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.
- Venomous and poisonous are not interchangeable, which is a common mistake in usage. Venomous means the subject has the ability to actively transmit poison. Poisonous means the subject transmits poison passively (e.g. is eaten, touched, etc). Therefore, a poisonous frog means that it will poison those eating it, while a venomous snake means it will poison its victims by biting them and injecting toxins. As the mnemonic saying goes, "If it bites you and you die, it's venomous. If you bite it and you die, it's poisonous." note This means that, technically, if you are bitten by a snake or stung by a scorpion, the correct past tense is "I have been envenomed." This may be because most animal venoms are not harmful if swallowed... not that we'd recommend drinking it, since it can still enter the bloodstream through any cuts in the mouth.
- There is a famous (for a given value of "famous") poem by Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper, inventor of the "modern technique" of handgun combat:
A clip is not a magazine
A mag is not a clip
Neither is a grip a stock
And "stock" does not mean "grip".
I do not mean to nitpick
But improvement might be seen
If we could bring ourselves to say
Exactly what we mean.- A clip and a magazine are often used interchangeably, but military terminology is that a clip feeds a magazine (or the cylinder of a revolver) quickly; a magazine feeds into the weapon itself. A removable magazine is often referred to as a clip even by military sources, however.
- This was highlighted early in 2014 when a California state senator delivered a press conference tirade where he kept using "30 calibre clip" and "30 magazine clip"... to characterize the supposed firing speed of a gun, which the size of the magazine has nothing to do with other than how long it can fire.
- A stock is the part of a rifle, shotgun, SMG, or occasionally pistol that is braced against the shoulder; a grip is the part that is actually, well, gripped—it's specifically the part of the gun that is held by the hand that pulls the trigger, and includes the trigger itself (though sometimes also used as a shortened form of "foregrip", the part of a long gun that is held by the off-hand to steady the weapon). The stock and grip are together part of the receiver, the framework that holds the whole thing together (often called a frame on handguns).
- To make things more confusing, in most classic rifles, a stock refers to the large wooden (or plastic) part all the metal parts (barrel, bolt and trigger assembly) are connected to, basically that which would be classified as the receiver in a more modern weapon. In this case, the part of the stock behind the grip that is actually put against shooter's shoulder would be a 'butt'.
- A bullet is the metal slug fired from a gun. A cartridge or round is the unfired ammunition. A casing is the spent part of the cartridge ejected otherwise. Referring to unfired cartridges as bullets is a classic error. Similarly, shot is what's fired from a shotgun. Shell can be both the unfired ammo and the spent casing.
- To be extra confusing, old style cannon fired shot (solid projectiles) and shells (explosive projectiles). Explosive projectiles are still called shells.
- A barrel is the tube a bullet travels down when fired; before firing, the bullet sits (contained in a cartridge, see above) in a chamber. Revolvers have multiple chambers which rotate in a cylinder; other guns load their chambers (or "chamber rounds") from their magazines.
- A clip and a magazine are often used interchangeably, but military terminology is that a clip feeds a magazine (or the cylinder of a revolver) quickly; a magazine feeds into the weapon itself. A removable magazine is often referred to as a clip even by military sources, however.
- For small arms, caliber means the width of the barrel at the narrowest point. "High caliber" is not, in fact, a way of saying "high power". E.g. A 7.62x39mm round fired from an AKM will not impart as much energy to a target as a 7.62x54mm round fired from a SVD Dragunov, nor will the 9x19mm Parabellum round impart as much energy as the 7.62x25mm Tokarev round.
- Another way to think of it is that a "high caliber bullet" will generally be fired from a bigger gun. However, caliber has nothing to do with strength by itself - if anything, the length of the cartridge (i.e. how much space there is in the casing for gunpowder behind the bullet) and of the barrel it's fired through (i.e. how much space there is for the explosion of that gunpowder to impart momentum on the bullet before it exits out the muzzle) has more to do with the energy the bullet imparts on a target than the diameter of the bullet. If you're trying to say that a high caliber hand gun is more powerful than a low caliber rifle, chances are that you're wrong. Unless you want to get into the specifics of grain count, rifling twist, bullet velocity and weight, you're better off assuming that handguns are less powerful than rifles.
- To put it another way, "caliber" is absolutely not the same thing as "stopping power"
. A small-caliber bullet fired from a high-powered rifle is a lot more likely to kill you than a large-caliber bullet fired at a much slower speed — the latter bulldozes its way through the entire region via hydrostatic shock; the former punctures its way through a narrow path. Kinetic energy is a function of the mass times the square of the speed.
- To put it another way, "caliber" is absolutely not the same thing as "stopping power"
- On the same subject, bore and caliber are not necessarily interchangeable. Traditionally for rifled weaponry, especially rifled artillery, "bore" denotes the number of turns in the number of calibers (i.e. how many times the width of the projectile down the barrel the projectile must travel to have one complete turn imparted on it by the rifling). So a rifled late Victorian artillery piece with one turn per 38 calibers is a 38 bore, but a smoothbore early Victorian cannon is a zero bore. To confuse matters further, in the UK the word "bore" is also used to mean the same as "gauge" in regards to shotguns: a measure of barrel diameter based upon the weight of a solid lead ball that will fit perfectly into the barrel, expressed as the denominator of a vulgar fraction of a pound if the numerator is one. Thus if the largest lead ball you can fit into the shotgun barrel weighs one twelfth of a pound, you have a 12-bore (or, in the US, 12-gauge) shotgun.
- To confuse matters, there are two separate meanings of the phrase "high-caliber," one of which means larger bullets, and the older of which means "fits the mold ideally." Therefore in the other usage, higher caliber always means "better," but in guns it's just a straight technical term with no better/worse meaning.
- To confuse the situation even further, the term caliber is also used to indicate barrel length of artillery pieces, especially naval artillery. So when one refers to a 5"/ 38 caliber gun, one is referring to a gun with a barrel that is one caliber, or 5", internal diameter, and 38 calibers, or 190" long.
- Another way to think of it is that a "high caliber bullet" will generally be fired from a bigger gun. However, caliber has nothing to do with strength by itself - if anything, the length of the cartridge (i.e. how much space there is in the casing for gunpowder behind the bullet) and of the barrel it's fired through (i.e. how much space there is for the explosion of that gunpowder to impart momentum on the bullet before it exits out the muzzle) has more to do with the energy the bullet imparts on a target than the diameter of the bullet. If you're trying to say that a high caliber hand gun is more powerful than a low caliber rifle, chances are that you're wrong. Unless you want to get into the specifics of grain count, rifling twist, bullet velocity and weight, you're better off assuming that handguns are less powerful than rifles.
- Point-blank does not mean "at very close range". Point-blank refers to the maximum distance between a firearm and its target before one's aim needs to be adjusted for elevation. Of course, for field artillery or naval guns designed to launch shells in long parabolic arcs, that is quite a close range. For handguns or rifles, not so much.
- The word factoid is often used as if it meant "little fact" or "trivia," as in "here's a little factoid for you". It actually means "something resembling a fact but with no evidence to support it"note , much like android is "something that resembles a man". Amusingly, this can often make the word more appropriate than the speaker's intention.
- Royalty is not the same as nobility or gentry. Royalty is basically the nearest family of a ruler, while nobles are descendants of knights and landowners. There could be royal dukes and noble dukes (for example, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was royalty, not nobility, because he was the nephew and heir of Emperor Franz Joseph). Gentry is somewhere between a subclass of nobility and a category of its own, as people in that class usually own land and are descended from well-established and well-connected families, but don't have hereditary titles or offices.
- Ironic doesn't (simply) mean "funny", "unexpected", "coincidental" or "cruel." See Irony for more on the subject, and Isn't It Ironic? for more on the misuse.
- And on a similar note, cynicism isn't "sarcastic but more". Sarcasm is mocking, cynicism is jaded negativity.
- And before cynicism got its current meaning, it was a Greek philosophy which taught that happiness is independence. From as much as possible - pleasures, law, other people...
- "Cynical" also doesn't mean "doubting something due to lack of proof" or "doesn't accept data from unreliable sources". More accurate words for that kind of thing are "skeptical" and "dubious".
- And on a similar note, cynicism isn't "sarcastic but more". Sarcasm is mocking, cynicism is jaded negativity.
- Impeach does not mean to remove someone from office. Impeachment is the process by which an individual is put on trial for unlawful activity. So Congress did not "try to impeach" Bill Clinton; they did, but he was not convicted and removed from office.
- In the legal context, it means to attack someone's credibility. At trial, both lawyers are trying to impeach the other's witnesses and it has nothing to do with elected office.
- A Scientific Theory is not a guess, hypothesis, or conjecture. It's an established framework of one or more hypotheses with a significant body of evidence backing it. In other words, it's been "proven" to the extent it can be. If a model makes accurate predictions and is consistent with testing and/or observation it can eventually be called a theory, while the word hypothesis is reserved for an idea that you think might work but you haven't had the chance to rigorously test yet. As for why the word theory is used rather than, say, fact or law, this is simply a result of the general understanding that any theory may be incomplete or inaccurate.
This doesn't mean we have any doubts about the validity of the theory itself, but that we may not know everything about it. Gravity is a good example, gravity is "only a theory". That is, our model of how gravity works may not be entirely correct; in fact we know it isn't, since our current theory does not incorporate quantum effects. That doesn't stop gravity from being real. Similarly evolution simply means change, and in the context of biology simply means change from one generation to the next in terms of genetic makeup. Our current theory of how species evolve through natural selection is a theory because the model may not be perfect, but the fact that organisms change from generation to generation is an observable fact.
Incidentally, even in non-scientific usage the word theory did not always mean guess. If you look at how, say, Sherlock Holmes would use the word theory, it would be a model explaining a crime, which is based on evidence, is testable, and has explanatory powers.- It should be noted that this word is now subject to a misconception of the opposite sign, as a result of an overzealous response to the above mistake. The word "theory" does not imply that an idea is unproven, but neither does it imply that it is proven: it really doesn't say anything about the degree of confidence in it. For example, the theory of phlogiston is a thoroughly disproven scientific theory on combustion. It's still a theory, i.e. a system of ideas that aims to explain scientific phenomena on the basis of general principle - it's just that nobody believes in it any more.
- The core "essence" of a proper theory (and by extension hypothesis) is it has the property of falsifiability. This merely means that it's possible to construct a repeatable experiment to test if it's wrong. The actual outcome (proven correct or proven wrong) is irrelevant.
- As a further, a scientific law doesn't mean it's "more proven" than a theory. A law is (loosely) is something derived from a theory to cover a certain point. If your theory was "Jack Harkness is the sexiest creature in existence" then one law might be "If you are in Jack Harkness' presence for more than 31.2 seconds, you will snog him." In more scientific terms, the classic e=mc^2 is a law derived from the Theory of Relativity.
- Decimate means "to destroy one tenth of something", Originating from a form of punishment used on Roman legions where legionaries draw straws and 1/10th are killed. However because the word looks like it means "to reduce something to 10%" this tends to be the modern meaning.
- The words racism, prejudice and stereotype are often confused. Racism is defined as any policy or belief based in whole or in part on the pseudo-scientific theory that all humanity consists of biologically distinct races and that every member of each race has the distinct physical and/or behavioral characteristics of that racenote . Prejudice means the belief that "a group of people [are] characterized by their race, social class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, disability or religion." Stereotypes, on the other hand, are "generalizations of existing characteristics that reduce complexity" (also copied from The Other Wiki). So, the belief of the USA's 'Southern' slave-owners that anyone who was not an Anglo-Saxon European was by default of an inferior race was racism, the belief of Anglo-Saxon settlers that the USA's Amerindian peoples were savages was prejudice, and the belief that all Canadians constantly say "eh" is a stereotype. Stereotype is a neutral term; often when people use the term in a pejorative manner, it is to attack a lazy stereotype — that is, a blanket statement that assumes homogeny among an entire spectrum of demographic.
- Similarly, people often use discrimination to mean negative treatment based on prejudice. In fact, discrimination simply means any differential treatment, regardless of what such differentiation is based on or whether such treatment is positive or negative. Discrimination can and is perfectly rational and justifiable in many situations: for instance, the practice of hiring the more qualified candidate for a job is a form of discrimination. Another example would be to discriminate between foods one likes and doesn't like (e.g. ordering the strawberry shortcake over the apple pie because you do not like cinnamon)—this last sort of "discrimination" is why "discriminating" is a compliment in dealing with matters of taste (e.g. the discriminating wine-drinker can tell the Grand Cru Bordeaux from the plonk, and is considered to have Good Taste because he "discriminates" in favour of the former over the latter). You will often see this used correctly in military contexts. If armed forces are said to be indiscriminate, they have crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
- Finns have become really, really bad at misusing "racism" ("rasismi") in the past ten years or so. People talk about "age racism" or "fat racism" or god forbid, even "sex racism" because they think "racism" just means "discrimination". Part of this stems from the English loanword "rasismi" replacing the old, 100% Finnish word "rotusyrjintä" (literally "race discrimination"). Nobody in their right mind would use a term like "ikärotusyrjintä" ("age race discrimination"), but "ikärasismi", "age racism" is ridiculously popular.
- Bigotry is often generalized into discrimination of any kind. In actuality, bigotry is merely intolerance of beliefs other than one's own. Other factors, such as race, are not relevant to the designation.
- There appears to be a confusion about the words sexism and misogyny. Sexism is discrimination and stereotyping based on sex, and encompasses all forms of discrimination based on sex (indeed, even men who believe that women are inherently better than men, for example). Misogyny and misandry are hatred of women and men respectively. Some dictionaries have expanded this to include deep-seated prejudice against women or men respectively (so a womanizer who sees women only as sex objects would be a misogynist, despite his claims to love women).
- Feminism often gets misused for misandry. Feminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men and nothing more. Unfortunately, due to a Vocal Minority of feminists who tend to skew issues into an "us vs them" rhetoric, their advocacy for equality is often conflated with outright hatred for men.
- There is some confusion as to what a Justification is in the wiki's jargon, due to the everyday use of the term in Justifying Edit. A Justified Trope does not require a Justifying Edit; in fact, nothing should require a Justifying Edit. A trope is justified when there is a good reason In-Universe for its appearance. A Justifying Edit is when a person tries to give a reason or excuse as to why a certain trope appears in a work.
- Polygamy is "marriage of one person to more than one spouse" (to distinguish it from "group marriage"). It is not just a synonym for "polygyny", "marriage of a man to more than one wife". Most arguments brought up in response to "What's wrong with polygamy?" (e.g., "It oppresses women") are irrelevant to "polyandry", "marriage of a woman to more than one husband", and "group marriage", "marriage of multiple people to one another". (And not just because "polyandrists do not exist", which is also factually incorrect.)
- A Battleship is a combat vessel that relies primarily on large caliber guns (11 inches or bigger) to do damage and is armored to withstand guns of equal power, if not greater power. It is not any ship meant to do battle, that would be a Warship. Nobody builds or uses battleships anymorenote (though several are preserved as museums) because missiles and aircraft carriers have rendered their construction uneconomical.
- While we're at it, a Cruise Ship and a Cruiser are very different types of ships. A cruiser is a medium-sized, long-range military vessel while a cruise ship is a passenger ship designed for pleasure cruises. Scifi writers screw this one up all the time when naming spaceships, to the point that it's not unheard-of for one setting to use the terms both correctly and incorrectly.
- You can only truly plead the Fifth in a particularly bad court of Hollywood Law. The correct phrase is to "TAKE the Fifth" (for those non-Americans unaffected by the Eagleland Osmosis: "The Fifth" is the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, one clause of which protects against self-incrimination; better known as "you have the right to remain silent"). Pleading in a criminal prosecutionnote requires a plea, most often "not guilty" or "guilty". (There's also nolo contendere, "no contest": "I didn't do it, but I will not fight the charges," usually done to avoid civil liability on the grounds of res judicata/collateral estoppel—particularly when the criminal penalty is relatively light but the damages in a subsequent civil suit will be massive if the case goes against you.)
