, the words "computer" and "calculator" were used interchangeably to designate the people — generally women — who did the number-crunching behind the hard sciences.
• Conscious/self-conscious: "Self-conscious" typically means "unduly conscious that one is observed by others" where "conscious" is taken to mean "immediately aware of". Less commonly, they are both used to mean "self-awareness" and things to that general effect.
• Conservative should not be used to describe someone who is opposed to change of any sort, let alone somebody who wants to turn the clock back to an earlier era. That is a reactionary, and such people are actually quite rare^note outside the Internet, of course. A conservative merely argues that things should not be changed if it is not absolutely necessary to do so, or that change should come as gradually as possible. Many conservatives in the past have been willing to accept economic reform (and, to a lesser extent, social reform) as long as the cultural norms of civilization itself were left untouched.
  • "Conservative" and "liberal" have come to mean very different things than when the terms were more or less established in the French revolution; les conservateurs were those opposed to the social ideals of the revolution and wanted to "conserve" the monarchy — and, incidentally, sat on the right wing of the French parliamentary chamber — while les libéraux were those intent on "liberating" the people from monarchic rule. In the past few decades, conservatives have been more about binding personal liberties ("conserving" the social order) while disengaging the state from the economy ("liberating" people — in theory, anyway — from rulership), while the liberal side of the equation seems to maintain its intent to open up social freedoms while maintaining (or even increasing) the role of the state in the economy. This is the problem with defining a multi-dimensional question on a simple left/right axis. Political theorist David Nolan (creator of the Nolan chart, which corrects for the inconsistencies of the left/right axis) has suggested that populist be substituted for what most Americans refer to as liberal - fitting, since American liberalism is usually thought to have split into its "classical" and "modern" wings in the 1890s, when the Democratic party (cautiously) co-opted the People's (or "Populist") party in order to blunt the accusation from socialists and others that they were no different from the Republican party.
    • ''Classical'' liberalism, interestingly, is a political philosophy in which the freedom of the individual person is prized over all other ideals — however, the freedom of any individual stops at the point where it begins to infringe upon the freedom of other individuals ("liberal" still has this sense in mainland Europe; in North America "libertarian" is closer, though not quite synonymous). How this intersects with the modern Anglosphere's liberal paradigm, which favors increasing safety regulations (up to and including seat-belt laws), is an interesting question.
    • It gets even more complicated, because "conservatism" also is often used in philosophy as a description of behaviour based on some non-negotiable principles or values and thus it is more a opposition of "opportunism" or "pragmatism". The values may be of any kind, so it is completely possible to be a "conservative liberal" (this is the description actually used by at least several European libertarian parties) if one considers liberty to be a non-negotiable value. In this vein, a conservative liberal will vote in favour of any solution that maintains liberty at the cost of safety, while conservative securitarian may be eager to forfeit freedom to increase security. The name "conservative" comes from the fact that such people did not wanted to change their values but rather tried to find new applications for them.
  • Intertwined with the above controversy is the common blurring of the line between society and culture. The "social" structure is just that - a structure, an artificial construct created by humans to preserve law and order according to an arbitrary standard; whereas "culture" is more organic, more universal (at least in theory), and primarily concerned with anything humans do that is not necessary for survival (religion, art, entertainment). One can be both culturally liberal in believing that artists have the right to create pornography and socially conservative in insisting that that pornography never be distributed to - let alone involve - children. Similarly, one can be culturally conservative by remaining a good Christian or Jew or Buddhist, but socially liberal if those religious beliefs lead one to oppose the status quo in the name of a higher standard of justice (anti-discrimination protesters, for instance).
• Crescendo is the process of getting louder, or greater in some other way, not a rise on pitch, or to the peak reached at the end of that process. So something can't “reach a crescendo”—well, it can, but that would mean the point where things start to get more intense—much less “build to a crescendo”. The word you're probably looking for is climax (although pedants would point out that "climax" is Greek for ladder, and originally meant something similar to "crescendo". A pedant might recommend "apex", "acme", "pinnacle" or "zenith" instead.) Jamie Bernstein has suggested that the word is misused this way "because the sound of the word so felicitously evokes the crashing of cymbals: 'the crash at the end-o.'"
• Crucifix is a depiction of a crucified Christ (hence the name), usually sculpted (but also painted or engraved). The cross without the depiction of Christ is not a crucifix, but simply a 'cross'.
• Cryogenics is the study of very low temperatures; the preservation of living tissue at such temperatures is accurately called cryonics.
• Culture Shock was originally a term describing a situation where either two cultures with vastly different levels of technology meet, or an isolated culture is exposed to a much larger community (for instance, humanity making contact with another alien species for the first time, or Japan's centuries of isolationism under the Tokugawa Shogunate ending) For instance, the Native Americans meeting the New World explorers and later pioneers is a valid case of culture shock. This is also the term that was used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to describe why the US Government kept the knowledge of the Monolith secret at first. The much more mundane meaning of the word (an individual adjusting to life in a different culture) has completely replaced the original meaning of the word.
• Cutpurse is, today, used in fantasy as a synonym for either "pickpocket" or "mugger". In fact, a cutpurse is neither. A purse, in this context, is a small pouch, hung from a belt, which would normally hold coins or valuables. A cutpurse would cut the strings or straps attaching the purse to the belt, and take the entire purse. Alternatively, a cutpurse would cut the bottom of the purse open and steal the contents that way. A pickpocket, (called a "dip" in medieval times) would take objects out of the purse without tampering with it, and a mugger would threaten or beat the victim until he handed over the purse.
  • Modern cutpurses still exist. They are thieves who remove items from pocket by making a slice under the object like wallet (specially one worn in the inner pocket) and allowing the gravity to help them in the task.
• Datum: Originally, "data" was a plural count noun referring to multiple items of recorded information. A single such item was a datum. However, sometime in the 1960s or so (basically, concurrent with the rise of computers) the usage shifted so that "data" is a mass noun. So now it's much more common to say "the data is" and "this data point is" rather than "the data are" and "this datum is". Many modern style guides not only accept but mandate this usage. Nonetheless, it still drives some people up a wall.
  • It doesn't help of course that "datum" is now generally used to describe not just any old "data point" but a specific reference point, depriving data of its singular and making this a bit of a lost battle.
  • The word media also is starting to show signs of abuse (e.g., "removable media" for a single CD-ROM). If you really want shocking, however, look no further than French, where "media" (as in newspapers) is now most commonly used as the singular and "medias" as its plural—and that's in a so-called Latin language.
  • The word “agenda” was similarly originally plural (“things that are to be done”). This usage did not last long.
• Deadly sins: Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath are, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the "seven cardinal vices". The term "deadly sin" or "mortal sin" refers to any sin that is serious enough to separate a Christian from the grace of God, unless the sinner undergoes the sacrament of reconciliation (confession, penance, and absolution). According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Cardinal Vices are contrasted with the Cardinal Virtues, and refers to character traits that are the root of all sin. For instance, one does not murder simply for murder's sake, but because Wrath was awakened when the person was wronged, or because Greed was awakened when the person saw an opportunity to get money, etc.
• Decadent is sometimes thought to mean "luxurious". It actually means "falling into an inferior condition" (sharing its roots with "decay"), and is nearly synonymous with "degenerate". The common conception is perhaps given to us through the image of the "decadently" wealthy in some common ideas and some historical examples, which doesn't refer to a lavish lifestyle that we would expect, but probably the sort of mentality that encourages inbreeding and jealous paranoia.
• Decimate comes from the Latin decimō, -āre, which means "to take a tenth part of something". Decimation was the Roman practice of executing one of every ten men in a rebellious or cowardly legion. The word also referred to the practice of tithing. However, it has been used since the 19th century to mean "destroy a large part of", no matter what proportion of a group was devastated. This is now by far the most common way the word is used, but some still object to the loss of the original meaning.
  • Actors may complain their agents decimate their salary — and would be technically correct!
  • A BBC game show called Decimate aired in 2015 and used the word in the sense of "reduce by one tenth" (in this instance, reducing the prize fund by that proportion). It didn't result in a revival of that sense though, as just about the only praise, or in fact notice of any kind, that the show got was from the handful of pedants pleased that it used the word correctly.
• Demon is a catch-all term for any supernatural living being, with no implication of benevolence or malevolence. The term gained a negative connotation starting with the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible, and is now colloquially used to refer to evil spirits or fallen angels.
• Despot (Greek δεσπότης^romanizationdespótēs, meaning "master"; feminine: δέσποινα^romanizationdéspoina) was a court title of the Byzantine empire, roughly meaning "lord." A despot was given control of a smaller region of the empire, called a despotate. It was only when American revolutionaries said that the British were ruling them as they would an imperial outpost that "despotism" and "despot" came to be pejorative. Despotism was also associated with absolute authority before it became associated with unjust authority. See also "Dictator" and "Tyrant".
• Destiny was generally defined as an inevitable, unalterable future event, equivalent to the current definition of "fate". Language has shifted enough such that it is now more generally known, even in many dictionaries, as a generalized word for forthcoming events, making phrases such as "changing one's destiny" retroactively correct.
  • Doom is another word for "destiny" or "fate". It doesn't have to be bad.
    • And Doomsday is referring to judgement, not to destruction. (See William The Conquerer's "Domesday Book", which was basically a census of his new realm.)
• Dictator was originally someone who wielded absolute power in Ancient Rome at the behest of the Senate in times of emergency, and his time in office was restricted to six months, until the next election; one may not have liked the particular dictator in question, but the office itself wasn't a bad thing compared to the emergency under which it arose (and in the Republic, the Romans did not like kings). Only when Caesar became dictator for life did some republicans begin to resent it, and even up to millennia later, in the 19th and early 20th centuries (when democratic ideals were still taking root in much of the Western world), it wasn't necessarily a bad title compared to, say, hereditary absolute monarchy. Essentially, the modern usage of the term focuses on the "taking power and ruling absolutely" part of the definition, ignoring the part about said rule being limited and temporary. See also "Despot" and "Tyrant".
• A dilapidated building or object is one in a state of disrepair because of age or neglect. A few pedants insist that only a stone building can be dilapidated as the word comes from the Latin lapis, "stone". During The Dung Ages especially folks would often take stones from old buildings to build or repair their walls.
• Dilemma involves a choice between two options, neither of which is desirable. A common misuse of this word is to refer to any difficult situation. Terms like trilemma and so on have been used for situations involving a choice between three options.
• Dimension: A "dimension" is technically just a set of directions, of which we have three in space (up/down, left/right, and forward/back, relative to the observer). Above three, things get more theoretical, with time being one proposed fourth dimension, and others being extrapolations based on the first three (i.e., the fourth dimension being orthogonal to the first three). However, the word "dimension" is commonly used for an Alternate Universe, in the sense of a place where the physical laws are entirely different from those in a place you could reach by traveling along another spatial dimension. See also: Another Dimension. This is only very slightly less pedantic than "universe".
  • It means rather something more similar to "degree of freedom". If a world has 9 dimensions, I can move a point in 18 independent directions; if a vector space has 9 dimensions, I can have 9 linear independent vectors. The problem with a word set is that cardinality of set is described by cardinal number (0, 1, 2, ... + various infinities) while there are branches of mathematics when you meet 2.5-dimensional objects.^note And not in the sense of 2½D, mind you.
  • This is actually a contraction for "another set of dimensions". That is, a location which has up/down, left/right and forward/back axes, but where those are entirely unrelated to the set of dimensions bearing those directional indicators commonly experienced. One could use "parallel universe" to mean the same thing (but see above). The implication is that physical laws are the same (which they need not be in a multiverse) but the spatial dimensions are unconnected to the ones we experience. A related phenomenon would be people referring to the first three dimensions as simply "the third dimension"; it implies the existence of the other two.
  • The malapropism is sort of a half-understood thing. People that actually understand what they're writing about generally refer to other "planes of existence" that are displaced in some other dimension, which is related to the multiverse idea above but posits that other realities are simply displaced in a dimension we don't normally move along and can, in fact, interact.
• Due is an adjective, and needs a noun to modify. In the sentence "There is chaos due to misunderstandings," "due" modifies "chaos", not the whole clause "there is chaos". Thus, some of hyper-pedants would prefer that "due to" not be used in place of "because of".
• Eau Rouge, strictly speaking, refers only to the fast left-hander at bottom of the hill at the famous Spa-Francochamps circuit. The equally famous right-hander at the top of the hill that immediately follows it that's sometimes also called Eau Rouge? That's Raidillon, actually. The entire circuit has a mish-mash of confusing corner names, which the official Formula One YouTube helpfully has a primer on.
• Ego^note simply means "I" in Latin, when used alongside terms like id, is often assumed to be its opposite. In fact, according to Sigmund Freud, the counterpart to "id" (basically, all your instincts and raw desires) is the superego (the critical, moral part of the mind). The "ego" acts as the mediator between the two, bringing Real Life into the mix. Crossword puzzles appear to be the most likely culprits here. The Freudian Trio uses the three in the original definition.
• Eke out. If Jane Austen says "the vicar ekes out a meager living by beekeeping", she doesn't mean he lives on nothing but the pittance that the bees bring him, she means the beekeeping supplements his inadequate stipend. ("Eke" is still occasionally used to mean "also".)
  • A "nickname" was originally an "eke name", meaning an additional name.
• Electricity refers only to a "quantity of electricity", that is, an electric charge. It does not refer to anything which can take the adjective "electric", such as electromagnetic radiation (which is what most people mean when they say "electricity") electric energy, or electronics. It has gotten to the point where physicists no longer use the term "electricity" in scientific publications, because the colloquial usage is ambiguous, although they still use "electric" and "electrical" as adjectives (e.g.: that which we most commonly call "electricity," powering our light bulbs and computers and everything in between, is called "electric[al] current").
  • In fact, the word "Electric" comes from the old Greek word for amber, a homage to the fact that the first known way to generate elecricity was to rub amber on a woolen cloth. Eventually, people just adopted it as the word for electromagnetic radiation.
• An Epiphany technically means the manifestation of something supernatural (such as magic, gods, etc). The current meaning of "a sudden realization or flash of insight" is fairly modern, although most dictionaries accept it as a secondary definition.
  • Somewhat surprisingly, the game Blood uses it the "right" way: the final level is called "The Hall Of Epiphanies" and is where you fight Tchernobog.
• Most people think Epitome means the "perfect" example of something. Calling for example, a villain "the epitome of evil." It really just means a typical example of something, not the most extreme example. On a side note, it's pronounced "epit-oa-mee", not "epit-oam".
• Erotic had roughly the same connotations as "romantic" for much of the history of its usage: it's derived from eros, which is one of several Greek words that can be translated as "love"—but specifically referring to the bonds between intimate partners, contrasted with philia (affectionate friendship between equals) and agape (selfless and unconditional compassion). Classicists generally agree that the Ancient Greek concept of eros had an emotional component as well as a sexual component, which is how many people experience romantic love. In its contemporary usage, however, the adjective "erotic" more-or-less exclusively describes sexual appeal, while "romantic" (in the context of intimate relationships) more often refers to emotional attraction; it's generally accepted today that erotic and romantic feelings can exist separately from one another, which is why asexual people can still experience romantic attraction. For example: a person might find a photograph "erotic" even if it's a picture of a complete stranger.
• Exception: For that matter, asking an official to "make an exception" for you is a misnomer because exceptions are already written into the law itself. However, the one enforcing it may make a derogation for you, and is sometimes legally empowered to do so.
• Strictly speaking extra means "outside of", not "on top of" or "more of it". This is why "extraordinary" makes sense. "Extralegal" means outside the realm of legality (i.e. illegal), not something that is especially legal over and above the usual definition. "Extraterrestrial" (outside of Earth; from another planet) is probably most recognizable by the majority of people in its correct meaning thanks to Steven Spielberg's film.
• An extravaganza is a literary or musical work (often musical theatre) characterized by freedom of style and structure and usually containing elements of burlesque, pantomime, music hall and parody. It may more broadly refer to an elaborate, spectacular, and expensive theatrical production. It is not a party, however lavish the party may be.