- While 'The Fifth' is not a plea, most courts will understand the statement "I plead the fifth" as a suspect explicitly invoking their Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. According to the Supreme Court, while a suspect must explicitly invoke the right, "No ritualistic formula is necessary in order to invoke the privilege" (Quinn v. United States, 349 U. S. 155, 164 (1955)).
- While 'The Fifth' is not a plea, most courts will understand the statement "I plead the fifth" as a suspect explicitly invoking their Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. According to the Supreme Court, while a suspect must explicitly invoke the right, "No ritualistic formula is necessary in order to invoke the privilege" (Quinn v. United States, 349 U. S. 155, 164 (1955)
- Similarly (and technically), pleading insanity is shorthand used outside of court for pleading "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect".
- Also worth noting is that one cannot be diagnosed as insane, because insanity is a legal concept, not a medical one. Even if a medical professional determines a person is mentally ill, a court must decide if that mental illness is legally relevant. In general, while having a mental illness or severe cognitive difficulty is an element of the court's decision, at the end of the day you are adjudicated insane, not diagnosed as such.note Similarly, on the civil side, you can also be adjudicated legally incompetent to do any number of things (to sign a contract, to commit a tort, to make a will, to serve as trustee of a trust); although the standard for that is a lot lower—"incompetence" can include moderate senility, for example—it is possible to have some kind of mental illness or cognitive difficulty and still be deemed legally competent to handle one's own affairs.
- Similarly, insanity means someone being mentally ill or being extremely illogical/foolish. Most people use the pop culture version taken from Far Cry 3 where a character states that insanity is "doing the same thing over and over, expecting things to change". While someone who is mentally ill can exhibit such a behavior, it is not what insanity is all about.
- The phrase "compare and contrast" is often used on this very wiki, but it is technically redundant. Contrasting is a type of comparison that focuses on the differences, like before-and-after photos or a Twin Desynch, while comparing in the broader sense will note similarities as well as differences.
- Exponentially means "increasing at a rate which is also increasing", not merely "increasing" and certainly not "a lot". Mathematically speaking, "exponentially more" refers only to the difference between the rates of increase of two functions, and has a much more specific meaning than "this is growing faster than that"note Values that stay the same or increase at steady rate are not, by definition, "exponentially" anything. Most people who say this mean "orders of magnitude greater". An "order of magnitude" is (usually) ten timesnote , so more than one would be 100 times, 1000 times, or more. That said, a quantity that is ten times larger than its starting value after one year, 100 times larger after two years, and 1000 times larger after three, can be said to be growing "exponentially" as the relation between value N and time t is one of N=10^t or N≈44.7e^t.
- A quantum is a discrete unit of something. Therefore, when James Bond finds his Quantum of Solace, he doesn't feel that much betternote . A quantum leap is a change directly from one state to another, without any defined intermediate states happening along the way. The distance leaped over does not need to be the smallest possible. Some pedants have not quite grasped this.
- To better describe, think of the word "quantity". When you have a quantity of something, i.e. a specific number of units of it, those units are quanta. In physics, a quantum specifically means "the minimum amount of a physical entity involved in a physical interaction" (from The Other Wiki).
- Inflammable is not an antonym to flammable; it's a synonym. The antonym is non-flammable. (Granted, this is played for comedy more often than it's used seriously...)
- The confusion here is mostly due to the fact that inflammable (derived from "inflame") doesn't come from the typical [in-] negation, it comes from [en-], to give or receive. "Flammable" is actually the newer word, created because people knew that this exact mistake would be made. It makes sense once you consider that the archaic enflame is similar to enrage and enjoy.
- "Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"
- "Flammable! Or inflammable, forget which. Doesn't matter!"
- George Carlin: "Flammable... inflammable... non-inflammable. Why are there three of them? Either it flams or it doesn't!"
- "It tries to set your face on fire, but you're inflammable." Wait, that means flammable. You're "un-light-on-fire-able."
- Of course, if someone did successfully light your face on fire, you'd suffer inflammation, which is a physiological response to injury. So you'd be inflamed as well as inflammable.
- Mano a mano is a commonly used Spanish and Italian term that translate as "hand to hand," (which means the same thing as in English, but with a connotation of "evenly matched"). It does not means "man to man"note . This is what is known in linguistics as a false friend. Sincerely saying that you want to settle things "mano a mano" before pulling out a gun is an example.
- Although, technically in some countries people shorten the word "hermano" (brother) to just "mano". So it could also be "brother to brother" ("hermano" or "mano" has been used as an identifier even if the person in question is not a sibling at all.)
- Even worse is when someone says "mano y mano" which is hand and hand, making no sense in relation to fighting, and even less sense when they think they are saying "man and man". Unless...
- The word whom is used by many as simply "who, but fancier." "Whom" is a direct or indirect object, so if you ever see someone use it otherwise ("Whom are you?" for example), they're futzing it up. As a general rule, replace the usage of "whom" with "them" (and, correspondingly, "who" with "they") and see if it still makes sense.
- "Whom" is used to describe people something happens to, and "who" describes people who do something. You might ask about a proposed business deal, "Who affects the deal?" and "Whom does the deal affect?"
- "Wherefore", as in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, does not mean "where", but "why"; "wherefore" is to "therefore" as "what" is to "that". Juliet was not wondering where Romeo was, but rather wondering why the man she loved had to be Romeo, one of her family's hated rivals. (Juliet's whole thing in the balcony scene is a meditation on the meaninglessness of labels.)
- People have been told not to say "Me and Joe went to the park", but "Joe and I ...". For too many, this has morphed to a general anxiety around the word "me", so they always use and I. This is a mistake. "He saw Joe and I" is wrong (it should be "Joe and me").
- "I" is when you are the subject, and "me" is when you're an object. This does not change if you are accompanied by someone else.
- First person singular pronouns always go after anything else when multiple subjects or objects are involved, so "I and ..." is never correct. (This is courtesy, not grammar.)
- If you have trouble knowing whether or not to say "I" or "me", take out the other person/thing/whatever and see if the sentence still makes sense. ("Joe and I went to the park" changes to "I went to the park", not "Me went to the park")
- This is only the case in formal English, however. In discourse, almost all speakers will accept "Me and Joe went to the park" as an informal but grammatical variant. "Me and Joe" is somewhat more common than "Joe and me", an interesting inversion of the above "first person last" rule.
- Similarly, "He saw Joe and I" is used consistently by some speakers of e.g. Northern Californian English. This is probably hypercorrection in avoiding "me" entirely, as noted above, which has been adopted into the dialect.
- People who have been told that and I is not a panacea will often abuse the word myself. This is a mistake as well. Myself is reflexive — when you're both the subject and the object. "I wet myself", "I touch myself" and "I cut myself" are all okay (grammatically, that is). "Please send the memo to Joe and myself" is wrong. You mean "... to Joe and me."
- Settling this and the above immediate point of grammatical confusion: In all cases where you list any series of individuals, ending with "and I/me", the way you settle the "I vs. me" is to eliminate everyone else from the list and isolate the "I/me". For instance, "Joseph, Victoria, and I went to the amusement park and rode the Thunderstrike," is correct because "I went to the amusement park..." would also be correct. Similarly, "Grandma Robinson regularly sent Joseph, Victoria, and me $5 checks on our birthdays," is also correct because "Grandma Robinson regularly sent me..." would also be correct.
- Possessives can get awkward as well, such as the cringeworthy "Joe and I's apartment." If you absolutely cannot get away with "Me and Joe's apartment," and the context isn't clear enough to just say "Our apartment," then the correct formal phrasing would be "Joe's and my apartment" for the same reasons listed above: "Joe's apartment" and "My apartment" are both correct by themselves.
- Whenever you are unsure whether to use we or us, delete the following word and see which sounds right. Thus "We tropers are really smart" changes to "We are really smart," and not "Us are really smart."
- Tense, aspect and mood tend to all get grouped under the first. Linguistics, makes a clearer distinction: Tense refers to the part of grammar that indicates when something happened; eg. I played basketball. Aspect refers to how the event unfolds in time, eg. I have played basketball (here, emphasising the action is complete). Mood pertains to the speaker's perspective about the action eg. I heard he plays basketball, or I think he plays basketball.note
- Similarly, passive is a voice, not a tense, because it has nothing to do with when the action takes place. A quick and easy way to identify passive voice- can you add "by [whatever]" after the verb/is it already there? Thus, you get "His brains were eaten (by zombies)"- passive voice, "Zombies were eating his brains (by zombies)"- not passive voice.
- A vaccine is a component of a pathogen designed to induce immunity to it, not a miracle cure. Typically they are most effective before being exposed to the pathogen, though the rabies vaccine, which is typically given to humans after they are exposed to the rabies virus, is an exception. Vaccination and immunization are often, incorrectly, used interchangeably, but an immunization is simply anything that induces immunity, which includes vaccinations as well as antibody therapies that can cure a disease after exposure.
- Bemused has nothing to do with being "amused" — in fact it means "utterly confused."
- Similarly, Nonplussed does not mean "aloof" or "unimpressed". It means "bewildered".
- Or "unperturbed". Non-reacting due to confusion, or just non-reacting.
- Similarly, Nonplussed does not mean "aloof" or "unimpressed". It means "bewildered".
- Slander and libel tend to be used interchangeably. Libel is defamation in the form of written words, while slander is defamation in the form of spoken words. Defamation is a catch-all that covers both. With the advent of the Internet and lower barriers to publishing, the definitions are changing, but libel is generally public postings and slander is generally private words.
- The distinction (in the UK at least) comes from the permanence of the defamatory statement. If I said it to someone in a restaurant it's slander. If it happened to be inadvertently recorded and put in a movie soundtrack or written in an article, it's libel.
- A.P. Herbert took this to the length of parody in "The Lawyer's Dream", where a bench of judges are arguing interminably about whether an audio recording is libel or slander?
- Mentioned in the first Spider-Man movie, as follows:Peter Parker: Spider-Man wasn't trying to attack the city... he was trying to save it. That's slander.
J. Jonah Jameson: It is not. I resent that. Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel. - Also note for Eagleland Osmosis purposes that in all civil-law jurisdictions and many common-law ones (e.g. Virginia), slander and libel do not exist/have been merged and there is only "defamation" to cover injury arising from false statements, whether spoken or written. Also note that even in common-law jurisdictions that still respect the distinction, the only significant difference (in most jurisdictions) is in the proof needed for damages: with libel, all you need to show is "general" damages, i.e. put forward a good-faith estimate as to how much the damage to your reputation has cost you, but with slander, you need to prove "special" damages, i.e. need to point to at least one situation in which the injury to reputation had actually and directly harmed you (e.g. cost you a job) before you can collect anything (although if you can prove special damages, you can usually collect general damages as well).
- The distinction (in the UK at least) comes from the permanence of the defamatory statement. If I said it to someone in a restaurant it's slander. If it happened to be inadvertently recorded and put in a movie soundtrack or written in an article, it's libel.
- In Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, people often say, "Spell X has been casted" or "I have casted spell X". There is no word "casted". The word "cast" covers both present and past tenses. So both, "I will cast spell X on the monster" and "I have cast spell X on the monster" are the correct forms. The same conjugation is also used regardless of the specific thing or person being cast: Some sculptures are cast, actors are cast in movies.
- Puritanical means keeping "practicing or enforcing strict religious behavior." Its only tangentially related to anything sex related, and most certainly does not mean enforcing current laws about the age of consent (which in most countries is higher than the age specified in the dominant religion and derived from quite secular legislation). This does not stop more than a few pedophiles from calling such laws "puritanical."
- Another mistake frequently made in fantasy contexts is the conjugation of slay. As seen on acres of Disney World merchandise, "I slayed the dragon" is incorrect. "Slay" doesn't work like "play." Instead, it should be "I slew the dragon." Alternatively, "I have slain the dragon."
- Lampshaded in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Willow on one occasion had difficulty coming up with the right form. Giles, surprisingly, says either slew or slayed will do.
- You do not seen something. You saw it, or you have seen it, but you never seen it.
- Most uses of the phrase "I seen it," especially those with enough emphasis to rule out a slurred "I've", are identifying the speaker as a hick.
- Inbreeding means breeding among closely related individuals. Not breeding with members of another group or anything else. The confusion likely comes from the similar-sounding word "interbreeding." But in or intra refers to the inside and inter refers to the outside. note By the same token, interbreeding should not be used to mean marrying your sister.
- Similarly, a butler is the head of a large household of servants, dealing specifically with the wine cellars — "butler" is, in fact, a corruption of "bottler". Because Jeeves is Bertie Wooster's only servant, his first job title would be "valet", although butlers may double as valets and vice versa.
- In one story, Jeeves' feelings are actually hurt when he is called on to buttle. That the normally unflappable "gentleman's gentleman" takes offense at something that seems trivial to us says that at one point it was a much more important distinction.
- Additionally, valet, when referring to a gentleman's servant, is always pronounced such that it rhymes with "pallet" or "mallet". Valet prounounced in the French style, such that it rhymes with "chalet", is an attendant who parks your car. In the United States, anyway. In the United Kingdom, they don't seem to make a distinction.
- While we're on the subject, claret—meaning a type of red Bordeaux wine and its associated colour—is pronounced to rhyme approximately with "merit". The word is a very old English borrowing, deriving from medieval English nobles' love of a kind of dark rosé Bordeaux called clairet, which the English eventually changed to "claret" as they began speaking English rather than French as a first language. They eventually began just calling any Bordeaux "claret," and when the preference of the English nobility (who still love French wine, especially Bordeaux) shifted from a rosé to dark red, the name didn't change. Pronouncing it in the French manner is a hyperforeignism and frowned upon by the people who actually drink it. (You might be forgiven for your first offence if you're from a region or group that isn't familiar with the term—for instance, the same wine marketed as a "claret" in England will just be called a Bordeaux in America—but once you've been warned, you're on your own.)
- Interstellar means traveling between stars. Earth to Alpha Centauri is interstellar; Earth to Mars is interplanetary (and for heaven's sake not intergalactic). Intrastellar travel would be travel within a star; transstellar would be across one; do not try either of these without serious heat shields or cooling tech unless you want to get fried to a crispnote . If you absolutely want to keep the stellar root for some reason, you might want to try circumstellar or parastellar on for size.
- To infer and to imply are different things. Person A may infer that Person B is stupid from the latter's misuse of words. Person A may then imply Person B's stupidity through witticism. Person B's inevitably incorrect response will be "Are you inferring that I'm stupid?" Person B is, in fact, inferring that Person A is implying that Person B is stupid, and they're right.
- The difference has been lampshaded by Lisa Simpson and John Munch: "You infer. I imply."
- As annoying as this can be for anyone with an interest in logic or literature, the use of infer to mean "suggest" is in fact very old; John Dryden is just the most famous writer to have used it that way. The difference between "infer" and "imply" is very useful, but it's actually wishful thinking to claim that the words have always meant different things.
- Lampshaded and played with in The Dresden Files TV series:Harry: These drakes, right, they can change shape? They're magical, immortal and all that. But you can change your appearance and you're magical and [stutters] you've been around a long, long time.
Ancient Mai: Are you inferring something?
Harry: Technically, I'm implying. You're inferring.
Mai: Well, it's dangerous either way.
Harry: You didn't answer my question.
Mai: You didn't ask one. Which, at least, shows some common sense. - Lampshaded in The Thick of It Series Two, Episode Three:Hugh: Just tell me, truthfully, did you send that email?
Terri: No, I didn't... and you know I didn't.
Hugh: Sorry, are you inferring...?
Terri: Implying.
Hugh: You're implying that... it was me? - One of Adam Warren's Dirty Pair short stories has this as its main plot.