• Fantastic, most commonly used to mean "great" or "cool", literally means "the stuff of fantasy". Thus, Mordor is every bit as "fantastic" as Rivendell. Its change from original meaning to the current usage came about the same way as "incredible" and "unbelievable" came to mean something like "amazing". Interestingly enough, the Coolio song "Fantastic Voyage" uses the word in its classical sense, as do some of our Speculative Fiction Tropes.
  • Fabulous ("the stuff of fables") is very similar, although nowadays its meaning has shifted again to have homoerotic undertones.
• People often use the terms First World, Second World and Third World as though they refer specifically to levels of development. This is not quite correct. The terms were originally coined during the Cold War to describe the three main geopolitical alignments of the time — that is to say, America and its allies (the First World), the Communist nations (the Second World) and those aligned with neither (the Third World). Admittedly, the Third World had from the very beginning connotations of low development and high poverty, whilst the eventual triumph of capitalism over communism as an economic system led to (generally) higher standards of living in the First World than in the Second World, but it should be remembered that these factors were coincidental, not definitive, and arguably, since the end of the Cold War, all three have become defunct, even though they're still used for more euphemistic equivalents of terms like GEDC and LEDC (Greater and Lesser Economically Developed Country, respectively).
  • The first usage of the term Third World was a direct reference to the "third state" (tiers état) of France before the revolution, with the idea being that it was a group of countries that had no voice in international decisions concerning them. The author didn't coin the terms "First World" or "Second World" though, given that they would have made little sense in the analogy. (The staunchly antitheistic U.S.S.R. was the religious class?) As such, it does not refer to underdeveloped countries or countries with low standards of living, but states with limited geopolitical clout, and therefore states like Lithuania and Peru fill the bill, whilst Egypt and India do not.
  • For the uncertain, the currently favored terminology is (Global) North and (Global) South, with the South being the less-developed countries, and the North being the others. It's not a strict division along geographic lines: Australia and South Korea are firmly in the North, whilst China and North Korea are in the South.
• Flame is not a synonym for fire. "Fire" refers to the entire chemical reaction, the visible part of which is called the flame.
• Football, despite what some people say, is a perfectly legitimate name for American football, not just the international name for what Americans call soccer. Those sports are not called football because a ball is kicked around with the feet, but because they're played on foot (as opposed to, say, polo, which is played on horseback).
  • To elaborate, in the 19th century, kids played their own versions of football however they felt like it. But soon after, there was a call in England for standardizing the rules of football, which of course led to lots of arguing. In the end the arguers settled on two games: rugby football and association football, which Americans call soccer. Not long after, other organized sports based on these two as well as others were formed (Australian Rules Football, American Football, Gaelic Football, etc.—many of which are either derivatives or hybrids of rugby and association football) and all of these "football" sports have since gained a foothold in sports culture. Of course, since there are quite a few sports that claim the name football, many of these arguments continue on to this very day.
  • It also should be mentioned that the British called it soccer first. (No really, it's true.)
• The original meaning of fornication is "to engage in consensual sexual acts with a person who is not your spouse". In modern usage, the term is often used to describe any form of sex deemed abhorrent by a religious group, such as adultery, homosexuality, bigamy, or various other actions viewed as taboo, something that can vary greatly among cultural lines.
• To frag someone originally meant to kill someone on your own team. The term originated in the Vietnam War, where it was a term for unpopular soldiers being killed by their fellows (often with a fragmentation grenade, hence the name). The term was later picked up by the Deathmatch mode in Doom, where it popularized and shifted the definition over time towards "First-Person Shooter jargon for a player kill".
• Frozen refers to a substance in the solid phase of matter. It does not have to do with cold temperatures. A rock is frozen, unless of course it is lava. Liquid nitrogen, on the other hand, is not frozen, despite the fact that it is cold. Freezing is the inverse process of melting, so dry ice is not frozen either. It is deposited carbon dioxide. Similarly, boiling just means that a substance in in the gaseous phase. Air is boiling, unless it is in a Dewar flask at cryogenic temperatures. Lava is not.^note Nor is magma, which is what molten rock is called when it is underground. You probably knew that one, though. As boiling is the inverse process of condensation, neither is carbon dioxide. It is sublimated. Evaporation refers specifically to vaporization occurring below a substance's boiling point.
  • The temperatures at which these changes happen are called "melting point" and "boiling point", regardless of which direction the phase change is going in. Water freezes at its melting point.
  • In the original meaning of the term freeze meant to burn like burning coals. Technically anything that is frozen is burned either by fire, by the friction in wind, by chemicals or by cold.
• There is some debate regarding the origin of the word ghetto, with one theory saying that it originated from the Venetian Ghetto. At one point in history, it referred the part of Venice where Jews were allowed to reside. It has expanded to mean any slum that is dominated by a single ethnic group. By the 1950s, the term was mostly used in the US to mean poor black neighborhoods. And, of course, the original ghettoes were what many Americans would call "suburbs" nowadays (as, indeed, they still are in Europe), whereas the typical American ghetto now is located in the "inner city."
  • If you're interested: the word was first used in Venice, apparently about 1516. It may be short for borghetto, a diminutive of borgo (related to English borough and German Burg) meaning 'walled city'; but dictionaries say 'origin obscure'.
    • Incidentally Venice has a large segment — separated from the bulk of the city by a wide channel — with the suggestive name Giudecca because it was arguably the original Jewish quarter of the city (However, Jews were allowed to live in any area of the city before 1516). When it got fashionable among Venetian noble families to build their residence there, the Jews had to be relocated to the location of the present-day Ghetto, where a foundry the name probably came from (Venetian gheto= slag) once stood.
• Glyphs and runes are not interchangable. A set of runes compose an alphabet with each standing for a single letter; glyphs are pictograms that correspond to an entire word. In other words, it would likely take several runes to convey the same idea that a single glyph could.
• The meaning of the term gossip has shifted considerably over time, now generally meaning "Idle chatter or conversation involving unconfirmed news or rumors", or a person who habitually engages in the same. While it has somewhat judgmental connotations today, it was originally a fairly neutral term, meaning "A close friend or acquaintance". In fact, it started out as a corruption of the Old English term "godsibb", meaning "A family member to whom one is related in God" (e.g. "godmother" or "godfather").^note  The modern word "sibling" evolved similarly; it started out as a diminutive form of the Old English "sibb" or "sib" (meaning "family member"), indicating a family member who was younger than a parent or aunt or uncle. The meaning likely evolved when people began using the word to refer to the sort of friendly chitchat that one typically enjoys with close acquaintances, since "gossip" usually implies a greater degree of familiarity or intimacy than other forms of conversation.
• Ever since Dashiell Hammett used gunsel to subvert the Hays Code, countless crime writers have used it to mean "gunman". Good luck with finding a straight use of the original meaning — a submissive male homosexual — these days. And, for that matter, "hired gun" originally referred to any sort of criminal, not just an assassin, and the "gun" part came from the Yiddish ganef ("thief"). Furthermore, "gun moll", a combination of the previous word and Molly, the stereotypical name for an Irish woman, originally meant not "lady with a gun", but "lady who hung out with thieves."
• For the load-bearing properties of something, hard, strong and tough have specific seperate meanings. "Strong" objects resist a change in their shape, whereas "tough" objects resist breakage and fracturing. Glass is strong - just try and bend a window pane -, but it can't take a huge amount of force before breaking. Metals like iron and lead can be pressed into new shapes, but it takes a lot to make them fracture competely. "Hard" objects resist damage to their surface, such as scratching.
• Hierophants were priests in ancient Greece, and Cenobites were (and are) monks living in a monastic community. Nothing like the Hellraiser folk, really. Or the bio-augmented priests of the Machine Orthodoxy. We hope. And they most certainly aren't undead flesh-eating mermen. In a modern example, the word Hierophant is used in its original context in Fire Emblem: Awakening and Tactics Ogre. You just don't want to get on the wrong end of said Hierophant...
  • The Hierophant Arcana in Tarot was originally called the Pope. The Pope is a type of Hierophant, someone with religious authority.
• When the word was coined in the 1950s, a hippie was simply another word for "hipster" (and, less directly, "beatnik"): an "ethnic" white (typically Jewish or Italian-American) with a fondness for Black culture. Thanks to American sociopolitical prejudices, the word soon came to mean a bohemian and then a subversive of any sort, or even a Communist (the actual treatment of hippies in Communist countries should give the lie to this). In the 1960s it was associated with sexual promiscuity and drug use, and opposition to The Vietnam War (the two groups did not necessarily overlap), and soon enough became a slur for any man with long and/or facial hair, whether he was a stereotypical hippie or not. Later, in the 1970s, as the environmentalist movement took off, a hippie came to be thought of as someone who wanted to "save the Earth", or more generally to turn the clock back to a "simpler" and more pastoral time (ironic, since the original definition suggested how modern American culture had become). Now "hippie" is often just a code word for "extreme left-winger", even though it's entirely possible to be a leftist and harbor conventional - or even puritanical - social mores (the Liberal party in nineteenth-century Britain supported prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and the Straight Edge subculture is a contemporary example).
• Being Hispanic and being Spanish aren't the same thing. Hispanic people are of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race. Hispanics may be white, black, aboriginal (as in "Native American", not the original people of Australia), Asian, or any combination of the above. Spanish people (also known as Spaniards) are from Spain, and only Spain. People may confuse the two terms because Spanish culture has a huge influence on Hispanic culture and is the name of the language commonly spoken by those people in those places, and indeed because many of these regions used to be part of the Spanish Empire, but that's like calling people from the U.S. "English". Not helping the confusion is that Hispanic until recently also sometimes meant 'of Spain', from Hispānia, the Roman name for what is now known as the Iberian Peninsula, which is in Europe, and includes Spain.
  In truth, neither "Spanish" nor "Hispanic" have any better geographical accuracy (in fact the Iberian Peninsula, containing Portugal, part of France, and other places that are neither Spanish nor Hispanic as it is understood, is slightly worse) and the use of either of them is because of their connection to the Spanish Empire. This is likely a factor in why the term "Hispanic" is slowly going out of favor and being replaced by Latino (for males)/Latina (for females) and more country of origin-specific names (e.g. Chicano [for males]/Chicana [for females] for Americans whose predecessors came from Mexico).
  • To further confuse matters, on many job and education applications, it is explicitly stated that "Hispanics may be of any race." This sometimes leads to people in polls being counted both as Hispanic and as members of a particular race (usually white); and since only non-Hispanic whites tend to be counted as "white", this inconsistency leads to too many white people, causing the sum total of a poll to add up to more than 100 percent. The problem could be solved by substituting "mestizo" (which is a race) or simply "some other race" or "two or more races" (which are often included in addition to "Hispanic") for "Hispanic", since that is what the great majority of Hispanic-Americans tend to be.
  • It doesn't help that different U.S. government agencies use different definitions — sometimes excluding Spanish people, sometimes not, sometimes including Brazilians and Portuguese, sometimes only Brazilians...
  • It would be more accurate to say "Hispanic is what people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race, are called in the U.S.A." People in Latin America don't think of themselves as being "Hispanic" most of the time (again, that would be like Americans referring to themselves as "English", or even "European"), although they may acknowledge some degree of shared culture. The most common racial terms in Latin America are blanco (white), mestizo (mixed white and Indian), indio (Indian), mulato (mixed white and black), negro (black), and zambo (mixed black and Indian).
  • Also, Latino does not refer only to Spanish speakers. It means someone from the Americas who speaks Latin based languages. For example, Brazilians are considered Latino despite having Portuguese as their main language.
• Holiday has come to mean "any recognized occasion of celebration with special significance", or (if you're British) "any period of personal leisure". Originally, though, it specifically referred to days of celebration with religious significance, which were officially recognized as such by the Church. Hence the word's etymology: it's a corruption of "holy day", which itself came from the Old English "hāligdæg". Thus, while holidays like Christmas and Easter would fit the old definition, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July would not. And even many contemporary religious holidays can stretch the old definition when their secular significance ends up eclipsing their religious significance: very few people seriously celebrate Halloween, Valentine's Day, and Saint Patrick's Day as the eve of All Saint's Day, the feast day of Saint Valentine, and the feast day of Saint Patrick, respectively. ^note  Even Christmas and Easter aren't entirely religious in nature: many nonbelievers celebrate both holidays as secular festivals marking the beginning and end of Winter.
• The word Holocaust has a meaning that comes to mind whenever it is mentioned, and it's not a pleasant one. The original meaning in ancient Greek was "given as burnt offering" or "completely consumed by fire". (Fans of The Princess Bride may remember how a "holocaust cloak" enabled Fezzik to appear as a flaming demon without being harmed.) Modern Jews would actually much prefer the word Shoah (שואה), a word meaning "calamity" or "tragedy" in Hebrew), be used for Nazi genocide, as they justifiably consider it mass-murder, rather than sacrifice.
• As an adverb, hopefully technically means that something is done with hope ("I hopefully applied to several colleges") rather than that it is to be hoped something will happen ("Hopefully I'll get admitted to a good college"). It's uncommon to meet someone not named Strunk or White who insists on the former definition.
• The term ikemen (イケ面) is supposed to refer to charismatic men, good looking guys, or Hunks. Because of the tendency to use the word as "attractive male", it's become an alternate term for Bishōnen among Japanese youth.
• If does not mean the same thing as "whether". "Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you," means you should inquire about getting a prescription if you determine that you should.^note For all you grammarians, yes, there should be a comma after "doctor", but that changes the typical reading of that sentence. Please, ask your doctor whether this drug is right for you. However, examples of this usage go all the way back to Beowulf.