- This mistake is one of the minor flaws that bother "Weird Al" Yankovic so much in "Close But No Cigar".
- Disinterested is not a synonym for uninterested; it means, rather, that you are unbiased or have no vested interest.
- Though it wouldn't be unreasonable to be uninterested because you are disinterested.
- A good judge is disinterested; a tough audience is uninterested.
- Ironically, the earliest recorded use of "disinterested" is in the sense that now belongs to "uninterested".
- A light-year is a measure of distance: the distance light travels in a year. Many writers have made the mistake of using the term to describe a very long period of time. (Before you get all pedantic and correct people though, note that it could be figurative: someone can be light-years ahead the same way they can be miles ahead.
- Similar to "light year", parsec is short for "parallax second", but is also a measure of distance, not time: 3.3 light years.note "Second" in this case refers to "seconds of arc", i.e., 1/3600 of a degree = 1/21,600th of a full circle.
Interestingly, the infamous Millennium Falcon line, despite many thinking it was a writing mistake, was supposed to be an invocation: Obi-Wan was supposed to react with skepticism to Han Solo, unfortunately it didn't quite come through on-screen and later it got retconned. - Conspicuous means "obvious," not "suspicious". Thus, if something was conspicuously absent, you are merely able to notice that it was absent; you do not necessarily have to raise an eyebrow at its absence.
- Fascism is a loose political ideology that combines ultranationalism, militarism, anti-socialism, totalitarianism, populism and (at least some aspects of) conservatism (insofar as fascists and conservatives can both agree that socialism and liberalism are bad). It's also associated with anti-conservatism (because unlike conservatives they are revolutionaries who look mainly to the future and not to the past for their ideal end-goal society), futurism, corporatism (i.e. Country-Corporation co-operation), military expansionism, and Social Darwinism. It's not a synonym for authoritarian, since one can be oppressive without being fascist. Nor is it a synonym for far-right, since there are many forms of right-wing extremism that have little in common with fascism. Most modern people and political parties that don't self-identify as "fascist" probably aren't fascists. Definite no-no's include communists, socialists, anarchists, feminists, environmentalists, liberals, libertarians, inter/anti-nationalists, pacifists, the USA's Republican and Democratic Parties, Youth Hostels, Gandhi, women and dogs. To be more precise, even people showing antisemitic or xenophobic tendencies cannot be called "fascists" indiscriminately, as the original fascism introduced in Italy by Mussolini wasn't heavy on ethnic- or race- based xenophobia (fascists' aggression was usually directed towards their internal political enemies, chiefly the Catholic Trade Unions and Socialist Parties, while also strongly promoting Italian language and culture based nationalism). It was German National Socialism ("Nazism" or "Hitlerism") that introduced the ideas of racial superiority with some fascists abroad following suit.
- Corporatism is the doctrine promoted by Mussolini that society should function as a body (Latin: corpus) in which each of the various sectors of society (government, business, labor, etc.) are treated as "organs" within the body, interdependent and working toward the betterment of the whole. The term can include big business, but is broader than a simple collusion between business and government; "corporatism" has absolutely nothing to do with the English word "corporation" and is not about corporate interests holding control over government or society (that's corporatocracy).
- Relatedly, corporate personhood does not refer to letting companies vote or adopt children the way individual citizens can. It means a group of people ("a body") are treated as one person for administrative and certain legal purposes (particularly certain economic rights, including, most importantly, the right to enter into contracts and the right to sue and be sued). Perhaps ironically, "abolishing corporate personhood," if done without extremely fine precision, could ban labor unions, Indian tribes petitioning for reparations, and class-action lawsuits.
- And while we're at it, Corporation(public) and a Limited Liability Company(private) are two different things. Most people haven't even heard of the latter but their rights are the ones people often attribute to "Corporate Personhood". To summarize, from a financial, and only financial, standpoint, a Limited Liability Company (LLC) is a person. This is because the whole reason LLCs even exist is so that a person can create a buffer zone between their business and their personal wealth. I.E. so no one can sue the owners of a local Mom and Pop coffee house for all their worth if a customer's coffee ends up being too hot. Corporations do not have all of the same privileges that LLCs enjoy. For example a corporation can't discriminate on who it hires but an LLC can. On the other hand, LLCs don't enjoy as many tax exemptions as corporations. From a legal perspective, an LLC is person who enjoys the same — no more, no less — privileges as an individual doing business.
- Strictly speaking, there is no single period in prehistory called the Stone Age. The term originates from a listing of the three stages of a prehistoric society: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. In the most literal sense of the term, cowboys fought members of the Stone Age in the Wild Wild West; heck, there were still "Stone Age" people living in isolated parts of the world by the time The Flintstones first went on air. The term is usually limited to Eurasian cultures, which complicates things.
- Strictly speaking, humanity as a whole had a single "Stone Age" (during which no sub-group had advanced beyond stone tools), after which the "Stone Age" becomes a term with more limited application, and terms such as "Bronze Age" began to apply as soon as one group use bronze for this purpose, even though they were the only ones. Likewise, the Stone Age would have begun with the first evidence of stone tools rather than the point at which stone tools become ubiquitous. Arguing otherwise would be akin to stating that we don't really live in the Space Age because most people alive right now have never ventured into space.
- Similarly, prehistoric does not necessarily mean ancient. "History" is "the study of what ancient people wrote about themselves," so for something to count as prehistoric, it merely has to predate the invention of writing (which was about 3500 BC). For this reason, there still exists a number of societies today which count as "prehistoric".
- Also, the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age were more a reference to the archaeology of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
- Yea is an an archaic version of "yes" (sometimes still used in very formal context where one is asked to vote "yea" or "nay"). It is not an alternative spelling of "yeah", and is pronounced differently.
- And cartoonists often confuse it with "Yay!", which sounds the same but is a different word, an interjection expressing delight or enthusiasm. ("Yay/Yea, we won the game!")
- This is very probably simple coincidence due to onomatopoeia. The real instance of this trope would be those who misinterpret the older usage as being the newer usage.
- Object (the noun acted on by the verb) and subject (the noun doing the verbing) are opposites.
- While true for active voice, the reverse is true for passive voice in which the object does the verbing. Thus, the agent always does the verbing, and the patient is always acted upon.
- People use the word vagina to describe both a woman's vulva (external genitalia) and vagina (internal genitalia). Even the author of The Vagina Monologues.
- Just to avoid making a false equivalency, "vulva" describes the entire external genitalia of the female, while "vagina" is one element of the internal genitalia (which also include the uterus, ovaries, etc).
- Explained here.
- Explained here
- Similarly, people seem to use Anus, Rectum and Colon interchangeably, when they are very different parts of the digestive system with very different functions. Look 'em up!note
- Just to avoid making a false equivalency, "vulva" describes the entire external genitalia of the female, while "vagina" is one element of the internal genitalia (which also include the uterus, ovaries, etc).
- Consequences. It's commonly used to mean the negative results of an action; the opposite of a reward or benefit. Its actual definition is all results of an action, positive and negative.
- Infamous is frequently used to mean "very famous," which is far from correct. While it is not the opposite of fame (that would be obscurity), it actually means "having a very bad reputation", as in "the infamous Jack the Ripper". Don't make the mistake that the ¡Three Amigos! did when you're asked to meet someone infamous.
- Confusion may also arise from: 1) Deliberately-ambiguous sarcastic use and/or 2) the Jerry Springer effect, i.e. "I want my 15 minutes no matter what I have to do to get it".
- As described above, Infamous is not an antonym of famous. Just wanted to clear it out: if something is infamous, it actually has to have at least some (evil) fame.
- It is interesting, because original meaning of this word, now mostly forgotten, meant something different. Infamy was a form of punishment technically stripping the convicted of any legal protection, in other words, outlawry (in the feudal world 'no fame' meant 'no one heard of him and no one will defend him'). Of course, the infamous had nothing left to lose, so they often were getting infamous in modern sense of this word.
- For another nice self-referencing example, compare the definition of trope in any reputable dictionary to the one used on this site. (For the sake of pedantry, assume the other wiki is not reputable.)
- Merriam-Webster agrees with us!
- So does the OED!
- Good vs Well. Good is an adjective. Well is an adverb. You look good, because good is describing you. You see well, because well is describing how you see. (You can look well, but in that cause 'well' is being used as measure of health, i.e. the opposite of 'You look ill'.)
- You can also correctly use 'look well' for 'look carefully', or 'look skillfully'. Similarly, the above could correctly describe a product that as part of its function interprets visual data. (A robot or something; if it's solely a camera, then its working is synonymous with its looking, and so it's still incorrect.)
- In 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan even corrected the resident Harvard grad in the first episode: "No, Superman does good. You do well."
- Some people, including many English teachers, insist that the statement I feel bad is only correct if it is used to mean that the speaker's sense of touch is functioning improperly, and the proper way to express that one is suffering is to say "I feel badly." This is totally incorrect, and in fact, the reverse is true: in the first case, "bad" is a predicate adjective modifying "I" and linked to it by the linking verb "feel," whereas in the second case, "badly" is an adverb modifying the action verb "feel," and describes how one's sense of touch is functioning. Likewise, the statement "I feel good" is a completely correct response to the question "How are you?", since "good" is, again, a predicate adjective modifying "I"; pedants who insist that one say "I feel well" are incorrect, although that statement is also grammatically correct.
- As a rule, "feel" (in the sense of feeling a certain way), "look" (in the sense of looking a certain way, not looking at something), "sound", "smell", "taste" and all forms of "to be" do not take adverbs, for the reasons given above.
- Like "no split infinitives," this is another example of a Latin rule being shoehorned into English. In Latin and Romance languages, "good" and "bad" are defining characteristics, akin to "saintly" and "evil" - to say that one is feeling evil today is a far cry from being tired. Instead, "I feel well" or "I feel unwell" (or a more specific feeling) are the typical answers in those languages. In English those words do dual duty as vague placeholders and as strong characteristics.
- This is possibly the best single example on the page that exemplifies the natural language problem, as well as why Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness is sometimes quite justified. (i.e. "I feel bad." becoming "I feel less healthful." or "My epidermis is less sensate.") It's also how someone that Will Not Tell a Lie can also be a Consummate Liar through clever use of near synonyms, logical misdirection, etc.
- Literally is often used as a generic intensifier, a "smarter-sounding" substitute for "extremely" or similar. The irony is that the usage is most often figurative, when it actually means "not figuratively." Example of misuse: "It was literally a slaughter!" in reference to a sporting event, assuming said sport isn't a Blood Sport. See Literal Metaphor. Then there are the people who correct this by saying "You mean 'figuratively'," as in this xkcd. That's also incorrect, as the desired effect was to speak hyperbolically, and using the word "figuratively" completely removes that meaning; what they really mean to say is an intensifier like "totally".note
- Peruse means "to read thoroughly", not "to browse."
- Scan has been similarly diluted in common usage, perhaps because computers scan things so quickly.
- In language teaching, both scan and skim refer to quick-reading techniques: scanning is quickly reading through a text to find a particular piece of information, whereas skimming means quickly reading through a text to catch the general gist.
- Incredulous means "not believing," not "incredible." If someone sees something incredible, then they can be incredulous. An easy mnemonic: In general people are incredulous while things are incredible.
- The difference between "rob" and "steal": You rob a person when you steal their property.
- Technically, robbery is defined more narrowly than this: it's taking someone's goods by threat of violence. But yes, it's never correct to say "My wallet got robbed" or "He robbed my wallet", but "I was robbed of my wallet" is correct.
- "Burglary" is a different kind of theft from "Robbery". If you leave your wallet at home, and when you get back, discover that it was stolen, you've been burgled. Or "burglarized" if you're in the United States.
- Legally speaking, burglary doesn't have to involve stealing (larceny and theft cover those). Burglary is the entrance of a building with the intent to commit a crime therein. You don't even have to actually complete the act you entered the building to do. If Alice enters Bob's house with the intent to murder Bob (or steal from him, assault him, or write a bad check while sitting on his couch), she has committed burglary, whether or not she actually does the deed. In some areas, even if you change your mind about committing the crime once you're inside, you can still be on the hook for burglary. As a result, burglary is a favorite of prosecutors as it can be added as a charge to many different acts. The case law of what constitutes "building" and "entry" can get a little silly.
- The term "Assault and Battery" exists because the two represent different parts of the same act. Assault is a a threat which suggests that "immediate harmful contact" will occur; battery occurs upon contact. Swinging a bat at somebody is assault. Hitting somebody with a bat is battery. Consequently, the latter usually depends on the former, except when the threat is unknown until contact. Generally, the contact doesn't have to be violent; the rule is that any unwelcome touching is battery (although as a practical matter you have to meet a certain threshold in order to get the authorities to prosecute). An unwanted pie in the face or kiss on the cheek constitutes assault and battery; thus some statutes on sexual assault actually call it "sexual battery" on the theory that you're punishing the touching, not the threat.
- Different jurisdictions have different definitions. Example: what the MPC and the above call "Battery" is called "Assault" in Delaware, and what the above calls "Assault" is named "Menacing".
- Bear in mind that both assault and battery are not only crimes, they are also civil torts in most common-law jurisdictions. This means that you can be prosecuted by the state and sued for damages by the victim for one act. Battery suits often address things that the state just lets slip; in one case frequently used in law schools (Garratt v. Dailey), an old woman successfully sued a five-year-old boy for $11,000 (in 1952 money!) after she got a hip fracture when he moved a chair she was trying to sit in.
- "Affect" and "effect": In general terms, "effect" is usually a noun and "affect" is usually a verb. However, there are actually five words there, not two.
- af-FECT (v) - To have influence on. "The heavy rains affected the water level."
- af-FECT (v) - To pretend, often to pretend to have a degree of sophistication. "At the wine club, Bob affected a fake French accent to be a douche."
- This is also the base word of "affectation," or a behavior adopted to evoke that air of sophistication. "Even though Bob is from America, he crosses his 7s as an affectation."
- AF-fect (n) - Usually only used in psychology circles, and it's basically a term for an emotional response.
- Effect (n) - A consequence or result of something. "The effect of all the heavy rain was flooding."
- Effect (v) - To create a change. "Due to the flooding, the city effected changes in flood channel construction."
- The things you carry on your person (in your purse or pockets) are your "personal effects"
- Off the northwestern coast of Europe are the British Isles, a collection of two large and many small islands, the largest of which is (Great) Britain and the second largest of which is Ireland. Together they contain two countries: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Ireland (called the "Republic of Ireland" to differentiate it from the island, of which it covers about five-sixths.) The United Kingdom is a country composed of four constituent countries: Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England. Cornwall is a politically united but culturally distinct area within England. There also exists the Isle of Man, the Bailiwick of Guernsey, and the Bailiwick of Jersey, which are not part of the United Kingdom, but which have its Queen as their sovereign and which the UK provides for the military defence thereof. It is confusing but please, for your own safety, NEVER use England to refer to anything besides the land south of the River Tweed and east of the Rivers Vyrnwy and Tamar (Cornwall may be a more debated case but the Cornish will like you for it).
- The term "British Isles" is also disputed by many Irish people, who object to the term "British", given its usual usage as "of or pertaining to Great Britain". The governments of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland both avoid using the term, as do most Irish people, but it is a common term in Great Britain, where it is seen as an entirely neutral, geographic term, akin to "Indian Subcontinent" or "North America".
- Well the British Government uses it, just not in international documents. The neutral term often used is Islands of the North Atlantic (IONA). (This does, mind, include the islands of Faeroe, which are really quite un-British, being ruled by Denmark and speaking their own North Germanic language and all...)
- Not to be confused with the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland.
- At least in the travel industry, the "Indian Subcontinent" is now the "South Asian Subcontinent".
- Also, it's standard practice to refer the UK as "Britain", even though Northern Ireland is part of the former but not the latter.
- Also, a person from Scotland is "a Scot"; many people from Scotland are "Scots." You may describe their nationality and their institutions as "Scottish" (so it's perfectly to say "my friend is Scottish" in the same way that one would say "my friend is English"), but only in that sense.
- 'Scottish' is an adjective qualifying someone or something from Scotland. 'Scot' is a noun. While it's preferable to refer to people from Scotland as "the Scots" rather than "the Scottish"note , it is not wrong to refer to someone as Scottish by way of an adjective. On that note, the adjective is indeed 'Scottish'. Don't use the adjective 'Scotch' outside of Scotch whisky, Scotch eggs or Scotch pies, at least not if you don't want to be scotched yourself.note
- And while we're at it, place-name adjectives like "Parisian" or "Viennese" do not simply mean "from Paris" or "from Vienna", but rather "typical or characteristic of the place in question". Thus, you can have a Viennese café in London (i.e. it embodies characteristics commonly associated with Vienna), but "Le Monde" is a "Paris newspaper" (i.e. a newspaper based in Paris).
- 'Scottish' is an adjective qualifying someone or something from Scotland. 'Scot' is a noun. While it's preferable to refer to people from Scotland as "the Scots" rather than "the Scottish"note , it is not wrong to refer to someone as Scottish by way of an adjective. On that note, the adjective is indeed 'Scottish'. Don't use the adjective 'Scotch' outside of Scotch whisky, Scotch eggs or Scotch pies, at least not if you don't want to be scotched
- These rules similarly apply to people. Hugh Laurie was born in England, Ewan McGregor in Scotland, and Catherine Zeta Jones in Wales. All three are Britishnote , but only Laurie is English. Pierce Brosnan is neither (he's Irish).
- And just to make things more complicated—people from most of the British Isles wince at the expression 'British accent'. Usually because they know what foreigners mean by that, and resent the implication that's how they sound. 'English accent' is marginally better (not that people from much of England will take kindly to being told 'all British accents sound posh and educated to me...', as they'll still feel that their existence is being denied and aren't always as pleased as you'd think to be told they sound 'classy', but it narrows the offence a little.)
- The Isle of Man is not part of England, Scotland or even the UK; it's a separate dependency of the British Crown. The Bailiwick of Jersey and the Bailiwick of Guernsey (known collectively as the Channel Islands) are the other two Crown Dependencies. ("Bailiwick" being an archaic term meaning the area under the jurisdiction of a bailiff — a bailiff being a sheriff's appointee, so a bailiwick would have been a part of a shire). There are also 13 British overseas territories, and the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (both on Cyprus).
- On that note, now you know where the idiomatic expression bailiwick got its meaning: it means an area specific to one's jurisdiction (department, profession, area of expertise): "not my bailiwick".
- The term "British Isles" is also disputed by many Irish people, who object to the term "British", given its usual usage as "of or pertaining to Great Britain". The governments of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland both avoid using the term, as do most Irish people, but it is a common term in Great Britain, where it is seen as an entirely neutral, geographic term, akin to "Indian Subcontinent" or "North America".
- Russia is a country (specifically, a federation of a number of states and republics) running from Finland to the Pacific Ocean, from Belarus to China, from Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean and immediately north of Kazakhstan. The Soviet Union, or more formally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is actually what it sounds like: a country, specifically a supranational federation of different republics with a federation government sitting in the capital of Moscow (at least in a constitutional and formal sense—like many large nations who used the same model, the actual distribution of authority is highly circumstantial and dependent on the period). They are not the same thing, but often times (particularly in, though not limited to, the West) it is convenient to make them interchangeable. Russia was one of the constituent republics, specifically, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, a founding republic of this federation state.
- This even confused foreign audiences at the time of the country's founding: "Soviet Russia" was founded in 1917 and 1918, with the collapse of the Petrograd-based Russian Provision Government (that came into power after the abdication of the Tsar) and the Petrograd Soviet moving the capital to Moscow, with the adding of "Soviet" to the name "Russian Republic." The "Soviet Union" was not founded until 1922, when said republic and five of its neighbors entered into a treat to become a supranational federation. Foreign observers were typically less familiar with the other states, and continued to use the name "Soviet Russia" commonly.
- This is particularly problematic when talking about geographic locations that were in the Soviet Union, but not in the largely-unchanged borders of Russia (for example, Friends speaking of "the Russian City of Minsk" in regards to the capital of Belarus).
- Another common error is referring to pre-1992 Soviet organizations where a Russian counterpart did not exist, or was clearly not the subject: the Russian atomic bomb (when, obviously, nuclear weapons are controlled by the national government), the Russian Air Force (which might refer to the Russian contingent of aircraft in the republic-level Border Forces, but obviously is intended for the Soviet Air Force), the Russian Olympic athletes (referring to Russian athletes alone, but likely intended to reference the entire Soviet Olympic team). Mother Russia is a national personification predating the creation of the Soviet Union, the term used in literature or philosophical speech for the Soviet Union (where it most commonly appears in fiction) is Mother Homeland, or the nonspecific Motherland. Some other republics had their own national personifications in the same period (for example, Mother Armenia, whose statue was erected in 1950). Very few post-war monuments are, accordingly, of Mother Russia.
- In an inversion, most residents of the Soviet Union spoke Russian, as there were dozens of native Soviet languages and Russian was linguistically dominant. To say someone is speaking Soviet is nonspecific and oddly-worded, especially since when not a modifying adjective (in other words, alone) "Soviet" is a noun meaning "council."
- However, the term Great Russia was used even internally to refer to the Soviet Union, or rather the territory of the former Russian Empire that the Soviet Union was forged from. Dropping the "great" would have been considered incorrect though.
- Immoral is knowing it's wrong and doing it anyway; amoral is, generally, not having a sense of right or wrong in the first place. Gravity and a large rock are amoral; my dropping a large rock on your head to kill you is immoral (unless, perhaps, I'm mentally disturbed in such a way that I'm incapable of making moral judgments). Furthermore, nonmoral (sometimes unmoral*) deals with things that are not a question of morality, such as the choice between chocolate or vanilla ice cream. note
- Non-zero-sum does not mean "win-win" or "opportunity to cooperate." It refers to some valuable resources (money, time, oil, wood, etc.) being permanently lost or gained during the event. A zero-sum game merely means that everything the participants begin with is redistributed. Non-zero-sum games can easily be lose-lose instead of win-win, and, while the Prisoner's Dilemma and a few other well-known non-zero-sum games are cooperative, others, such as the dollar auction, are normally non-cooperative.
- Whether something is win-win vs. lose-lose or cooperative vs non-cooperative is usually a function of the players' choices, not of the game itself. If the players in a dollar auction agree beforehand that only one person will bid, and that the profits will be shared equally, that is a cooperative/win-win strategy. Some games can be structured to always be lose-lose, but aren't as interesting to study.
- If by "win" one means "end with more than one started" and by "lose" one means "end with less than one started", it is also not a requirement that someone must win and someone must lose in a zero-sum game; if everyone ends with exactly as much as each one respectively had at the start, it is still a zero-sum game.
- Also, usually game theorists do not use "zero sum game" but "constant sum game". That's partly for ease of mathematics behind it, but it also can mean that all players lose or win if compared to the status quo before the game. It is just that each win of one side is countered by a loss of equal amount on the other side (and let's not start about more-than-two-player games). Also in many to most games meta gaming (e.g. side payments outside of the game itself to counter asymmetric payouts in a win-win situation) is not considered, thus not every non-zero-sum means opportunity to collaborate.
- Whether something is win-win vs. lose-lose or cooperative vs non-cooperative is usually a function of the players' choices, not of the game itself. If the players in a dollar auction agree beforehand that only one person will bid, and that the profits will be shared equally, that is a cooperative/win-win strategy. Some games can be structured to always be lose-lose, but aren't as interesting to study.
- Stupid and ignorant are not interchangeable: a stupid person lacks intelligence, an ignorant person lacks knowledge. So, if someone crosses a street on a red light because they didn't know that red means "stop", they're ignorant. If they cross a street despite seeing a car coming at 50 mph and get hit, they're stupid. (Although if you want to be extremely pedantic, "stupid" in its most original form meant "numbed" or "stunned". The sense lives on in the verb to stupefy.)
- Omniscient means all knowing. It does not necessarily mean Divine or decides right from wrong. A lot of tropers seem to be misusing Omniscient Morality License under the latter assumption.
- Née means "born". It does not mean "formerly known as" or "otherwise known as" or even "maiden name" except in the context that a woman's maiden name is generally her birth name. If a woman is born as Mary Smith, marries and changes her name to Mary Robinson, then divorces, remarries, and changes her name to Mary Jones, it would be correct to say "Mary Jones, née Smith"; it would not be correct to say "Mary Jones, née Robinson."
- Secondly, "née" is feminine. If a man changes his name, it's né (e.g. "Malcolm X, né Little").
- For transsexuals, as a general rule of thumb, you use the gender-specific words of the gender they identify as, rather than their genotype, if you are trying to be polite to them. So for example if you know a FtM, it is "He" "Him" "né" etc.
- Similarly, French-derived adjectives should retain their French masculine-feminine endings. A woman with flaxen hair is blonde, but a man is blond. More obscurely, and only in English, a man with dark hair is not a brunette but a brunet. It would all be pronounced the same in English, though, where articles don't have gender.
- In French, "brunette" carries the literal meaning of "little brown-/black-haired girl." A woman who is dark-haired is "brune", and a dark-haired man is "brun". The nouns, "une brune" and "un brun" can also be used, especially with adjectives ("une jolienote brune"/"un beaunote brun"). "Blondinette" (blond-haired girl) is an endearment. There is no male equivalent for "brunette".
- Also, when one is engaged to be married, the proper word depends on the person's gender: a man is a fiancé, whereas a woman is a fiancée. As with other French-derived terms, they may be pronounced exactly the same, but their gender matters.
- People keep using pragmatic to describe someone who appears to be thinking quite ideally, or something along the lines of that. This is used frequently to describe politicians during political campaigns. The word means "of or pertaining to a practical point of view or practical considerations." In a related sense, pragmatism is a "character or conduct that emphasizes practicality." So depending on the case, one may be correct or not.
- If you're waiting on someone, then you're performing the job of a waiter or servant. If you're looking at your watch wondering where the hell they are, you're waiting for them.
- Dialect difference. Like how people from parts of the eastern US—especially New York City—say "on line for tickets" instead of "in line for tickets". Slight differences between preposition use are a common dialect variation, especially in Germanic languages (anyone who took high-school German probably read that word "preposition" and began to weep softly, like a Shell-Shocked Veteran).
- Trust me, we Germans aren't happy with English prepositions either.
- Dialect difference. Like how people from parts of the eastern US—especially New York City—say "on line for tickets" instead of "in line for tickets". Slight differences between preposition use are a common dialect variation, especially in Germanic languages (anyone who took high-school German probably read that word "preposition" and began to weep softly, like a Shell-Shocked Veteran).
- A narcotic is any sedative defined as drug with morphine-like effects (to quote The Other Wiki). Most people use it as an umbrella term to include all illicit drugs.
- The term was corrupted as soon as the stimulant cocaine was classified as a narcotic in US federal law (the original Harrison Narcotics Act was written to deal with opium trafficking), so for legal purposes it is - despite being a stimulant.
- Argumentum ad hominem means "to attack the person instead of their argument". To explain, consider possible responses to someone saying "2 times 2 is 10":
- "You're an idiot, so you are wrong" - ad hominem
- "You are not a mathmatician, so you are wrong" - Also an ad hominem
- "My calculator says it's 4, so you are wrong. Also you're an idiot" - Rude, but not an ad hominem
- "You're an idiot" - Technically not an ad hominem because it's just a statement, though generally there is an implied "You are wrong"
- Semitic doesn't necessarily mean Jewish. It means of Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Hebrew, and/or Phoenician ancestry.note On the other hand, the terms anti-Semitic, anti-Semitism, and anti-Semite typically only refer to hatred of Jews; these words were coined in 19th century Europe, during the era of "scientific racism" which claimed that all apparent religious and cultural conflicts of Jews and (Christian) Europeans were actually born of conflict between Semitic and "Aryan" races,note and the terminology has stuck ever since.
- Contrast with the lesser-known word anti-Judaism, which refers specifically to opposition to the Jewish religion, and not to Jews as a nation, race, tribe, or ethnicity. Then there is anti-Zionism, which specifically refers to opposition to the political nation-state of Israel and/or Jewish Nationalism in general (some of the most vocal anti-Zionists are Haredi Jews, some of whom have committed violence in the name of their position).
- Both anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism can, of course, be covers for anti-Semitism. Even without deliberate dishonesty, the three tend to shade into each other, especially given how tightly interwoven Jewish religion and nationalism are to the rest of Jewish identity (it's similarly difficult to distinguish opposition to Hinduism from opposition to Indian nationalism or hatred of Indians).
- Contrast with the lesser-known word anti-Judaism, which refers specifically to opposition to the Jewish religion, and not to Jews as a nation, race, tribe, or ethnicity. Then there is anti-Zionism, which specifically refers to opposition to the political nation-state of Israel and/or Jewish Nationalism in general (some of the most vocal anti-Zionists are Haredi Jews, some of whom
- Populist has done a complete turnaround of meaning since the 1890s. Political scientist David Nolan once used it as roughly a synonym for socialist. Actually, while the Populist (or People's) Party of the 1890s that thrived in much of the western and southern United States was more anti-"big business" than anti-business generally, it did call for some reforms that are usually thought of as socialistic (such as the nationalization of particularly lucrative industries). Nowadays, the word has been shorn of almost all economic connotations. To be a populist is to bear resentment against society's elites, who need not necessarily be "the rich." Class is still a factor to some extent, but differing educational levels and the contentious nature of American popular culture also enter into the equation.
- The broadest definition of populism is opposition to the elite, whatever "elite" may mean at the moment. As such, it's perfectly correct to use it for the political movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked for their socialist tendancies and dismantling of corporate giants, as it is to use it for the current anti-intellectualist bent in the American social and political landscape.
- Populist is not about opposition to the elite but about favouring and aiming efforts at the greater populace. To be a populist is to promote oneself to be liked by the majority, the non-elite, if they happen to like the elite it would be populist not to go against the elite...
- To complicate matters further, populist may also refer to politicians who aim their efforts on any majority, thus changing sides and agendas to maximize their support, not to represent any group in particulat. It is more or less political equivalent to 'opportunist'.
- Also, "socialist" and "communist" aren't synonyms. While socialists and communists both believe that Capitalism Is Bad and that the means of production should be owned by the people instead of private corporations, their end goals are different. Communists advocate for a moneyless, classless, stateless society in which all goods and services (houses, cars, food, clothing, etc.) would be provided free of charge and shared among the community. Socialists still support the idea of earning money (and socioeconomic classes would still exist, the gap between them would just be narrower) and using that money to buy personal property.
- "Democratic socialist" is another term that gets misused a lot, especially in the United States. A Democratic socialist is someone who wants the means of production to be owned and operated by the workers (as opposed to traditional authoritarian socialism, where the means of production are owned and operated by the government). It is not someone who wants free healthcare, free education, higher wages, more welfare for the poor/disabled and more regulation on businesses (though most democratic socialists do want these things), but the businesses in question are still privately owned and operated. That is a "social democrat"note .
- The broadest definition of populism is opposition to the elite, whatever "elite" may mean at the moment. As such, it's perfectly correct to use it for the political movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked for their socialist tendancies and dismantling of corporate giants, as it is to use it for the current anti-intellectualist bent in the American social and political landscape.
- Objective (as in the opposite of Subjective), especially when used with the word review (as in a critical review). There is no such thing as an objective review. A review, by definition, is subjective. A consensus may be derived from many reviews, but there will never be a definitive, objective review. An actually objective review would look something like this review of Final Fantasy XIII by Jim Sterling.
- The word one should use when speaking about review that is as unbiased as possible and takes into account multiple point of views is 'intersubjective'.