• The word ilk does not mean “class” or “kind”; it means “the same”. “MacDonald of that ilk” means “MacDonald of ditto” (i.e. “of clan MacDonald”).
• Immolate means sacrifice. When a monk lights himself on fire to protest a war, he is engaging in "self-immolation" because he is killing himself to make a point, not because he is setting himself on fire. The root meaning was to sprinkle meal on the victim, in preparation for a sacrifice. Dictionaries today show the fire-based definition as an acceptable secondary.
• Incredible means, well, not credible, and is synonymous with "unbelievable". It's more commonly used today to mean "really good" (the implication being you can't believe how good the thing is), but most dictionaries list the original definition first.
• The word Inferno has come to mean "a raging fire" over time, but it was originally just the Italian word for "Hell"—which is why it's the title of the first part of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. You might think that it's a simple case of figurative language, since "inferno" obviously conjures up images of the classic Fire and Brimstone Hell that's long been entrenched in the popular imagination in the West; of course, if you've actually read The Divine Comedy, you'll recall that Dante's vision of Hell didn't quite fit that mold (he depicts the deepest circle of Hell as a deathly cold realm where sinners are entombed in ice, not fire). The Italian "inferno" actually derives from the Latin "infra", meaning "under" or "below", from which we get the words "infrastructure" (an underlying structure or framework) and "infrared" (describing forms of electromagnetic radiation of a lower frequency than the color red); a rather more accurate English translation would actually be "Underworld". "Inferno" may have come to be associated with fire because of its similarity to the Latin "fornax" (meaning "furnace", "kiln", or "oven"), or perhaps just because images of fire and brimstone became increasingly popular in artistic depictions of Hell around the Renaissance. Either way, the connotations of the word have stuck ever since.
• Innuendo is anything that hints at something without saying it out loud, not just restricted to sex. It is perfectly possible to talk about a "racist innuendo", for example, though the more common term these days is "dog-whistle" (i.e. something that seems silent, but those who know the hidden meaning can hear).
• The Internet is simply the protocol that allows two computers to connect to each other, and has been around in one form or another since the 1960s. When people refer to "the Internet" they often mean "the World Wide Web", which is an information space which runs through the Internet, that allows computer users to visit, edit and create web pages stored on remote servers.
• When it comes to intelligence tests, people use expressions such as measuring IQ. But that's a bit like saying that you're measuring the miles per hour of a car. You're not measuring its miles per hour, you're measuring its speed, and miles per hour is simply the unit. Likewise, IQ is a unit used to measure a person's g-factor, the theoretical construct for intelligence.
  • IQ is in and of itself an incorrect term (unless the work happens to take place in the early to mid 20th century); the proper modern term would be IQ score. "IQ" stands for Intelligence Quotient and was proposed by Stern as a number derived from dividing the age which the individual's knowledge was most common at by the age they actually were. While this score worked fine for children, it was hard to construct valid scores for adults. The modern "IQ tests" such as the Stanford-Binet actually just centralize the bell curve of scores at 100 with an approximate standard deviation of 15 (and since the scores are derived from statistics, this means that extremely high IQ scores are often meaningless).
    • Meaningless, because the highest percentile bracket maxes out at 99.99%, and the people who score higher than any 9999 other takers could cover a broad range of IQ scores. Even more meaningless over time because subsequently tested population may adjust the distribution of scores, regardless of how the center of the curve may be maintained.
• Item is Latin for "as well as"; the fact that it ended up preceding each object in a list gave it its modern usage.
• A jigsaw is a motorised saw which can cut wood into non-standard shapes. A puzzle made using a jigsaw is called a "jigsaw puzzle" (and even then, the "jigsaw" part is largely an Artifact Title nowadays, since they're rarely made using actual jigsaws or even with actual wood).
• Just deserts is spelt with a single "s" and has nothing to do with what you eat after the main course - "desert" in this context means "what is deserved", though such usage is now extinct outside this particular idiom.
• The Japanese word kaiju (怪獣^hiraganaかいじゅう) simply means "mysterious beast", but popular culture in general and Godzilla in particular have shifted the definition more towards "giant ultra-destructive monster" (which would more properly be called a Dai-Kaiju.
• "Kicking the bucket" is now a common slang term for dying, but its meaning was originally much more specific: it was a euphemism for committing suicide (the expression alludes to a person stepping onto an upturned bucket to hang themself, then kicking it out from under them). Somewhere along the line, though, the original meaning was largely forgotten, and it became a euphemism for death of every kind.
• Knots: The nautical term for speed is "knots", not "knots per hour" (the term for distance is "nautical miles", not "knots"). "Knots" refers to an arcane method of measuring speed by counting knots in a rope but has since become "one nautical mile per hour". "Knots per hour" is, however, a valid unit for acceleration.
• Koi is Japanese for "carp", and so calling them "koi carp" as many people do is a tautology.
• The original labyrinth (λαβύρινθος^romanizationlabúrinthos) of Greek Mythology was a very complex maze; hence the use of a thread to find the way out. But the term shifted to describe what began as an illustration of the myth: a figure consisting of a twisty but unbranched path, such as appears on the floor of many old churches. With the increasing popularity of maze puzzles, it's once again more commonly used in its original definition.
• The Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church is not just the anointing of the sick with oil. It's a sequence of three rituals: Penance (Confession), then Anointing of the Sick, then Eucharist (Communion); the last is also called Viaticum, "provision for the journey". Additionally, the Anointing isn't limited to being administered to the dying, which is why it's called Anointing of the Sick, not Anointing of the Dying.
• Libido is not sexual desire. It is sinful desire. Blame Freud for the shift in meaning.
• A Luddite was originally a follower of Ned Ludd^note who didn't actually exist, but that's another story, who destroyed a weaving machine that had taken his job. The original Luddites campaigned against the replacement of human labour by new technologies. Nowadays, the word "luddite" (often not capitalised) is used to mean anyone who is opposed to new technology for any reason.
• Lust can colloquially just mean "generic sexual desire", but its classical theological definition is "the vice of excessive sexual act". So, first of all, as a vice, it has to be habitual (i.e. committing adultery on one occasion but never considering it before or after is technically not "lust", but still vicious and qualifies as a mortal sin according to the Catholic Church). Secondly, it needs to be excessive, so simply desiring to have sexual intercourse isn't lust, or even wrong; only if one continually and intentionally dwells on sexual thoughts or continually and intentionally performs sexual acts can it be called "lust". This is further complicated because there is another, more archaic and almost never used sense of the word "lust", which is "to treat human beings as tools without giving them the proper dignity they deserve as humans". This sense of the word "lust" would apply to a man who has intercourse with a popular woman in order to gain social status; one can think of it as being related in that his sexual drive is perverted (i.e. misused) because he uses sex for something besides procreation.
• The word mad used to exclusively mean insane. However, the term "mad with anger" meant someone extremely angry, so angry that it resembled madness. Over time, mostly in North America, it evolved into just "mad", though those English speakers will still not be confused when it is used to mean crazy, chiefly from context. In addition, the word madness has always meant a state of insanity in all English dialects.
• Once upon a time, a maid was an unmarried young woman. This is also where the insult "old maid" comes from if an unmarried woman is not so young. Many lower-class maids worked as domestic housekeepers and were known as "handmaids" or "maidservants," for which "the maid" became shorthand. By the 20th century, "maid" became inextricably linked to domestic help regardless of age or martial status (though nowadays "housekeeper" is the preferred term). The only case of the word retaining any vestige of its original use is when we speak of bridesmaids. Technically, if the maid of honor is herself married, then she would be the matron of honor, but this fell out of use as most women today don't find the word "matron" very flattering.
• The word man, today taken to mean a male member of humanity, in the original Old English referred to any member of the human species, which today is filled by human. The different sexes were differentiated by the prefixes 'wer-' for males, becoming werman, and 'wyf-' for females, becoming wyfman.
• -mancy is often used as a general-purpose suffix to mean magic of some specific kind. For one thing, it's often incorrectly used as "-omancy", inserting an extraneous O into words that don't have one (like "blahomancy" rather than "blahmancy"). This probably stems from one of its most common uses being in "necromancy", where some might not quite realize exactly where the suffix begins. In addition, "-mancy" specifically refers to divination, not magic in general. A fantasy sorcerer who raises the dead is not technically performing necromancy. However, this technical misuse of the term has become nigh-omnipresent in contemporary vernacular.
  • Unknown Armies has a sidebar on this very subject, and puts forward -urgy (from Greek, "technique for working with") as the proper suffix for magical styles.
• Marquess of Queensberry Rules has generally become to mean "don't hit me in the balls!", when actually, the Rules were a long set of pugilism regulations, as seen in the Other Wiki. One of the rules is indeed no Groin Attack, but other rules include the arena size, no wrestling and no use of spiked shoes, and so on. In fact, modern pro boxing bouts follow a majority of the Rules.
• Massive, strictly speaking, refers to an object that's particularly large, heavy, or bulky, i.e. it has a lot of mass. (The scientific definition goes even further; something that has mass is massive). Common usage, however, tends to apply the term to anything with a large scale: massive failure, massive ego, etc.
• Matinée means "that which takes up the space of the morning" (from the French matin, "morning"). The current meaning (an event in the afternoon) was an ironic one used by American high society as a way of referring to how they always woke up late. Also, the original rule of thumb was that anytime before dinner—originally the midday meal—was considered morning, but as dinner became a nighttime meal, the Matinée followed.
  • The word is currently used to refer to an event that usually occurs at night (such as a movie showing) instead happening in the the morning or (by extension) the early afternoon.
• Mayhem is commonly used to mean chaos and disorder, but the original, and legal, definition is the act of maiming. People misinterpreted the word from phrases like "violence and mayhem", and the definition stuck.
• A meme is a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted between people through communication. The word was coined by Richard Dawkins, and he gave examples of melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (such as religions^note Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen argue that something as complex as a whole religion isn't just a single meme, but what they call a memeplex), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches. Therefore, while a funny picture such as Longcat is an example of a meme, the word meme does not mean just "a funny picture".
  • The "memes" featured on Siivagunner could be better described as Running Gags, especially considering how many of them weren't established as such before appearing on the channel.
• Mental illness or mental disorder is a poorly defined catch-all concept that encompasses abnormal patterns that renders someone (whether the affected individual or others) disabled, distressed or at a disadvantage. This ranges from stuttering and insomnia, to depression and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), to more threatening and victimizing conditions such as pyromania and pedophilia.
  • It is not interchangeable with insanity, which legally refers to a condition in which a person cannot mentally comprehend or prevent himself or herself from committing a crime. Not all mental disorders render people insane.
• Meta-. Ever since metacrawler the prefix "meta-" has been used to denote an aggregation (like in metacritic) when it is supposed to be used to denote a definition or something that goes beyond the original intent, e.g. metaphysics goes beyond traditional physics, metadata is data that defines the data, metacrawler is a search engine that crawls the HTML Meta tags on websites that are supposed to be used for defining what content is on your page. If used properly, metacritic would be a site devoted to critiquing the critics or even be a site like This Very Wiki, not an aggregation of critical reviews.
  • The Greek prefix Meta- in fact simply means "after". It has its modern origins in the work of Andronicus of Rhodes to put the surviving works of Aristotle in a sensible order. Andronicus was able to sort most of it into categories like "Politics" and "Poetics", but found himself with some miscellaneous writings that were hard to categorise. Andronicus put them together and inserted them into the overall scheme after "Physics". He had a good reason for this because the writings seemed to resemble physics at a deeper level, giving rise to the modern meaning. All the same, "Metaphysics" means "after physics" simply because that's where Andronicus put it.
• A meteoroid is a solid object moving in interplanetary space, of a size considerably smaller than an asteroid and considerably larger than an atom. When a meteoroid enters the Earth's atmosphere, it is moving so fast that it compresses the air before it to the point that it is heated enough to melt and give off light. The streak of light in the sky this produces is a meteor; the rock itself is never called a meteor. If this streak is very bright, it is called a fireball or bolide (colloquially a shooting star). The solid remnant which hits the ground (or sea) is a meteorite. Meteorites are actually still very cold after they hit the ground (having been floating around in very cold space for quite a long time). However, the impact with the ground and the transfer of energy melts some of the rock or earth on the Earth's surface; this molten material is knocked away and when it solidifies is called a tektite. An asteroid is a chunk of rock larger than a meteoroid, floating freely in space.
• Geographically speaking, the Midwest is not "all parts of the United States between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains", which is how the word is commonly used today. That's Middle America you're thinking of, that term being much more geographically accurate. "Midwest" means "the nearer part of the West" (as opposed to the "far west", the Mountain States); so, Great Lakes and Great Plains states. Nor are Middle America and Flyover Country necessarily the same thing. "Flyover country" is a very culturally-variable term (since it has the subjective meaning "places you fly over but would never visit"); for one person it might mean "any rural area", for another it might mean "anywhere but the metropolitan areas on the East and West Coasts".
  • Originally, the term “midwest” or “middle west” denoted the part of the US between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi river. In everyday usage, the term has now shifted to mean the Great Plains (between the Mississippi river and the Rocky Mountains); the former Midwest—states such as Ohio and Indiana—is now generally treated as part of the East. (The Census Bureau, however, defines the Midwest^akaNorth Central as the northern states between Pennsylvania and the Rockies, thus including the Great Plains^akaWest North Central and the Great Lake states^akaEast North Central.)
• Modern in history refers to the period after Middle Ages which is still on-going. So "modern" technically could mean anything from renaissance to some time in the future. In arts, modernism refers to the movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s, hence why we already have "postmodern" art, literally "after-modern". Obviously the common meaning is perfectly acceptable but if you do want to avoid it, words like "current" or "present" should work. "Contemporary" on the other hand has its own problems as mentioned in Moderately Pedantic.
• Molest formerly meant to simply annoy or to bother, but has since semantically shifted to become a synonym for sexual abuse. That said, Unmolested still usually means "unharmed", and is hardly ever used to mean "not sexually abused."
• Moot comes from the Old English word for a meeting, wherein important issues were discussed. A moot subject was one deserving serious debate, not something of little or no relevance. The current usage comes from a corruption of "mooted"; a "mooted" thing means something previously debated, i.e., a settled thing. This has been settled usage for so long, though, that even the law courts use it; lawyers and judges are famously pedantic, so this is no small thing.
• In Marvel media, mutant refers to a member of the subspecies Homo sapiens superior (not Homo superior; baseline humans and mutants can have fertile children), characterized by the emission of a specific brainwave and usually, but not always, innate superhuman powers and/or anatomical oddities. People who gain superhuman powers or anatomical quirks through an outside agency or event are mutates. Sunfire is a mutant; the Human Torch, despite his similar powers, is a member of Homo sapiens sapiens and a mutate.
• Mystic and mystical are not synonyms. "Mystic" means "of hidden or symbolic meaning, especially in religion". "Mystical" means "of mystics or mysticism". "The mystic crystal ball" is correct; "the mystical crystal ball" is not, unless the aforesaid crystal ball is used by mystics. Technically, "mystical" also means "having spiritual meaning, value, or symbolism", so the crystal ball could be called "mystical" if it had spiritual value.

• Nakama (仲間^hiraganaなかま) means "friend", "comrade" or "colleague" in Japanese. If you were to stop a random Japanese person on the street of Osaka and ask, "Could you define the word 'nakama' for me?", the response wouldn't be "a group of friends who are as close as family", or "a group of friends that are closer than family". On the contrary, the response would simply be "friend", with none of the deeper connotations that people here on TV Tropes have ascribed to it. (Or at least, did, before the trope name was changed.) This incorrect use of the term originated in One Piece fandom, though even there, only a small percentage of the One Piece fans insist that the word means anything more than just "friends".
  • Possibly because the Japanese language has another term that means "friend", 友達^hiraganaともだち^romajitomodachi, and clearly English-speakers just can't understand having two words that mean the same thing.
    • 仲間 and 友達 are not synonymous. 友達 is closer to the English "friend", referring to someone you consider an equal who is close to you, who you play, talk, and hang out with. 仲間 is more like "comrade", referring to someone who works with you in doing something, or is part of the same group. The two words are contrasted with some frequency.
    • A Japanese person, asked to explain the difference, might say that 友達 is closer to 親友^hiraganaしんゆう^romajishin'yū (basically best friend) and 仲間 is closer to 同志^hiraganaどうし^romajidōshi (literally "same interests", and used as "comrade" by political ideologues like Marxists)—because practically every word in Japanese that's of native origin can be said in Sino-Japanese with slightly different connotations, much like how English can say both "Gallic manufacture" and "French handiwork".
• A nation is a collective group of people who share a racial or cultural identity. A state is a political entity that controls a geographical area. While the two often coincide, and are used as synonyms (since it became fashionable for the state to rule in the name of the people), there are plenty of places where they do not:
  • The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is one state containing four nations: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The distinct ethnic groups hailing from each nation are ruled by a single political entity.
  • Korea is a nation split into two adjoining states. Nowhere else in the world is there a homogeneous group of people so starkly divided by ideology.
  • In Africa, the boundaries of nations and states rarely have anything to do with each other due to the continent's history of colonization and decolonization.
• Going by very strict etymology, the word Nausea specifically means seasickness, as it comes from the same root as "nautical". The current meaning of just general stomach sickness wasn't invented until later.
• When people hear the word nimrod, they may think of a fool or lunkhead, but the word actually comes from a powerful figure in The Bible and Mesopotamian mythology. Nimrod was such a great hunter that his name became synonymous with hunters (The RAF even named a reconnaissance plane after him). However, when a popular Looney Tunes short featured Bugs Bunny calling Elmer Fudd a "poor little Nimrod", children watching assumed that the word was an insult, and the interpretation stuck.
  • It probably wasn't helped by the earlier Felix the Cat antagonist, named Nimrod, who was both a hunter and constantly made a fool of by Felix.
  • It's not too far off though. Tradition says Nimrod became so full of himself that he began trying to replace God with himself, and started building the Tower of Babel to challenge him directly. To call that plan foolish would be an understatement.