- The use of a somewhat archaic word has clouded its meaning, but nibbling on hors d'oeuvres serves to whet one's appetite, not wet it. Whet means "to sharpen," as seen in the term whetstone, a stone used for sharpening knives—if something is sharpening your appetite, it's leaving you hungry for more, not dampening (or wetting) your enthusiasm. So, "whetting your appetite for destruction" would mean starting small as a prelude to becoming more destructive, not sating the urge altogether.
- There are so many examples of psychological and psychiatric terms that are misused that it almost warrants its own page. To start with:
- Psychotic: It does not mean "going around and killing people for no reason"; someone who does that is just homicidal. Psychosis is a loss of touch with reality, characterized by disorganised thinking, delusions, and sometimes (but not always) auditory, visual, and tactile hallucinations. While people with psychosis can be homicidal, it is extremely rare (violence by psychotics is more usually related to paranoid or other delusions). Psychosis is also often confused with psychopathy, which is an entirely different concept altogether (as detailed immediately below).
- Psychopath / Sociopath: They are usually not murderers; in fact, many successful CEOs, lawyers, and politicians are psychopaths or sociopaths. Psychopathy and sociopathy both mean lack of a conscience, a limited emotional range, and difficulty in forming significant relationships. They also often lack impulse control. Both psychopaths and sociopaths can be classed as having antisocial personality disorder, though not all people with the disorder are psychopaths or sociopaths. Psychopathy and sociopathy are typically held to be synonyms under the umbrella of antisocial personality disorder (which is the term the DSM-IV uses that includes psychopaths and sociopaths), and when a distinction is made it has nothing to do with the origins of the disorder, since the origins are not definitely known. The typical distinction is that sociopaths have a more normal temperament and are better able to adapt to societal norms. While statistically speaking murderers are likely to be psychopaths or sociopaths, psychopaths and sociopaths are not very likely to be murderers.
- Antisocial: Sometimes used to mean someone who dislikes or fears socializing. In the psychological sense, it doesn't mean that at all. Antisocial attitudes or behaviors are against society, from extreme acts like murder to more minor transgressions like simply being a manipulative, self-centered Jerkass. Someone who fears interacting with other people should be said to be asocial or suffering from social phobia, not "antisocial" tendencies. As a matter of fact, social phobia is an outdated term, and is usually now called "social anxiety disorder." In other words, people who are antisocial are hostile — not merely indifferent — towards society.
- "Antisocial" is also used to denote "rebellious" individuals actively fighting (not necessarily by violence, also by dissent or passive-aggressive behavior) any authority and are incapable of operating under external influence.
- An increasingly more popular and accurate term for the above disorder is agoraphobia, from the ancient Greek term for "fear of the marketplace" (though they were referring more to a political forum than a retail market). More specifically, a fear of being unable to escape from whatever situation you're in (sometimes amended to include 'without severe embarrassment'), rather than the situation itself. Being in a busy place (e.g. a football crowd) could count if you couldn't leave your set without making a huge scene.
- On a related note, introversion is not being antisocial or even asocial; being introverted is simply being most comfortable solitary activities to social activities. An introvert can still wish to socialize when the mood strikes, but they are most at home in their own company.
- Manic-depression is more properly known as bipolar disorder, and does not mean "severe depression" or "wild mood swings;" the highs and lows last for days or weeks at a time. Neither one is a catch-all for "crazy ex." (See borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic disorders for what most people think of as "crazy ex syndrome.")
- Marvin the Paranoid Android is a manically depressed robot, not a manic-depressive robot, which is true - he's enthusiastically depressed.
- Also, bipolar is an adjective, not a noun. It's either "my friend is bipolar" or "my friend has bipolar disorder," not "my friend has bipolar."
- And it doesn't have anything to do with tsunderes, no matter what certain fansubs say.
- On the subject of borderline, saying someone is borderline does not mean they're on the cusp of having a personality disorder; it means they do have one. Borderline is a name for a very specific pattern of behaviour involving emotional instability, poor self-image, impulsiveness, and black-and-white thinking (what psychologists call "splitting"), as well as a fear of abandonment. The name is only used because of historical reasons which are too complex to get into here, and the existence of the disorder has been questioned, with some seeing it as a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder (specifically, one that the profession slaps on female PTSD sufferers, as the overwhelming majority of borderline personality disorder diagnoses are of women).
- Depression is yet another psychological term (seeing a trend here?) that's casually thrown around but has a different meaning in a medical or therapeutic context. Depression is not just sadness, but much more persistent and disabling, and includes many other mood changes and physical symptoms like: anhedonia (loss of the ability to feel pleasure), changes in sleep and eating habits (either much less or much more than usual), and a lack of energy and motivation.
- OCD is often thought of as the concept of a Neat Freak taken to the extreme. That's because the most visible sign of it is the rituals that people who have OCD do (counting, checking, hand-washing, climbing stairs and so on). The reason it's called obsessive-compulsive disorder is because people with it have certain obsessive thoughts that are highly distressing and which they cannot get rid of (things like fears of their entire family dying, or their house burning down, or accidentally harming a baby). The compulsions they have are a coping mechanism of sorts - performing these rituals helps the obsessions go away, but only temporarily. To describe someone as "kind of OCD (adj.)" because they like order and cleanliness is not even close to reality.
- Chronic does not mean "severe". It means "recurring/habitual" and/or "happening for a long time;" it comes from a Greek root meaning "time" (same as "chronological" or "chronicle"), so you should think "over time." Contrast acute, which means "rapid onset". Too many people associate "acute" with "small" due to its meaning in geometry (they should be associating it with "sharp" for the same reason). An illness being acute does not necessarily mean that it is serious, it only means that full set of symptoms display themselves quickly (a papercut is acute).
- Terminal means fatal. Thus, the phrase "terminally online" is probably supposed to mean "chronically online", unless being online somehow kills the people.
- Paranoia and paranoid are a particularly egregious case. Paranoia is a full-blown psychosis, not just thinking people are out to get you. However, someone who really was diagnosed with paranoia would be paranoiac (literally out of his mind), not paranoid, which denotes a neurotic paranoid state.
- This is lampshaded in the movie version of The Caine Mutiny, where Maryk admits that until Keefer talked to him, "I didn't even know the difference between paranoid and paranoia."
- Schizophrenia does not involve multiple personalities. Multiple personalities are a form of dissociation known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It is an extremely rare diagnosis, so rare that its existence is very hotly debated. In addition, one of the major prerequisites is that the separate personalities are usually not aware of each other—something that is often overlooked in both real life and the media, as the protagonist in United States of Tara was quick to point out.
- Especially confusing for those who like their Greek roots, because 'Schizophrenia' literally means "split mind".
- The full etymology for schizophrenia is skhizein (σχίζειν, "to split") and phrēn, phren- (φρήν, φρεν-; "mind, intelligence") not the same thing as personality.
- If we wanted to do right by the etymologists we should switch from Schneider's 'schizophrenia' name for schizophrenia back to Emil Kraepelin's 'dementia praecox'.
- Dementia praecox wouldn't work though because it means "precocious madness", so a degenerative disease of young people. However, schizophrenia isn't degenerative like dementia is, and it's treatable, whereas Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia aren't really and treatments for them are mostly palliative. Also, schizophrenia does most often manifest for the first time in young adulthood (late teens to early twenties) but it can develop at any age, including in the elderly.
- The confusion is likely from some schizophrenics having auditory/visual hallucinations and sometimes speaking back to them, giving the illusion to some people that another "personality" is speaking to the schizophrenic.
- If psychology texts are reliable, the confusion is the above misinterpretation of "intelligence" as "personality", plus failure to understand that "divided" in this instance means something closer to "shattered" than it does to "split".
- The "split" portion of the word actually refers to a divergence of the mind from reality, not that it's split internally.
- The word schizoid, which is a personality disorder, does use this root to mean "cut off (from other people)". But this is a very different thing than schizophrenia.
- If a person has anorexia, that does not mean they are skinny or even necessarily underweight. In strict medical terms, anorexia refers to loss of appetite as a symptom. The psychiatric disorder involving distorted body image and fear of weight gain is anorexia nervosa, and it strikes men (especially athletes and gay men) more than one might think. Also, a person with the disorder is an anorectic or they are anorexic. They would not be "an anorexic." "Anorectic" is a noun; "anorexic" is an adjective.
- The words psychologist and psychiatrist are often confused. A psychologist is someone who has an advanced degree in psychology (normally a doctorate or at least a master's) and does psychotherapy and psychological testing. They can diagnose people, but can't prescribe medication (except in a few jurisdictions) or order medical imaging. A psychiatrist, on the other hand, is a medical doctor who specializes in psychological disorders and they can do these things because of their broader scope of practice. Psychologists study nothing but psychology in their training; psychiatrists have to learn about other branches of medicine first before specializing in it.
- A Narcissist is not someone who's extremely vain. Vanity is simply taking excessive pride in one's appearance. It might not be the most positive personality trait, but you can be vain and still be a decent person. A narcissist prioritizes their self-image above all else. This can include their appearance but it doesn't have to. In fact, a narcissist who's not obsessed with their looks will often look down on those who are and use that as a Suspiciously Specific Denial of their disorder ("I'm not shallow like those bitches!"). Let's say Alice shares a selfie on Instagram of herself doing charity work. She might genuinely care about others and use her platform to spread awareness; vanity would be making sure she looks as good as possible in the process. But if she's a narcissist, then she's primarily doing it for the recognition and is sharing the picture to say "Look how awesome I am!" The posts can be completely identical; the difference isn't what they do, but why they do it.
- Bulimia nervosa is defined as both purging (usually deliberate vomiting, but sometimes excessive exercise or use of laxatives and/or diuretics) and binge eating, and no refusal to eat. If someone refuses to eat but also sometimes binge eats and/or purges, they'd either be an anorectic or have Other Specified Feeding/Eating Disorder (OSFED), whereas if they don't refuse to eat, but they do purge, but don't binge eat, they'd have Purging Disorder.
- Quean does not mean, as Brian Jacques claimed in interviews about The Sable Quean, "wicked woman". Nor, as some readers might assume, does it mean "queen." It means "prostitute" or "promiscuous woman."
- To be bereft of something does not just mean to be without something. It means to be without something that you previously had.
- Peasant is not a general term for a poor person. A peasant is a tenant farmer, a free laborer who rents a farm and works it for himself. The hierarchy is: slave (who is owned property that can be bought and sold, lacking any rights), serf (has some rights, but is required to work his lord's land and give the lord a portion of the harvest), sharecropper (a free man who works on someone else's land and pays the landowner a portion of the crop) peasant, crofter (a farmer who owns his own house, but still rents land to farm), yeoman (owns enough land to support a family), gentleman (owns enough farmland to support himself by renting it out). Admittedly, a lot of this depends on time period and the distinctions can be blurred; for instance, consider someone who rents a piece of land and works it himself but has agreed to pay the rent by sending the landlord crops equivalent in market value to the rent (e.g. "the rent is £600/year; in lieu of cash, tenant may send crops with market value of £600"); is this person a sharecropper or a peasant?note To no small degree this depends on whether he's in medieval England (where he would probably be called a peasant) or the post-Civil War American South (where he would probably be called a sharecropper). Poor farmers can loosely be called "the peasantry," but that's about it.
- Note that Translation Convention can introduce confusion in dealing with non-English-speaking societies. Everything after "peasant" is often called the same thing in many other languages (because "doesn't work for someone else" is a decisive characteristic). Many other European languages also often use their cognates for "peasant" in senses closer to English's "crofter" and "yeoman" (a French peasant could be a full-blown landowner, for example, or a "métayer", a sharecropper). Of course, the reason for the misuse in English is probably writers making Upper Class Twits and evil aristocrats yell "out of my way, peasant!" when challenged, even in a city.
- A Chaingun is a single-barrel weapon with an electrically-driven bolt operated with a chain. It is not a rotary gun. This comes from Doom misusing the term; usually, the reasoning for the mistake is that the latter is fed with a "chain" (ie a belt) of ammunition, or that the barrel group is driven by a chain.
- More accurately still, a "Chain Gun" is the specific model of weapon used on many US and NATO aircraft. Any autoloading (generally fully automatic) weapon larger than a machinegun is called an "autocannon" regardless of mechanism. A multi-barrelled weapon in this class that rotates is called a "Rotary Autocannon." A single-barreled weapon that uses a rotating loading mechanism is a "Revolver Autocannon". The most accurate name for Doom's "chaingun" would be "Rotary Submachine Gun", as it uses pistol ammunition.
- "Decapitated head" is paradoxical: to decapitate someone is to behead him. Cutting a head off of itself is... well... inconceivable. A body can be decapitated; a better adjective for a head on its own is severed. (Disembodied usually means 'intangible'.)"Newsanchor overheard in Highlander: "It also left a man's decapitated body, lying on the floor next to his own severed head."
- Related: "decapacitate" is a rarely-used word that means to reduce someone or something's capacity for action, essentially a milder version of "incapacitate." It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the head; in fact, decapitating someone is far more likely to incapacitate them (by killing them) than decapacitate them.
- Differential is both a noun and an adjective, but in the noun form, it is a mechanical device used for combining torque from different inputs, not a synonym for difference. This is a favorite of television sports announcers ("There's a three-point differential in the game!").
- A differential is also used in mathematics to refer to infinitesimals in calculus and differential geometry i.e. dx, dy etc or to the Jacobian matrix of partial derivatives.
- A demigod is not a lesser "category" of deity. "Demi" means "half", i.e. "half god". A demigod has both mortal and divine parentage. For example, Hercules (son of Zeus, a god, and Alcmene, a human) is a demigod, whereas a dryad (a forest spirit) is not.
- Note, however, that the term was invented by 19th century classicists; the Greek word for "of mixed divine and mortal parentage" was "hero" (which originally never applied to pureblood mortals—and also had intrinsically cultic connotations, since all the mythic heroes were considered appropriate for worship, especially Heracles).
- Something being random means that it has no clear predictability or arrangement. It doesn't mean "kooky" or "off the wall", and neither sporks nor waffles nor doom are "random" (see also: the 4chan meme "Katy").
- In fact, since "doom" means "fate" (as shown on the Very Pedantic page) doom is in fact the least random thing imaginable.
- Prequel doesn't mean "a previous installment in a series". It means "a sequel to an existing work that takes place earlier in the timeline of its 'Verse".
- The suffix mancer does not mean "magician". A [something]mancer is a very specific type of magician who uses [something] to predict the future. (A "necromancer" used bones and entrails to divine.) A better suffix, -urge, means "worker", as in "one who creates or works with". A thaumaturge (worker of wonders) is a magician, but a dramaturge (playwright) isn't, and neither is a metallurgist nor a demiurge.
- The Internet usage of Troll does not mean "someone who has a different opinion from mine", "someone who has an unpopular opinion", or "someone who does something for attention". A troll is someone who does/says things for the sole purpose of trying to piss people off. Someone can legitimately have an unpopular opinion, but he's not a troll unless he states it just to be annoying.
- Of course, a troll may accuse another user of being a troll just for haivng a different opinion.
- A well known real-life troll is Fred Phelps, who travels around the country saying the most upsetting things he can to emotional audiences (mainly at funerals), in the hopes that someone will cross the legal line so he and his family (all lawyers) can sue them.
- The term comes not from the mythical creature, but from a trawling, the method of fishing involving moving through the water while waving the bait behind you. An internet troll is fishing for reactions, waving their 'opinion' as bait.
- Its earliest use, in the early 90s, usually referred to 'fishing out' new users and lurkers (often in a good-natured attempt to encourage them to write) by presenting an argument that had been already thoroughly discussed by regulars.
- In even narrower sense, trolls do not even have to have an unpopular opinions. They cause also can cause stir by simply initiating a discussion that is bound to cause an argument but they may do so without taking sides themselves. (However, be careful with accusations in this case; they may simply have triggered an event by accident.)