• Oblivion technically means "the state of being forgotten about", and comes from the Latin oblivisci, meaning "to forget". The use of the word to mean Cessation of Existence isn't wrong, although most dictionaries list the "being forgotten" definition first, as it's more consistent when the original etymology of the word.

• [Word]oholic is frequently misused to describe how you are addicted to [word] (such as being a self-proclaimed rageoholic if you are addicted to rage). If you are a rageoholic, you are addicted to rageohol, not rage.
  • Homer Simpson actually uses this correctly, exclaiming "I'm a rageoholic! I just can't live without rageohol!", in the episode "I am Furious (Yellow)".
• Orgy does not necessarily mean a sexual orgy. The word comes from ancient Greece, where an orgy was a secret nighttime cultic congregation overseen by an orgiophant (a teacher or revealer of secret rites), which was celebrated with dancing, drunkenness, singing, and other such things. Add those together, and sexual intercourse probably resulted from excessive booze and celebration. However, "orgy" can mean mass consumption of anything; a popular non-sexual orgy is eating. Some use the word "orgy" regarding violence.
• Orthodoxy: While orthodox has taken on the meaning of "traditional", particularly in matters of faith, the term originally meant something more like "right opinion". The word literally derives from the Greek words ὀρθός^romanizationorthos, meaning "right/correct", and δόξα^romanizationdoxa, meaning "opinion/to think/praise". Presumedly, the connotations of "traditional", "established", or "backwards" came relatively recently, as people who self-identify as "orthodox" also tend to reject more modern predilections towards reform and progressivism.
  • Under the original definition, "political correctness" would be a type of orthodoxy (whether or not it is the norm in your area): there are certain beliefs that are deemed proper to hold about, say, women; and certain beliefs that are not. Indeed, Holocaust deniers are, under this sense of the word, unorthodox.

• Pathetic refers to something that provokes pity (sharing a root with words like "sympathy" and "pathos"). However, it is used more often to simply mean something is rubbish, with no connotation of pity.
  • The original meaning is retained in the term Pathetic Fallacy, which means ascribing feelings to an inanimate object, such as describing a stormy sky as "angry."
• PC, used to refer to computers running Microsoft Windows, is an interesting case. PC is an initialism for "Personal Computer." In the literal sense of the term, this refers to any computer for use by a single person (as opposed to the room-sized computers which you accessed via a terminal), including such things as the Commodore 64 and yes, Apple computers. However, PC also refers to a specific computer architecture, the IBM Personal Computer and its clones, for which Microsoft built its DOS and Windows operating systems, and became so dominant that "PC" became synonymous with "Windows computer", despite the fact that Linux and BSD are relatively popular on the platform. Notably, while current Apple computers are PCs in the latter sense, before 2006 they did actually have their own distinct architecture (PowerPC), and thus weren't PCs.
  • As How-To Geek puts it, "not all PCs are Macs, but all Macs are PCs".
• Pedantic originally came from ancient Greek, and was originally used to refer to someone (usually a slave) who led children to school. It then became known as an educator of children, making the words "teacher" and "pedant" synonymous for a short time. Eventually, it morphed into its current definition, someone obsessed with finding the smallest and most inconsequential details about various words and phrases, much like how a teacher would correct children in grammar school.
• Pedophilia is specifically a primary sexual attraction toward prepubescent children, generally 10 and younger. According to the DSM-IV, it can be exclusive (the person is only attracted to children) or non-exclusive (the person is also attracted to adults or at least post-pubescent youth), but it must have been acted on in some way - though not necessarily to the point of molesting a child - or it must cause the patient marked distress. Some people would prefer to define the term differently than this — for example, in such a way that only the exclusive form counts. There are also a few who think the word should be "pedosexual", and they may have a point. (After all, do bibliophiles want to have sex with books?) But regardless of these details, on any reasonable definition:
  • An artist who draws a child in a nonsexual context (for example) is not necessarily a pedophile, no matter what details are included.
  • Someone who is primarily attracted to adults but has sex with prepubescent children is not a pedophile. Many child molesters don't have a particular attraction to children, but are simply exploiting a vulnerable warm body; analogous phenomena include prison rapes.
    • It is worth noting that in the typology of sexual offenders there are also people who are attracted to children due to their own heavy regression that renders them unable to relate to other adults. They are usually not categorized as pedophiles but as 'regressed child molesters'.
  • Related to the above, there is no such thing as a "convicted pedophile". This isn't Orwell's Oceania; one cannot be sent to prison simply for having certain thoughts. There is, by contrast, most certainly such a thing as a "convicted child molester". Even if such a person is a pedophile (not a given), they were not convicted merely for being one, but for some specific action they took as a result.
  • A sexual preference for pubescent adolescents (ranging from about 10-11 to 14-15 years old) is not pedophilia, but hebephilia. "Prepubescent" is quite different from merely "under the legal age of consent".
    • One may see the term "ephebophilia" (sexual preference for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 14-15 to about 19-20) used to make a similar distinction. Interestingly, while such a distinction is usually scoffed at in Internet discussion, it can have an enormous impact on the legal/psychological consideration of specific cases.
  • The word "pederast" refers specifically to a man in a (usually sexually charged) relationship with an adolescent male. Though often incorrectly thought to be an uneducated corruption of "pedophile", "pederast" is actually the older of the two words. The difference is in the Greek root word used for "lover", ἐραστής^romanizationerastēs instead of φίλος^romanizationphilos; the former refers to ἔρως^romanizationerōs, or sexual desire, while the latter refers to φιλία^romanizationphilia, a more general kind of love. (The Ancient Greeks^note at least according to C. S. Lewis; this is debated by linguists had four words for love: ἔρως, φιλία, στοργή^romanizationstorgē—familial love, and ἀγάπη^romanizationagapē—divine love.)
• Peruse means to read something carefully and thoroughly, not to glance at something carelessly.
• The word perverted can refer to anything from child molestation to strange but harmless sexual fantasies, depending on whom you ask. However the definition of a pervert is someone who corrupts or misuses a person or thing; to say a person is perverted is closer to declaring them morally reprehensible than to saying they have a sexual disorder. The word originally referred to people opposing religious doctrine, and probably found its current (perverted?) usage in some churches' campaign against homosexuality. The word is still used correctly in the criminal charge of "Perverting the Course of Justice" - to interfere with a criminal case in such a manner that justice cannot be served or is not served in a timely manner.
  • And speaking of perversions, the adjectival form of the word is perverse. "Perverted" would be a past-tense verb, e.g. "Jack underwent perversion yesterday. He was perverted. Jack is now perverse." The more broadly applicable "-ed" form may be due to that being more widely applicable to words that may lack a specific adjectival form. (Today, of course, this has become a mutation: generally speaking, "perverse" refers to non-sexual contexts—e.g. "perverse incentive"—while "perverted" refers to sexual ones.)
• Most plastic surgery is used to reconstruct parts of the body damaged in horrific accidents, such as severe burns. The beauty procedures which the phrase normally refers to should really be called cosmetic surgery, which is just one type of plastic surgery. Moreover, some cosmetic techniques, such as Botox injections, do not actually qualify as plastic surgery under the formal definition. Finally, the "plastic" part of the phrase doesn't mean the substance plastic is used in the process, rather it is the somewhat dated adjective form of plastic meaning "malleable",as they are trying to "mold" the person's face or other parts into a new shape.
• Polarize means to cause something to acquire polarity; very polarizing is descriptive of a Broken Base. It's not descriptive of a unanimous or unilateral opinion within a group of people. If something drives a wedge through group consensus and leaves them with opposing opinions, that's polarizing. If it leaves everyone with the same opinion, it's the opposite of polarizing.
• A Pony is not a young horse. That is a Foal. Instead, it's an adult horse that is bred to be small (shorter than 14½ hands or 58 inches).
• Proletarian originally meant "people whose only value to the state is producing offspring". In (Marxian) economics, it means "one who does not own the means of production but labors for one who does, while retaining political liberty". It does not mean "working class" or "blue-collar" — most airline pilots are proletarians; many taxi drivers are not.
  • Not even neo-Communist Slavoj Zizek knows the difference.
• Propaganda was once more-or-less synonymous with "advertising". Only in the last hundred or so years has it come to mean false advertising. It also suffers the "technically it's a plural" problem (see "data", above) - being a Latin phrase meaning "things to be spread".
• Psychotic is a word very often confused with "sociopathic"; in fact, one is a sub-class of the other. "Psychosis" is one of many mental disorders where a sufferer experiences a "loss of contact with reality". (The term is very broad, and can include mood disorders, depression, and various behavioral disorders).
• The idiom Pull oneself up by ones bootstraps is invariably used to mean something like "improve one's lot in life just by using one's own abilities." It originally meant something more like "do something blatantly impossible (or claim you did)", which makes more sense if you know what bootstraps are (for those who don't know, they are those little handles on some shoes that make them easier to put on, and you can't just levitate off the ground by pulling on your own shoes). It may also be inspired by a story supposedly told by the (in)famous Baron Munchasen where he claimed to escape from a bog by pulling himself up by his ponytail). As such, people who use it unironically in it's modern meaning (usually as part of a Hard Work Fallacy) are almost always completely missing the point.
• In physics, a quantum leap refers to a change that is not continuous (for example, a particle "leaps" from one energy level to another instantaneously). In common parlance, it is used to mean a groundbreaking development - perhaps under the misguided notion that the phrase refers to the "leap" forward that physics made when quantum mechanics was discovered. A more accurate phrase would be "paradigm shift".
• Republic: a vague term supposed to mean a political system in which there is a large degree of participation and equality amongst the citizens. A republic is not necessarily a democracy (the demos not necessarily being coterminous with the citizenry, i.e. those with political rights), hence the distinction for "republican democracy", but a dictatorship is certainly not a republic whether it has hereditary rulers or not. Modern political philosophy — such as the word of Phillip Pettit — employs this older use. "'Republic' means not a monarchy'" is a case of people in the 1900s who kept using the word when it didn't mean quite what they thought it meant.
  • A republic is essentially any political system that incorporates any caste-based electoral instrument, regardless on how widespread its use is. One good example is the (First) Republic of Poland called so since the 15th century, when the local councils of noblemen gained an important influence over the king (first a hereditary then an electoral monarch) and the royal court and were essentially ruling their respective lands.
  • In the ancient Greek republics, often called "democracies", the voters were limited to male free citizens who had finished mandatory military service, thus excluding women, slaves, infirms (unfit for military service) and metics (free immigrants).
  • The "satellite countries" aligned with the Soviet Union, or members of the Warsaw Pact, were technically republics (there were regular elections, and the countries were ruled by the same instruments of power as in any other republic) but these instruments were warped by e.g. fixing the local party-to-opposition ratio, so that the opposition could never overpower the USSR-backed party. This is why they are often called "façade republics" or "controlled republics".
  • According to Cicero, one of the last consuls of The Roman Republic, a Republic was a combination of the three types of government identified by Aristotle: aristocracy (via the Senate), democracy (through the Legislative Assemblies and the veto-holding Tribunes), and monarchy (through the consuls).
  • It certainly doesn't help matters that the original Latin term rēs publica is best literally translated as "the public thing," where rēs ("thing") can be just as vague as it is in English. It also doesn't help matters that "dictator" was originally a legitimate office of the Roman republic in times of emergency with strict term limits. It wasn't until Julius Caesar made himself dictator "for perpetuity" that it gained traction as one way to say someone is President for Life.
• A ring is round with a hollow center, but it does no good to point out boxing rings are square.^note The name dates from an era when boxing matches were fought in a circle roughly drawn on the dirt; the modern boxing ring is sometimes called "the square circle" as an allusion to that.