- Not to mention the Chewbacca Defense.
- Lately the term has been used as a synonym for "bully" or "harasser" in that it constitutes behavior used to belittle or demean a target. It's also often confused with the term "flaming" which is any sort of negativity towards a specific user. While the initial trolling might involve any of those, the end goal of the troll is to incite flames rather than just insult somebody.
- A furry is not the same thing as a zoophile. A zoophile gets off on real animals, while furries like fictional anthropomorphic characters, most of whom would be intelligent enough to consent if they were real.
- Also, many if not most furries are not interested in the sexual aspect of the fandom at all, they simply like drawing/dressing up as/writing about anthropomorphic animals.
- The confusion about the definition of the term is not helped by the fact that it is often used interchangeably to refer to both fans of anthropomorphic animal characters and the characters themselves. The especially pedantic may insist on referring to the former as "furry fans" and reserving the term "furry" for the latter, but even that may be confused by the practice of taking on a "fursona," at which point a person is both a furry fan and a self-identified (though not literal) furry (i.e. anthropomorphic animal).
- I.e. ("id est," "that is") and e.g. ("exempli gratia," "for example") are not interchangeable. I.e may be used to expand upon a point or to exhaustively list every possibility, while e.g. merely gives possible answers but leaves the list open."There are many varieties of pasta, e.g., spaghetti, macaroni, and gnocchi.""Pasta should be made al dente, i.e., firm and chewy, not overcooked."
- A useful mnemonic is to remember i.e. as "in essence" and e.g. as "example given."
- On a similar note, etc. ("et cetera," "and other things"), should never end a list introduced with "e.g." or "i.e." (or the plain English "for example" and "such as"). Etc. and e.g. are redundant, and it makes no sense to abbreviate i.e.
- A cannibal eats members of its own species. Something that is non-human, but eats humans, is an anthropophage. "Anthropophage" is a pretty pedantic word, but come on; use "man-eater" or something. Technically a human who eats other humans would be a cannibal and an anthropophage, but "cannibal" seems superordinate in this case. The word "cannibal" derives from the Carib people (after whom the Caribbean Sea is named) who were once believed to chew and spit out the flesh of a defeated enemy.
- This was actually mentioned in Dawn of the Dead (1978), where it was said that the undead were not cannibals, because they were no longer human.
- This is also pointed out in Dragon Age: Origins by Alistair when he remarks that it's not cannibalism if Dog is eating fallen foes.
- However, in fantasy/sci-fi settings, the definition is sometimes extended to any sapient creature eating another (Elves eating humans, or even lizardfolk, would be considered cannibals in such a setting).
- More evolved, at least in common usage, is invalid: evolution doesn't work like a ladder that animals climb to the top. Likewise, "devolve" is meaningless because to evolve just means "to change" and says nothing regarding whether the change is for better or for worse. (You can say that something is more evolved if you're referring to how a species changes over time: homo sapiens is more evolved than homo erectus, though this usage is generally eschewed in biology.)
- If we were to put this in the "very-Pedantic" entry, "evolution" originally meant to unroll something. The word has been documented since the 17th century and might be even older. The word "evolution" is a prime example of a dead metaphor, where a metaphor becomes an actual term no longer considered metaphorical (e.g. electric current). The word was used a metaphor for the unrolling of time/fate and over the ages, its, well, evolved so that not only has the metaphorical meaning lost its metaphorical use, the original meaning has been completely forgotten.
- Castration is specifically the removal of testicles. The correct term for the removal of the penis (or the male genitalia as a whole) is emasculation. Though it might be argued that the correct term for either one is ouch.
- The surgical removal of the penis is called a penectomy (not "penisectomy", as Captain Cragen once said), while orchidectomy is the term for the surgical removal of the testicles. (And now you get the joke in Mad Men about Bert Cooper's "unnecessary orchidectomy.")
- One can be castrated without the testicles being removed (still less the whole scrotum- very dangerous without modern techniques, it has a heavy blood supply)- the only significant part is the testes, the glands within them. These can be permanently decommissioned by drugs or, in the case of the Italian castrati singers of the 14th to 19th centuries, by being deliberately ruptured by being squeezed by one who knows where to apply pressure. (They can also be ruptured by accident, though you'd have to be very unlucky to lose both this way.)
- A totem is not a personal spirit guide, even if it is an animal. A totem animal protects an entire group of people, such as a family, clan, or tribe.
- Asexual is applied in general to anyone who doesn't have sex for any reason, but, as a proper sexual orientation, there are several more nuanced shades of meaning. Asexual in the strict sense means that a person does not feel physical attraction to others, or only rarely or under specific circumstances. Someone who identifies as asexual does not see themselves as suffering from a medical disorder like lack of sex drive.
- An asexual can and often does experience attraction but it's more of the platonic/aesthetic type. There are as many different types of asexuals as alosexuals, but it should really be pointed out that it has nothing to do with desiring relationships. One can be asexual but romantic (enjoys friendship, love, kissing or hugging, but is uninterested in sexual activity).
- Finally, asexual can also refer to animal species that don't have separate sexes for the purpose of reproduction. However, context is usually sufficient to distinguish the terms - it depends on whether you're discussing humans, or non-human species.
- Relatedly, abstinence is a willing choice not to engage in some activity—such as, for example, sexual abstinence (which might range from "doing everything but intercourse" to much stricter levels of abstinence, like refraining from masturbation and from sexual contact with others). Celibacy originally meant simply "being unmarried", but now generally means being unmarried and sexually abstinent. Chastity means obeying the appropriate moral rules for sexual behavior, which does not necessarily imply sexual abstinence. In traditional Christian teaching, for example, a chaste husband and wife would be sexually active with each other but with nobody else, while a chaste, unmarried person would be sexually abstinent.
- Comprise and compose are (roughly) reciprocal, not synonyms. An archipelago is composed of many islands, and comprises those islands; it is not comprised of the islands — if anything, the islands are comprised of the archipelago (though this use of of is very archaic; comprised by might be better—although not by much, since comprised by is hardly a common expression either). A good way to test if you're using it right: replace "comprise(s)" with "contain(s)" and see if the sentence still sounds right. For example: "the USA comprises (contains) 50 states."
- Erstwhile is not laudatory; it means 'former'.
- In chemistry, Volatile does not mean "explosive" or "flammable"note , it means how likely the substance is to vaporise. Vapours of a given flammable substance likely will be even more flammable than say the liquid form, but that's just coincidental. The correct words to describe something which is likely to go boom or otherwise react spontaneously is either unstable (for when it is energetically likely) or labile (when it is kinetically likely); in particular, gasoline and oils are volatile but not particularly unstable, compared to compounds like acetylene.
- In regular English, the other meaning ("quick to anger" or "prone to violence") is perfectly correct, however.
- Holland is a region in The Netherlands. It comprises most of the coastal region and the best-known cities from The Netherlands lie in Holland, namely Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. Holland is not a valid name for the country, nor is it the name of a province anymore. The region that was once Holland now has the imaginative names North Holland and South Holland. This is akin to referring to the UK as "England".
- It should be noted that in several languages the official name of Netherlands is derived from the name of the Holland province (e.g. 'Holandia' in Polish or 'Holland' in Danish and Estonian). It is used however to denote only the European part of the Kingdom of The Netherlands that incorporates also Aruba and former Dutch Antilles).
- Of course, it doesn't help avoid confusion when the pars pro toto shorthand "Holland" is used in the name of the national football team and by local fans who shout "Holland!" and "Hup Holland Hup!" at matches (so the word "Holland" is prominently implied to denote the whole country to the rest of the world's spectators), and "Holland" is currently used by the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions to refer to the entire country in literature for prospective visitors. The main tourist website is Holland.com which contains a brief description of why Netherlands is technically correct but why it's nonetheless preferred to use Holland to attract visitors. The Dutch may actually be less pedantic on this point than many English speakers.
- A rabbi is a person sufficiently versed in Jewish law to have obtained this designation from a religious authority, not unlike an academic degree. It is not a job title. The same way a person with a PhD is entitled to be addressed as "Doctor" even if they don't use their degree professionally, a rabbi...
- ...is not the Jewish equivalent of a priest. There still exists a hereditary priestly class within the Tribe of Levi, called Kohanim, although their duties have been significantly reduced since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE;
- ...is not a person who certifies kosher food. This is a mashgiaḥ, which literally means "inspector", and it is certainly not done through "blessing" food as Hollywood seems to think;
- ...is not a person who performs circumcisions. This is a mohel, who is generally a licensed physician these days;
- ...is not a person who leads prayers in the synagogue. This is a ḥazan or cantor, or often just a lay member of the congregation;
- ...and is not exclusively the spiritual leader of a synagogue. Rabbis who do this are usually called "pulpit rabbis," but there are thousands of individuals with rabbinic ordination who do not work for synagogue congregations, including those who study full-time, teach, etc.
- Now to be fair, there is overlap among these categories — some kohanim become rabbis, some rabbis work as mashgiḥim, etc., but the fact of being a rabbi does not mean that one does any of them, much less all of them. Also, any bearded man wearing a black hat with long curly temples is not a rabbi. This is the standard appearance for all ultra-Orthodox Jews whether they have rabbinic ordination or not.
- Jealousy typically refers to the negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety over an anticipated loss of something that the person values, particularly in reference to a human connection. One can be a jealous boyfriend, but one cannot be jealous of someone else's boyfriend, unless there's already something between the two of you. This is often confused with Envy, which is "an emotion that occurs when a person lacks another's (perceived) superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it. Further compounding the confusion is the word Covet, which includes all the characteristics of the definition of 'envy' but also indicates a willingness to take the object coveted for themselves. For instance, if a person has a television set that you want, envy might drive you to buy a bigger, better TV (as you desire the quality of owning a nice television). If you coveted it, however, you'd be more likely to steal their TV (as you desire the exact television set they own). And if you're jealous, you're worried that they're coveting your TV.
- This confusion has caused no small amount of confusion with one of the Christian commandments. The command is correctly translated as 'Do not covet', but 'Do not envy' and, worse yet, 'Do not be jealous' are common incorrect translations.
- Lose vs. Loose: More of a spelling issue than a language one; people still say them correctly. However, (particularly online), the two are used almost interchangeably, though it is more common to add an "o" than to subtract one. For the record, "lose" (rhymes with "booze") is a verb, and, in its intransitive form, has several meanings including to suffer defeat, to suffer loss or to depreciate in effectiveness. "Loose" (rhymes with "goose") is an adjective, and the opposite of tight. You can lose a game, but not tighten it. Your shoelaces can be loose, but you can't win them. Okay, technically shoelaces could be a prize...
- Loose can also be used as a verb, to mean "release" or "unfasten", but that usage is kinda archaic — you've probably never heard it outside of The Bible or archery (one looses an arrow from a bow). It still isn't the opposite of "win" or "find", ever.
- Not only a spelling issue, but very often a "spell-check" type of issue, where the word could be a typo but will never be caught by spell-check.
- A particularly interesting example of this is a Swedish book called The Looser Handbook which is about the art of leading a life of constant failure. It only stands to reason that the author would fail at naming the book, since failure is what the book is about.
- Casualties are the people wounded and permanently crippled (physically or psychologically), missing, captured, and dead sustained during a military operation or in any other given period. There is a term the dead, missing, captured, and crippled alone: Irrecoverable Casualties. Those who merely died (sometimes including those dead of wounds or in captivity) constitute Fatalities. Note however that the definition of wounded is pretty fluid - it can mean anything from "minor stab wound requiring hospitalisation to be on the safe side" to "crippling but temporary phobia of footsteps" to "three limbs blown off and permanent loss of hearing". In other words just anything short of actual death.
- To quote the other wiki, "In military usage, a casualty is a person in service killed in action, killed by disease, disabled by injuries, disabled by psychological trauma, captured, deserted, or missing, but not someone who sustains injuries which do not prevent them from fighting." So if one received a minor stab wound and got stitched up and sent back to the front one would not be a casualty.
- Casualty is also not the adjective form of casual, as Jewel learned in an infamous TV interview (and she was not happy about it.)
- Invalid with regard to arguments is a matter of not having the correct form. It has nothing to do with the truth value of the statement. See generally Sound/Valid/True.
- "Fido has four legs. Dogs have four legs. Therefore Fido is a dog." is invalid. "Fido has four legs. All animals with four legs are cats. Therefore Fido is a cat" is valid.
- CGI: In Video Games, the term is often misused to describe pre-rendered cutscenes. All videogames (except ones done entirely with Pre-Rendered Graphics) use CGI, which means "computer-generated imagery". Even Pac-Man and Donkey Kong use CGI; their graphics were created by computer images. When a cutscene is debated on whether it shows real gameplay, there's no question whether it has CGI (unless it features live-action video). The question is whether the video was pre-rendered and recorded beforehand or if it features the actual game assets.
- In animation, CGI is used to mean "anything rendered in 3D software". 2D animation using computer rendering software (Adobe Flash/Animate, Toon Boom) are typically referred to by what program they were rendered in, despite being just as computer-generated as the 3D kind. This Very Wiki's own All-CGI Cartoon page tends to list 3D works over computer-made 2D ones.
- On the subject on rendering, render is commonly misused to refer to official artwork in general, regardless of whether or not it appears in-work.
- MMO is commonly used to refer to an MMORPG, an abbreviation for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. While it makes sense to abbreviate the term, most people refer to an MMORPG as an "MMO", when "MMO" is merely a prefix, as any genre can be Massively Multiplayer and online. Most Massively Multiplayer Online Games happen to be RPGs because the formula had been experimented with the most, but if you refer to game as an "MMOG" or refer to Neocron or PlanetSide as an "MMOFPS" or Darkwind War On Wheels as an "MMOTBS", people will often look at you weirdly and not understand what you meant as other multiplayers, no matter how massive they are just call them "Multiplayer" or "Online".
- Otome Games are games with a female protagonist and male love interests, with the main focus being the romance between the protagonist and male characters. Games for a female audience with a Cast Full of Pretty Boys, Self-Insert protagonist but no explicit romance with the protagonist are not otome games. Touken Ranbu, A3, THE iDOLM@STER: SideM, Ensemble Stars! and IDOLiSH7 for example are sometimes labelled otome games, even though they technically aren't. They'd be correctly referred to as joseimuke games. If community tags on Steam are to be believed, some people even incorrectly tag bishoujo games clearly for male audiences as "otome".
- A Protagonist is the principal character (or, more loosely, characters) of a work, typically the one from whose perspective it is narrated and usually (though not always) The Hero, or at least the person we're meant to sympathise with. Strictly speaking, there can only be one protagonist. The second-most important character on the protagonist's side is the "deuteragonist", the third is the "tritagonist", and so forth. An Antagonist is a character who creates problems for the protagonist, and is thus typically The Villain (although again, not always). It is NOT the other way round. Some people get this wrong, even though you'd think it obvious given that 'antagonist' obviously shares a root with 'antagonize'....
- MP3 refers to either the MPEG standard popularly used to encode music or audio files, or a file using this standard. It is not the same as an MP3 player, which is either computer software or a physical media player which plays MP3s, and it is not a catch-all for all kinds of digital audio.
- On a side note, MP3 does not stand for MPEG-3 but for MPEG-1 Layer 3 (and MPEG-2 Part 3) which is a sound encoding mechanism for the MPEG-1 format. In order to avoid any further confusion, the MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group) decided there would never be any MPEG-3 standard and thus they went from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4.
- This is made worse by Chinese manufacturers who simply bump the number after "MP" whenever they add a new feature, so we have MP3 player, MP4 player (their 'new feature' is video playback, but they're also unrelated to MPEG-4 and don't support MPEG-4 video at all), MP5 player, MP6 player...
- A riff is "a short, repeated phrase, frequently played over changing chords or harmonies or used as a background to a solo improvisation". The way "riff" is often used, especially by MST3K, is as though the riff itself is an improvisation, and "riffing" is the act of coming up with something on the spot. It's actually the opposite: a riff is the same thing repeated over and over again, possibly with slight variation. The confusion likely comes about because riffs are used in jazz, and jazz is improvisational music; but improvisations are not made of riffs, they're made of longer, more complex melodic phrases. Improvisation is the spontaneous creation of a melody, and is not properly called "riffing". An example of "riffing" would be the guitar part in the verse of "You Really Got Me", "Come As You Are", or "Whole Lotta Love"; or in jazz, the repeated horn parts heard most famously in Count Basie arrangements: a short fragment that's repeated constantly and identically.
- as a note [no pun intended] when people refer to a "riff" or "riffing", what they are probably INTENDING to refer to is "scatting" - scat singing, specifically, although one can scat on any instrument; "scat" officially means "vocal improvisation with wordless vocables" (nonsense syllables generally, sometimes just "oooo" or "aaa", sometimes a single word used over and over, etc) but over the past decades has grown to mean ANY instrument improvising the melody, over the riff, in a jazz or jazz-based song or piece.
- On the other hand, Merriam-Webster dictionary describes riff as above (noting the possible etymologyis a shortening of the word 'refrain') but also gives another definitions, namely 'any variation or improvisation'.
- Occasionally, a law-enforcement officer will refer to the scene of a brutal crime as being very "graphic". Well, duh, you're there and you're looking at it, one would expect it to be visual and realistic instead of merely implied. The idea of "graphic" violence in media isn't that it's Gorn, just that it's shown onscreen rather than implied.
- by the same token explicit doesn't mean rude or obscene (as people probably think due to those "explicit lyrics" labels) it means stated outright rather than just suggested.
- Rein vs. reign. "Reign" means to rule as royalty, "reins" are what one uses to guide a horse. Both involve leadership and sound exactly alike, and so are easily confused. A very common example is the phrase "free rein", which means letting loose of the reins and allowing a horse to wander as it pleases. This is often misused as "free reign", which doesn't even make sense: a King by definition has freedom to reign, it's what makes him a King. So to recap: "reign" refers to a state of having authority, while "free rein" or "being given the reins" refer to the actions of leadership in a situation. If there is a plural, it's almost always going to be "reins".
- Charisma refers to someone's speaking talents and ability to influence others through force of personality and diplomacy. While good looks help, someone is not charismatic because she looks good in a formal dress, or because he has blue eyes and a nice smile; similarly, just because someone is able to speak publicly and get their point across doesn't qualify them either, not unless people are cheering wildly for how the news is presented, rather than the facts themselves. For a historical example, Cleopatra was considered extremely charismatic, despite contemporary accounts of her being a very plain-looking woman.note
- Calorie is a non-SI unit of energy. It is relatively small unit however, so caloric intake of foods is usually expressed in kilocalories, (1 kcal = 1000 calories). Thus an average recommended daily energy intake is not 2200 calories but 2200 kilocalories or 2,200,000 calories.
- A Calorie refers to a kilocalorie, while a calorie refers to the base unit. This can get confusing when 'calorie' is at the beginning of a sentence, which without context, would be indistinguishable as to if it was between the normal unit or the large unit.
- Also, although it isn't an SI unit, it is a metric unit rather than Imperial or American customary.
- Stereophonic refers to an audio that has exactly two speakers, instead of one (mono) or four (surround). It is slightly inaccurate to refer to a system with surround sound as a "stereo", but always inaccurate to refer to the output as being "stereo sound."
- Less commonly, it can be any sound the gives the illusion of being surrounded by a sound field. It's not useful stereo if the two speakers are stacked one on top of the other, or placed too close together as in a boombox.
- One's interest is piqued, not peaked. This mistake is understandable, since "peak" can be used as a verb to mean "maximize" or "climax"; though your English professor will still probably mark this as being wrong. "Poque" is right out.
- Likewise, getting a preview of something means getting a sneak peek. A "sneak peak" would be a stealth mountain. In fact, someone's interest may be piqued by a good peek.
- Likewise, getting a preview of something means getting a sneak peek. A "sneak peak" would be a stealth mountain
- The Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary by her mother Anna, specifically the belief that "from the first moment of her existence [... Mary] was preserved by God from the Original Sin and filled with sanctifying grace that would normally come with baptism after birth." Jesus' conception and birth from Mary was the Virgin Birth. (Whether Mary actually was immaculately conceived is a huge theological dispute between Catholics and modern Protestants, so nothing more will be said about that. But if a Protestant says he doesn't believe in the "Immaculate Conception", he is not necessarily saying that Mary wasn't a virgin.)
- And the Immaculate Reception is something else entirely...
- And the Immaculate Reception is something else entirely
- A song is called "song" because there's singing in it. If there is no singing in it, it is not a song. There is a proper word for a musical composition without singing. It's a piece. In the context of popular music, one might call it a "track" (which encompasses music that does have singing and music that doesn't).
- Musical definitions are strange animals because composers are always Playing With definitions. Mendelssohn quite famously wrote piano pieces called or "Lieder ohne Worte," or "Songs without words." Even in German, the Lied was associated with singing, and Mendelssohn was Playing With the idea in the 19th century. Also, a "piece" can include singing, but it is normally limited to one where the singing is not the primary purpose, like Beethoven's 9th symphony. However, there is a song in that movement (which we know as "Ode to Joy"). Composers love to Mind Screw with convention.
- All of which gets frustrating when trying to put this kind of music into a computer, having to classify movements or recitatives as 'songs', composers as 'bands', operas as 'albums' and anything written before about 1920 as 'Classical', a weird appellation to, say, Medieval music, to lump it in with Puccini and Handel (neither of whom are really 'classical' either.)
- Musical definitions are strange animals because composers are always Playing With definitions. Mendelssohn quite famously wrote piano pieces called or "Lieder ohne Worte," or "Songs without words." Even in German, the Lied was associated with singing, and Mendelssohn was Playing With the idea in the 19th century. Also, a "piece" can include singing, but it is normally limited to one where the singing is not the primary purpose, like Beethoven's 9th symphony. However, there is a song in that movement (which we know as "Ode to Joy"). Composers love to Mind Screw with convention.
- A neophyte is someone who is new to something (a newbie); it literally means "new/young/newly-planted plant". A neophile is someone who likes things that are new.
- Novitiate is the state, condition, or period of being a novice, not the person. William Buckley fouls this up in Tucker's Last Stand.
- An epidemic refers to the frequency of a disease substantially exceeding what is expected in recent history.
- Sushi is a food consisting of cooked rice mixed with vinegar ("shari") and other ingredients. It can contain a large variety of ingredients ranging from vegetables, seafood (mostly uncooked, but some are cooked as well), sauces, etc. The shari makes it sushi. Onigiri or (o)musubi is usually rice (no vinegar), another ingredient, wrapped in seaweed.
- Similarly, Sashimi is taken to be the the word for raw seafood by itself, but it actually refers to the way it is prepared (thin slices), and can apply to other types of meat or vegetables.
- Similarly, Sashimi is taken to be the the word for raw seafood by itself, but it actually refers to the way it is prepared (thin slices), and can apply to other types of meat or vegetables
- Ichor originally meant the blood of gods or angels. In later times, it has somehow come to also mean pus. Fiction writers, however, like to use it as a "fancy-sounding" word for pretty much any liquid.
- Your and you're. "Your" is a possessive pronoun used to describe something as belonging to the person being addressed, while "you're" is a contraction of "you are". If "you are" would fit instead, then "your" is not the correct word.
- Likewise, it's, and its have similar misuse. "Its" is a possessive pronoun that's usually used to describe what belongs to the subject in the sentence. "It's" is the contraction of "it is". If "it is" can fit into the sentence, then "its" is not the correct word. Likewise, if there's a sign of the subject having possession in the sentence, then "it's" does not apply. (A good way to make sure it's being used correctly is to speak the phrase as if there's no contraction. For example, "It's red" = "It is red" is correct. "It's walls" = "It is walls" is incorrect, and should be "Its walls".)
- Implicate means to be responsible for something, or to assign responsibility to someone. Insinuate means to subtly hint at something unpleasant. Both are used for "imply", whether positive or negative. Imply actual means to strongly hint at something.
- Pilot does not simply mean "the first episode of a TV show". It should be used if, and only if, the episode is made by itself with the intention of shopping it around to various networks who will judge whether it works well enough to commission a whole series, as in a "pilot program". Pulp Fiction, which popularized the term, actually made this distinction, but along the way the word has become conflated with premiere. This usage is especially incorrect when referring to animated shows, which often get a whole season commissioned in advance due to animation lead time, and the pilot or pitch demo, often made cheaply and quickly, is simply redone.
- The exception, obviously, is when the pilot is made and then broadcast as the first episode.
- Ripoff is either a bad financial scam where you are conned into buying a fake product, or something where you are tricked into giving money without receiving anything in return. A lot of people use "ripoff" to mean the general act of copying or mimicry in general, and in the form of entertainment, a Ripoff is apparently "Something that's similar to a movie I saw before." The origin of this misuse had to do with Mockbusters trying to trick people into buying their product mistaking it for the product they actually wanted.
- Egregious has been used so egregiously on This Very Wiki that it has its own page.
- Similarly Your Mileage Will Vary is used as a way of referring to Your Mileage May Vary on especially controversial issues that reach a point where there is no middle ground. Your Mileage May Vary comes from car commercials that say consumers might get a different amount of mileage than is advertised, and on this wiki, means that viewers might not agree with the statement. Using "Your Mileage Will vary" implies unanimous disagreement rather than inevitable controversy.
- One that shows up every now and again is equivocal to mean "equivalent". An equivocal statement is one that is ambiguous and open to interpretation (conversely, an unequivocal statement is one in which the meaning is clear).
- Presently does not mean "happening now" or "ongoing". It means "soon".
- Ambivalence is not the same as ambiguity or just 'not bothered'. if you feel ambivalent about a decision, you are torn by equally strong feelings in two (or more) directions. A child deciding whether to live with her mother or father after a divorce might feel ambivalent.
- The term "stepchild" is sometimes mistakenly used with children who are adopted, rather than for children whose parents have married someone besides their other parent. For example, Lindesfarne of Kevin & Kell is Angelique's adopted daughter, but after her adoptive parents' divorce, she became Kell's stepdaughter when she married her adoptive father Kevin.
- Something that is anonymous has no name attached. If there is a name attached but it doesn't match the one on the originator's passport, such as an internet username, it's pseudonymous.
- Cherubim (singular cherub) are the alien looking creatures appearing in the book of Ezekiel. The chubby little winged cupids are called putti (or putto in singular), and don't really have anything to do with biblical angels.
- In the entertainment industry, there are indie producers and developers (short for independent) that create and release their own works without relying on a 3rd party to assist in their project, such as major developers or publishers. However, people often get meaning of indie movies/games/etc. wrong and think it means the product was made by people who did not have a lot of money. This also leads people to believe that indie developers that make a ton of money off of their work or use a major publisher to get their product out to the public have "sold out" to major corporations. In short, as long as a group of developers have total control over their creations and don't have anyone outside of their group influencing their work, then the developers are indie, whether they are large or small, profitable or unprofitable.
- The Independent Spirit Awards had to actually redefine its criteria for nominations after Fargo won Best Picture. While it was technically an independent film, its budget was $7M, and not in the spirit (pun recognized) of the awards, which was intended to give low budget films their own recognition.
- In the context of wrestling, an escape is where one frees themselves from a hold, a counter is where one turns a hold being applied to them into a hold of their own and a reversal is a specific counter that results in you applying the hold your opponent just had you in.
- The confusion was referenced in Ring of Honor when CM Punk argued he shouldn't have been cost a rope break when he used them to reverse an arm hold applied by AJ Styles instead of using them to as a means of escape. Unfortunately Punk allowed Styles to escape while arguing, weakening his own point and requiring ROH to take another look at the rules.
- In TNA, Don West had to explain the significance of someone finding a counter to the Canadian destroyer used by Petey William, after the fans had likely seen the move blocked, escaped or otherwise negated dozens of time. Even then, the move itself may never have been countered before but attempts to apply it had.
- Someone born with reproductive organs that are intermediate between male and female is not transgender or a hermaphrodite, they are intersexed. A true hermaphrodite is an organism with functional male and female parts in the same body, that can reproduce as either: a condition which occurs naturally in earthworms or snails, but never in humans.
- "Excessive" does not mean "a lot" or "a great deal". It means "too much".
- One can only commit treason if they are working with a foreign power. If it's a completely internal case of trying to overthrow the government, it's sedition.
- Cojones is Spanish for balls. Cajones is Spanish for drawers. Although saying cajones in English could be a bilingual pun.
- Port and starboard do not mean left and right, but specifically the ship's left and right — that is, the left and the right of a person on the ship facing towards the bow. The fore and aft directions are similarly measured relative to the vessel, not the speaker.
- In cases where a smaller boat or plane is being carried on a larger ship, "left" and "right" are always used when referring to the smaller boat or plane to prevent confusion. So if a plane is parked on a carrier deck facing towards the back of the ship, the left side of the plane is towards the starboard side of the ship.
- Entitled means that someone is given a title, authority or rightful ownership of something. Some people however use it as if it meant the opposite, "someone is claiming to deserve something, although he doesn't"; such behavior is more correctly labeled "self-entitled." Even on TV Tropes — see Entitled Bastard, Entitled to Have You. The usage here refers to an unearned subjective feeling of entitlement, hence the common expression "sense of entitlement" — the person in question feels they deserve something, even though they don't. The correct way to use "entitled" would be saying the person feels or acts like they are entitled to something, not that they are "being" entitled. "Entitled" also doesn't mean "with the title of"— that word is "titled".
- Simplistic is not a synonym for "simple". It means "too simple" or "simple to a fault", and is inherently pejorative.
- A sprite, for video game terms, is a 2D image in video games that is completely flat and lacks 3D angles. People who have little knowledge on video game definitions assume that all characters that one sees in a game are sprites, which is not completely true; people confused 3D models for sprites and a model is a 3D shape that can be viewed from any angle. Some games like Paper Mario invoke a 2D style, but most of them use 3D character models that are flattened down so they look 2D.
- For video games, graphics is what a viewer sees on their display or monitor. Many people assume that "graphics" means what the video game looks like. In actuality, people usually mean the game's visual style when they describe a game's graphics.
- Beta, in the context of game development, has three major misuses:
- First, the word itself refers to software which is basically finished and nearing release. Software that is in beta should only receive bugfixes and performance enhancements, not new features, graphical changes, or anything of the sort (that should make it an Alpha).
- Second, open beta means "anyone can jump in and bugtest" while closed beta means, well, the opposite - you need an invitation.
- Third, technically speaking a "paid, open beta" is an oxymoron, since "beta test" is defined as a test of a computer product prior to wide commercial release. No matter what a company tries to tell you, once they're accepting money from the general public, they're selling a product, not conducting a beta test (although the line gets blurry in cases where the beta costs money, but is cheaper than the final release, such as Minecraft). This is further confused by the fact that "beta" used to imply that the software was "incomplete" in some way; in the modern world of seamless online patches and updates, no software product is ever "complete" until the company stops issuing new patches and updates, often years after the product has come out of beta.
- Political ideologies in general suffer from a lot of confusion which can make discussions very hard. The confusion of what left and right actually mean, for example, or what is the relationship between conservatism and economic policies, or perhaps the most confusing word liberal which has different meanings in different countries which can, at worst, be the opposite of each other.
- Autistic, at least on the Internet, gets used to mean "'retarded' only less so" more and more often in recent years - while less for perceived stupidity and more for social awkwardness (so you'll never find someone calling an inanimate object autistic even online), the general effect is the same. "Autistic" can also be used to refer to someone who has an exceptional focus on a particular activity, even if the person being described does not have an autism spectrum disorder at all. This is most likely due to the G.I.F.T; anonymity means both that people feel freer to use "autistic" to mean "asshole" despite the implied ableism, and that people feel freer to use autism as an excuse for being an asshole (whether they're actually diagnosed or not), which only perpetuates the stereotype.