• Sadism is deriving pleasure directly from inflicting suffering on others. It does not include deriving pleasure from actions in which suffering is inflicted but not the source of pleasure to the perpetrator. That's schadenfreude.
• Serial Killer and mass murderer are often incorrectly used as synonyms. While they both have to murder at least three people, a mass murderer kills all their victims in one go (think Columbine, or Elliot Rodger's massacre), whereas a serial killer has a "cooling down" period, and usually only murders one person at a time (think Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.)
• Satellite: A "satellite" is any object that orbits around a larger object, such as a planet. Most people think of satellites as the man-made pieces of technology that detect weather and spy on the Russians, but any natural chunk of space rock can be a satellite. Moons, of course, count too, as do planets which orbit a sun. Many people refer to their satellite dishes as simply "the satellite," leading some people to confuse the meaning of the word. This is why we now have the distinction between "natural satellite" and "artificial satellite".
  • Incidentally, the word originally meant a (human) hanger-on, such as a courtier; Galileo applied it metaphorically to the things that scurry around Jupiter. The application of the word to the smaller members of the Warsaw Pact is perhaps truer to the original than the now-usual sense.
  • The movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman uses "satellite" to mean UFO. It was made around the time that Sputnik was launched, and the screenwriter apparently thought the word meant any object flying in space. This usage is common in 1950s low-budget sci-fi movies.
• To culinary professionals, savory now means containing a particular taste sensation, also known as umami, created by glutamic acid (popularly known as monosodium glutamate, or MSG). It can also mean any food which is particularly spiced or salted, as opposed to sweet. However, the original meaning was that still used by most people — any particularly pleasing meal that makes the mouth water in anticipation. The modern meaning came about because glutamic acid creates a mouth-watering sensation after eating, similar to the anticipation.
• Sentient/Sapient: To be sentient is to have the power of perception by the senses. To be sapient is to have or show "great wisdom or sound judgment," though it's often used to mean to simply possess human-like intelligence. These words are often used to mean things like simply being capable of intelligence or judgment or used to mean "self-aware", "conscious", or capable of subjective experience.
• Shoujo-ai (少女愛^hiraganaしょうじょあい) and Shounen-ai (少年愛^hiraganaしょうねんあい) are used in the West to mean same-sex romance between girls and boys, respectively, often less "intense" and sexual then actual yuri and yaoi. One had better not use those words in Japan, where they refer to the love of children. Their English equivalents would be "girl love" and "boy love", which themselves shouldn't be confused with the Gratuitous English terms "girls' love" and "boys' love", which the Japanese use to refer to.... yuri and yaoi. Yes, this is quite the coincidence.
• Shrapnel refers to a very specific type of artillery shell: one that bursts open in flight to shower the target area with projectiles, invented by Major General Henry Shrapnel. A normal explosive produces fragments, not shrapnel.
• Sorcerer is a word which at its roots means caster of lots. It does not mean witchcraft or spellcasting. Furthermore, the practice of casting lots is praised in the ancient Hebrew Old Testament.
• To a mathematician, a sphere is just the outer surface of a three-dimensional, perfectly round shape. A solid three-dimensional, perfectly round shape is called a "ball". So billiard balls are balls, ping-pong balls are spheres, and most other sorts of ball, which are filled with air but have a fairly thick lining, are somewhere in between.
• Spinster means "unmarried woman" as the female version of "bachelor" (its etymology comes from women who spun cloth for a living, one of the few ways women in older times could support themselves without a man). Many anglophone countries in Africa and the Caribbean issue marriage certificates that list the "spinster" and "bachelor" instead of bride and groom (or spouse 1 and spouse 2, etc.). But in other countries, including the United States, the word as picked up decidedly negative connotations in ways "bachelor" has not, hence the more common usage of the feminine equivalent "bachelorette".
• Stoicism was originally a philosophy that held as a central tenet that extreme emotions should be overcome and prevented. It now means the repression of emotions, shorn of other parts of the philosophy. While someone who is stoical may be so because of an emotional disorder, it may just be a way of handling one particular occurrence.
  • Cynicism for that matter, as often used in this website is actually less concerned with the contrast with idealism, and more to live life without falsehood (both in personal character, and by not chasing after things of false importance such as wealth, power, success, and fame). The classical Cynics were more like ascetics, living simply (much like the Stoics later would). The word means "dog-like" which to large portion fits, because dogs are known for doing certain things without any guilt or remorse.
  There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies.
• As defined by the man himself, Sturgeon's Law states that "Nothing is always absolutely so", that is to say that every rule has exceptions. The claim that ninety percent of everything is crud is more properly termed "Sturgeon's Revelation", but nobody ever cites it as that, not even This Very Wiki.
  • For that matter, most Internet adages, particularly Finagle's Law (which is almost always confused for Murphy's Law) and Poe's Law, are often invoked with a subtly different meaning than originally intended.
• Subliminal simply means "below the threshold of sensation or consciousness", said of states supposed to exist but not strong enough to be recognized.
• Succulent, because of its frequent use in the culinary arts, is often assumed by the layman to mean "tasty", when, in fact, it means "juicy". For example, milkweed is a very succulent plant, but eating it is not recommended. (Unless you're a monarch butterfly. And if you're reading this page, then you are not.^note Unless you're just dreaming about reading the page.)
  • There's even an entire botanical clade known as Succulent Plants. They are so named for their ability to retain water in arid conditions.
• Sycophant is an ancient Greek term for "informer" and "public accuser". They would expose the crimes of others to the authorities and be rewarded with a fee. By the 5th century BC, Aristophanes' comedies point to this having become a profession and practitioners caring little of the truth behind their accusations. Thus it gained the meaning (retained in Greek) of a false accuser, a slanderer. The English meanings of "flatterer", "bootlicker", are only loosely associated with the original meaning, by application to a hanger-on who curries favor with one person by denigrating others.

• A tabloid was originally just a newspaper that's half the dimensions of a standard, with a front page that lends itself well to eye-catching headlines. It's because of that second part that the tabloid format became increasingly used for sensationalist stories like celebrity gossip or paranormal sightings (or both, what with all the stories of Michael Jackson's alien baby). Nowadays, "tabloid" has come to refer to trashy news media in general, even if it's not printed in the tabloid format (many are just magazines) or if it's not even print at all but a TV show or website, like TMZ. In fact, many newspapers that technically are printed in the tabloid format—it's standard for local free papers like The Village Voice—don't market themselves as such due to the connotation. And then you have cases like the New York Post, which began life as a legitimate tabloid-sized newspaper but is now, well, a tabloid.

• TB does not stand for "tuberculosis", it stands for "tubercle bacillus", which is one name for the bacterium which causes tuberculosis.

• Thermos is a brand name for what is properly called a vacuum flask. It was invented about two decades before Thermos started marketing it, by Sir James Dewar, who unfortunately, refused to patent it. Most folks today use the brand name to describe any portable vacuum flask, or any similar device that keeps drinks cold.

• Thou, Thee, and Thine are akin to "I", "me", and "my", in that order. So the correct usage should be "Thou eat an apple", "The apple eats thee", and "That is thine apple". All this distinction was lost by the 17th century and replaced by "You", which is another can of worms (see below).

• Transpire formerly meant "breathe", and still does in a scientific context. It has a legitimate second meaning, "to become known". It is now used to mean "happen", but some people react quite strongly to that usage.
• In anime, tsundere originally referred to a character who started out harsh and cold, then over the course of the series underwent Character Development and gradually became nicer and sweeter as they warmed up to people - in other words, what This Very Wiki now calls a Defrosting Ice Queen. Nowadays, it's more often used to mean a character (often if not Always Female) who randomly and frequently switches between "harsh" and "sweet" moods, and some even take it further by using the term to mean "split personality".

• Tyrant in the original, ancient Greek meaning, was a single person who ruled over a city through usurpation (they took sovereignty by force, without right or permission). It was a value-neutral term, not a pejorative for an evil or oppressive ruler. Many ancient Greek tyrants were actually very well-liked (for instance Peisistratos of Athens). That said, the negative connotation of "tyrant" also comes from Ancient Greece: specifically Athens, where the term first showed up, when there was an "evil tyrant". It's been negative ever since. Strictly speaking, the meaning was "a ruler whose rule doesn't come from the state's laws" (i.e. synonymous with "usurper"). As such, the name was often used to describe rulers appointed by foreign powers (like in the states conquered by the Persian Empire). See also "Despot" and "Dictator".

• Universe: Technically speaking, the "universe" is the totality of everything that exists. If two "universes" are capable of interacting with one another, they're (strictly speaking) part of the same universe. This one is extremely pedantic, particularly if you have a multiverse (itself not quite an oxymoron; that would be "multi-universe"). It turns out that 'Universe' is for the entirety of everything, and 'universe' is for the big balls of space and time.
  • This is a case of the word actually changing, at least within the realm of modern cosmology, where the "universe" is our observable reality, and yet other universes with their own branes, time-space continua and physical laws are predicted to also exist. The conglomeration of absolutely everything is called, simply, The Bulk. But given that our own universe is incomprehensibly huge, the need to ponder what is beyond it is rare.
  • Omniverse is sometimes used to refer to "Universe".
    • Whereas within modern metaphysics, "world" is used for the totality of all existing things, and "universe" for universe as in cosmology. This becomes confusing for the uninitiated when talk of possible worlds — ways the totality of stuff might, logically, have been — is combined with talk of multiverse theory within physics as entirely reasonable statements like "Even if our universe is not actually part of a multiverse, there is a possible world close to this one in logical space in which our universe does exist as part of a multiverse" are a bit puzzling, especially for those who use "the world" and "Earth" interchangeably.
  • In quantum physics, a "multiverse" is viewed as a multitude of "universes", of which we are one possibility. To us it's the only one. They're all real, but we can't ever communicate with might-have-beens or especially "have-beens" or "will-bes." So to a layman it's all the same. The theoretical or philosophical implications of quantum physics has never stopped people from applying it, though, as you can observe on the macroscopic level right now by reading this on a computer.
  • The man who coined the word "multiverse", William James, said that if there was something beyond the universe, it wasn't the universe; it was one of a number of multiverses that were aspects of a greater universe; exactly the opposite of how the words are used now.
  • This is a very old progression: by the very act of coming up with a term for "everything", you raise the question of whether there could be anything else. This also happened to φύσις^romanizationphusis (in Greek) and nātūra (in Latin), which, having been used to mean "everything" came to mean a more limited set of things. (C. S. Lewis traces the process nicely in Studies in Words.)
  • If a universe we can't observe can be hypothesized, more than one could also be hypothesized. Speculative Fiction illustrates alternatives to the observable universe, so "multiverse" and the plural "universes" would be appropriately used in this context.
  • "Cosmos" is now sometimes used to mean "everything that is". Carl Sagan introduced his TV show Cosmos with the words "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." Some people have (mis-) interpreted this as an assertion that there is no God (since "all that is" is the universe). In fact, while Sagan was an atheist (or at least an agnostic), here he was just defining the term. By this definition, if there is a God or a Heaven (or, for that matter, alternate universes or timelines), then they are included in the single "Cosmos".

• Viking is not a demonym^note a word that denotes an ethnic group but a profession. People most commonly described as such were in fact Norse or Norsemen (Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians). The word víking (it's the feminine form, by the way) means "journey" or "raid", so a víkingr (the masculine form) was a person who was taking part in mercantile voyages or raids. Prior to the ninth century it usually meant "seaman" or "merchant", but later it gravitated towards the rough part of the trade, meaning "pirate" or "raider". In other words, Norse craftsmen, workers or skalds were not vikings, even if they were capable warriors themselves.
• Vulgar technically means "common" or "ordinary". It came to mean rude or obscene because "common" people are often stereotyped as having bad manners.
  • You can still see this in the mathematical term "vulgar fraction" - a fraction less than one, in which the top number is smaller than the bottom number, such as 1/2 - it's "ordinary because numbers smaller than one is what people mean when they say "fraction" informally (eg, when you say something costs "a fraction of the regular price", it means a lot less than the regular price). By contrast, a fraction greater than one, where the top is bigger than the bottom, is an "improper fraction", ie not the sort of number people would infer from just "fraction". This, despite that "vulgar" and "improper" have similar meanings when used outside the context of fractions.

• Originally, Waifu (and its Spear Counterpart term Husbando) referred to a fictional character that a person loved obsessively, to the point they would marry the character if given the chance. But because it's possible for any character to inspire that level of obsession, it eventually meant "character one loved the most", then eventually "favorite character" or plain "cute girl/boy", which coincided with the point where phrases like "seasonal waifu" (i.e. favorite character that season) started being used and unintentionally brought up imagery of philandering or polyamory. The original definition would eventually be a subset term, such as specifying that a person has "only one waifu".

• Werewolf is a term that specifically applies to male members of humanity that turn into wolves, as the "were" part actually derives from the word "werman", an archaic word for a male human which was later shortened to "man" (and that's a whole other case). The correct term for a female that turns into a wolf is a wyfwolf, from the term "wyfman", which was later shortened to "woman".
  • On a related note: Lycanthrope specifically means werewolf (it comes from Ancient Greek and literally means "wolf person"). Some works erroneously use it to mean any were-creature. A better term to use would be werebeast or therianthrope (literally "beast person") if "werebeast" is too boring for you.
• Whence, thence, and hence, mean, respectively, "from where", "from there", and "from here". Thus, using any of those words with the word "from" is redundant. They were sometimes used with "from", but mostly for emphasis, e.g. "Where are you from?" or "There is where he's from."
  • However, the phrase "from whence" appears in the King James Bible.
    • This phenomenon, which also occurs in the Book of Common Prayer in forms such as the double plurals "seraphims" and "cherubims", is probably because of the translators' fears that the "correct" language would not be understood by the illiterate masses, and so various slightly odd turns of phrase emerge.
    • In case you were wondering, the potential singular and plural forms are as follows: one seraph/cherub; two seraphs/seraphim/seraphin/cherubs/cherubim/cherubin. "Seraphims" and "cherubims" are right out.
• The word willy-nilly, universally understood today to mean "haphazardly" or "arbitrarily", originated as a contraction for "will ye or nill ye", roughly meaning "whether you like it or not".

• Yaoi is frequently used for all manga with gay male content. This isn't correct. Bara is the proper term for most manga written and read by gay men, though the most widespread term in Japan is Gei-comi. Yaoi is mostly written and read by women (although there are male yaoi writers, and female bara writers). Bara tends to have more Manly Gay characters, in contrast to the bishounen yaoi characters. Unlike Yaoi, Bara is usually pornographic, and doesn't have the Seme/Uke dynamic in Yaoi.
  • The word itself once was an acronym meaning "No Climax, No Resolution, No Meaning", referring to the way these stories were written rather than just the content. Over the years it slowly morphed into a catch-all for any male/male works regardless of if they had any of the three. Nowadays, fans try to avert misusing the phrase by simply referring to said works as BL (short for "Boys Love", another popular term). In the West, Yaoi had become so prominent a word in media that talked about it that BL was the synonym rather than the other way around.

• You two is, very pedantically speaking, a contradiction, while You all and You lot are redundant. This is because "You" originally meant "you all" already, while "you two" was "ġit" and singular "you" was "thou"... except that isn't quite accurate either: "you" is for the object, eg. "This is you". When it's the subject, then it's "ye", eg. "Ye are here". All this distinction was lost by the 17th century when "Thou", "Thee" and "Thine" became absolete, which is another can of worms (see above).

• Zombie: This is a case where the continued wrong use of a word in popular culture has redefined the term. However, using the term "zombie" to describe any old reanimated corpse is technically wrong. Those which we call "zombies" today were usually called "vampires" in past centuries (before our image of the vampire took on its "bloodsucking" connotation). Zombies are supposed to be bodies specifically animated and directed by a supernatural force (as in Voodoo, Hollywood or otherwise). Zombies don't even have to be dead or undead, as drugged Haitian slaves might tell you. Similarly, ghouls are typically viewed as type of Undead, but in Arabic myth they are actually jinn believed to have been sired by Iblis, that dwelt in graveyards and other uninhabited places. Revenants^note from the Latin reveniō, -īre = "come back" actually were undead, but they weren't typically held to be specifically brought back, they come back of their own accord, either for some specific purpose (such as to take revenge on their killer) or just to harass their families.
• Mouse, pointer, cursor◊. Modern operating systems themselves refer to the "pointer" as a "cursor," however, so the distinction seems to have eroded to a nub.

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