- Asymmetric Multiplayer, as originally defined by Nintendo in reference to certain Wii U games, is a multiplayer mode in which the different players have totally different roles and capabilities, unlike most multiplayer games, where all the players are generally doing the same thing and playing the game the same way. This does not include games where players can be different characters (e.g., a magic user and a sword user) with slightly different abilities but carry out essentially the same goal in the same way. This instead refers to games where the roles, abilities and gameplay experience are drastically different. Misuse of the term became an issue with Star Trek: The Video Game and several other games revealed and/or discussed in the period during/after E3 2012, when the development teams for the games claimed that their Co-Op Multiplayer counted as Asymmetric Multiplayer (probably stemming from a desire to ride on the coattails of the initial Wii U hype).
- AIDS is often used to refer to the notorious sexually-transmitted disease that cripples the host's immune system. "AIDS" stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and many people don't understand the "syndrome" part. You cannot catch AIDS; rather, you are reduced to it by being infected with the aforementioned STD, which by the way is called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), and having it beat the snot out of your immune cells. It is possible for someone to have HIV, but not AIDS, so long as their immune system is still intact. In addition, no one dies from AIDS - they die from complications related to the condition. (Simiarly, no one can die from alcholism, either. They can only die from complications due to it, such as cirrhosis of the liver.)
- Maltese cross is a eight-pointed cross which has the form of four "V"-shaped elements joined at the center, most famously used by The Knights Hospitallers. Colloquially, however, the term "maltese cross" is sometimes applied to the cross pattée, a cross which has arms narrower at the centre, and broader at the perimeter, most often associated with the Prussian and German military usage.
- Scandinavia: Finland and Iceland are not Scandinavian countries, though they are sometimes referred to as such. Scandinavia consists of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. (They are, however, part of the Nordic region, as are the Scandinavian countries. There's also a distinction between Scandinavia—a political-cultural concept—and the Scandinavian Peninsula, a geographical feature which excludes Denmark but includes part of Finland.) Finns, for their part are neither Scandinavian nor Nordic in the ethnic sense; some anthropologists go so far as to describe them as Eurasian, given their common ancestry with certain Siberian (Asiatic Russian) peoples.
- Sex/Gender: The distinction between sex and gender. The sexes (male and female) as the two divisions in which many organisms are placed, based upon their reproductive role and the genders (masculine and feminine) referring to social characteristics (such as behavioral norms) associated with males and females, respectively. The use of gender to mean the same thing as sex dates back to the 14th century, whereas the use of gender to mean gender roles only dates to John Money's work in the 1950s. So it is not incorrect by any stretch for people to continue using the original meaning of the word (which in fact still precedes the gender roles meaning in the dictionary ).
- The distinction between transgenderism and transsexuality does not necessarily have anything to do with genitals or whether or not someone has had sex reassignment surgery (SRS). "Transgender" is usually understood as an umbrella term for anyone whose sex and gender aren't totally congruent, or who strongly deviates from gender norms. "Transsexual" means someone who permanently transitions from one gender to another, usually through medical treatments like hormones and surgery as well as social and legal changes, but no individual step is necessary for being transsexual. SRS doesn't have much to do with it. Many transsexuals can't have SRS or choose not to. Furthermore, "transgender" is already an adjective. Saying "transgendered" is simply redundant.
- The words nemesis and archenemy are synonyms, as both words mean "one's greatest enemy". The "arch" modifier in "archenemy" signifies "greatest", while the word "nemesis" doesn't require a modifier because it already means "one's greatest enemy" by itself. "Arch-nemesis" is not only incorrect but redundant, since it would mean "one's greatest greatest enemy".
- The term pay to win is used in many video games that entices the player to buy items or enhancements with real life money in order to have an easier time in beating the game or getting a step ahead of the competition. Many free to play games are designed to be frustrating to play normally and have heavy restrictions on what the player can do unless the person forks over money to gain and advantage. Pay to win is also applied to competitive games where a player can buy enhancements to defeat their opponents with little effort, thus only people with money to burn can beat everyone else that didn't pay. However, people often use pay to win on any video game with DLC that contains new weapons or other items, even if the game itself can be played just fine without the extra content, the DLC content themselves being on par with vanilla content, or if the game lacks any competitive aspect. The term in general carries negative connotations, with the implication that those that pay real life money have advantages that cannot be obtained by those that play for free. People have also used "pay to win" when it comes to buying cosmetic items in a game where said items do nothing to enhance the player's game other than simply changing how they look because some people believe obtaining all the items in the game is a way of "winning".
- The words atom and molecule, and their derived terms ("molecular", etc.) are not synonymous. Molecules are structures formed from atoms. By strict usage, "molecule" only refers to structures held together by covalent bonds, so e.g. a block of metal is not made of molecules - its atoms are connected by metallic bonds.
- A molecule is also not the same as a mixture. In a molecule, atoms are chemically bonded together but in a mixture they are not. For example, air is (mostly) a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, as it contains nitrogen and oxygen molecules.
- In the SCP Foundation notably, you will very often see the word amnesiac referring to substances that cause loss of memory. An amnesiac is actually a person suffering from amnesia. A substance causing amnesia would be an amnestic. However the word is so deeply rooted in SCP terminology that it's all but impossible to do anything about it. The Wiki only told newer authors that they prefer using "amnestic" instead of "amnesiac", but would forgive any uses of the latter.
- Challenging times can make it hard to make ends meet. No food item called ends meat (or end's meat) has ever existed, outside of phonetic incomprehension or stories that end with absolutely horrid puns. Imagine trying to tie a rope or cord around something with insufficient or barely sufficient length (or, conversely, with plentiful length, though it's usually only mentioned in the context of scarcity), and you'll understand the sensation the phrase is meant to convey.
- Niggardly is a perfectly innocent word meaning "stingy, miserly, not generous." It does not have nor has it ever had any connection to a certain infamous racial slur— its origins date back to the 1300s by way of Old Norse, long before the African slave trade was a thing— except that unfortunately it kind of sounds like that word. (Etymologically, it's related not to the N-word but to "niggle" as in nitpick, quibble about small details.) Sure enough, well-meaning but small-vocabularied people who succumb to Political Overcorrectness have created many controversies about it, to the point that it's probably wiser to avoid it altogether today.
- A regimen is a health-related routine, such as diet, exercise, and/or medicine. A regiment is a military unit (traditionally commanded by a colonel). A regime is a government or leadership (usually with negative, authoritarian connotations). These three words often end up shuffled into one another's places.
- Android, cyborg and robot are not synonyms, as a quick glance at their respective etymologies should make clear. "Android" is derived from the Greek prefix "andro" ("man") and the suffix "oid" ("resembling"), and it means "An artificial creation built in the likeness of a human. "Cyborg" is a contraction of "cybernetic organism", and it means "A lifeform with a combination of organic and mechanical body parts". "Robot" is derived from the Russian "rabota" ("to work"), and it means "An autonomous machine built to perform a specific task". The term android technically refers to an artificial life form that resembles a male human. The female equivalent would be a gynoid.
- Something's inception is its beginning. Courtesy of the eponymous movie, this is widely misunderstood. Since a great deal of the movie revolves around dreams within dreams—and later, by Memetic Mutation, anything within the same thing—a lot of people have, by association, gotten the idea it means the latter.note
- A desert is any place with low rainfall and vegetation. It does not have to be warm. Thus, Antarctica is a desert, as is much of Colorado (including Denver) and the entirety of Mars.
- A Good Samaritan Law is not a law which compels someone to help a person in jeopardy. That is a Duty To Rescue law. A Good Samaritan law grants legal protection to anyone who attempts to help another person in the midst of a crisis. There have indeed been cases where someone offering aid was later sued by the person they attempted to help.
- Centurion is not an all-encompassing term for a soldier in Ancient Rome; it was an upper-level rank in the Roman military (roughly analogous to "Captain" or "Major") specifically designating the commander of a Century (a unit of around 100 soldiers, hence the name). A baseline Roman soldier (analogous to "Private") was a Legionary (not Legionnaire; that comes from the French Foreign Legion).
- For the term let alone as in "X is not Y, let alone Z", Y should be the less far-fetched idea. For example, "bronze is not as valuable as silver, let alone gold." Sometimes, the opposite gets used, that is, "bronze is not as valuable as gold, let alone silver."
- The same rule applies when two entities are specified, such as "I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one"
- For United States citizens, Freedom of Speech means a person has the right to criticize and speak out against the government without needing to fear repercussions from said government. It does not mean "I cannot be silenced for saying anything I want to" since you can get in trouble for saying something that implies a threat to someone else (even if you claim to be joking), nor does it allow you to say something offensive on a privately owned web site whose owner(s) have the full right to ban you for breaking their rules.note
- To suggest otherwise is like saying the right to Freedom Of Assembly means you can have a party at someone else's house without permission whenever you want
- Emigrate and Immigrate refer to the same concept, but the difference between the two words is that "emigrate" refers to moving out of a country while "immigrate" refers to moving into one. Export and Import are a similar source of confusion regarding objects rather than people. Think of it as like "exhale" and "inhale".
- Semantics is literally the study of meanings of words and phrases, and how they relate to the phonetic strings used to convey them. When you say about two different terms, ‘This is semantics,’ you are in fact saying they mean two different things rather than that the difference is negligible. Similarly, you could say that:
- the difference between ‘cat’ as an animal and ‘cat’ as a jazz player is semantic;
- the difference between ‘pray’ and ‘prey’ is semantic, orthographic (i.e. in writing), and syntactic (you can’t pray on someone, at least not in the same meaning);
- the difference between ‘kid’ and ‘child’ is phonological (they’re obviously pronounced differently) and orthographic, and while the difference is, for the most part, not semantic (i.e. both terms refer to a human between the ages of 2~3 and ~12, although the former could also mean ‘young goat’), it is also pragmatic (i.e. you wouldn’t use the former in formal conversation);
- The difference between Missouri (‘miz-ZURR-ree’) and Missouri (‘miz-ZURR-ruh’) is purely phonological/dialectical.
- The term reboot is sometimes used in reference to a new installment of a franchise that differs from the original in terms of art style or premise, when the term specifically applies to an adaptation that restarts continuity for the sake of telling a new interpretation of the franchise's characters and events. If the new series is still in continuity with the original incarnation, then it would be a revival (some people distinguish between the former and latter using the terms hard reboot and soft reboot).
- Arab refers to people who speak Arabic. It is not a term for Muslims in general (there are Christian, Druze, and even Jewish Arabs, and most Muslims come from non-Arab countries). Similar, the vast majority of Afghanisnote , Iraniansnote and Pakistanisnote are not Arabs, although all write in variants of the Arabic script.
- Hinduism refers to the religion; an individual who practices it is a Hindu. Hindi refers to the most commonly-spoken language, which is used by the national government as a matter of convenience. Also, just because something is Indian doesn't mean it's Hindi or Hindu. There are multiple Indian religions and languages that share little if any similarity to Hinduism or Hindi. The meaning of "Hindu" in modern English is actually something of a reverse of this trope; it originated in the Iranian languages as a term for a person from the area around the Sindhū or Indus River (a shift from initial S to H occurred as proto-Iranian evolved from proto-Indo-Iranian) before coming to mean someone who followed the religious traditions originating in or particular to the Subcontinent (with certain exclusions, e.g. Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs).
- Monkey is a very fuzzy word which can be used incorrectly in several ways:
- It's classically referred to a simian primate (an infraorder that also includes apes) which has a tail. Apes (which include gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans) were excluded from this definition; they lack tails, have larger brains than monkeys, and tend to be larger than most monkeys. People who use "monkey" to casually refer to all nonhuman simians are thus mistaken.
- On the other hand, and more pedantically, apes are more closely-related to Old World monkeys (both are in the suborder Catarrhini) than either is to New World monkeys (Platyrrhini). This means that the traditional use of "monkey" is paraphyletic, and excluding apes from being monkeys isn't taxonomically meaningful.
- In common use, rape and sexual assault are used interchangeably. Sexual assault is defined as any physical sexual contact perpetrated against a person without their consent or otherwise against their will. Rape is a specific form of sexual assault involving penetration.
- Semen is the liquid that comes out during male ejaculation. Sperm are specifically the male reproductive cells which are present in the semen of fertile males. It is indeed possible to ejaculate semen without sperm if he's infertile.
- Parasite is sometimes used, especially in fiction, to refer to something that drains life from its host, even to the point of death. Real parasites try not to kill their hosts; lethal "parasites" are actually called pathogens (diseases) or parasitoids.
- Geneva Conventions are the international conventions binding their signatories to observe specific conduct toward refugees, captives and prisoners in the time of war. It has nothing to do with the agreement to abstain from the use of some types of weapons as this subject is covered by the Hague Conventions.
- Remake and remaster are used interchangeably in the video game field whenever a video game from the past gets rereleased with improved graphical fidelity. A remake is a video game that is rebuilt from the ground up with the intention of adding/changing levels, rewriting the story, and using new gameplay mechanics that couldn't have been done in the original game. A remaster is simply taking the same video game and giving it a visual upgrade (and possibly a new feature or two) while everything else remains the same. Publishers as well as consumers are responsible for the inadvertent blurring of the categories: from the 2010s onwards, there have been numerous high-profile re-releases which were marketed as "remasters", but which modify so many features of the original game in addition to the graphics that they might more properly be thought of as remakes.
- Samurai is not a synonym for a traditional Japanese warrior but it specifically means a warrior who is bound by feudal agreement with a lord. A vassal in other words. A general word for any person belonging to warrior caste is bushi. A bushi serving no lord is called ronin.
- Similarly, a knight is technically not a heavily-armed and armored (and possibly mounted) warrior in the medieval-European style - the term refers to an individual of that time period within the social class of knight, which was lower nobility and inevitably could fight in the aforementioned style. There actually is a term for a warrior capable of fighting with a lance in heavy armor upon a horse, independent of their social class: A man-at-arms. Interestingly, etymology seems to indicate that the term knight was originally used around this loosely before the social class arose and the term man-at-arms then came around for the difference.
- Television announcers in both the US and Canada routinely use the word common-law husband or wife to denote the person someone is living with. The act of cohabitation, no matter how long, never creates a legal relationship in the U.S., and only rarely in Canada.
- Vapid: A word meaning "uninspired", "vacuous", or "bland", that has come to be used heavily by the online community for movies they don't like. Becomes hilarious (or infuriating) when the thing about the movie that turns them off is the exact opposite of being vapid. ie. it is inspired and deep, but goes in a direction the person doesn't care for.
- Exeunt is not a fancy synonym for exit. Etymologically, "exit" is the third-person singular present active indicative of the Latin verb exeō, and "exeunt" its third-person plural present active indicative. Thus, in stage directions, "exit" is used for only one actor (e.g., Exit Hamlet), and "exeunt" for two or more (e.g., Exeunt Romeo and Juliet).
- A crescendo is NOT the loud climax of a piece of music or other sound — the word you want is, well, climax. Crescendo (Italian: "I wax, I grow greater") refers to the process of getting louder, an increase in volume over time, which ultimately may lead to a climax (or instead subside again in a decrescendo.) "The noise rose to a crescendo" is flat-out wrong, in fact semi-redundant (rather like "His speed increased to an acceleration"), and will produce winces among the musically-trained.
- Muppet, apart from use as an insult, is repeatedly used (even on This Very Wiki!) to refer to advanced rubber puppets of the type seen in The Dark Crystal and Farscape. In reality, Jim Henson himself said that those characters are not Muppets, but rather Creatures. It's also a trademarked name, meaning that if Disney (the currect rights holder for the name) doesn't say something is a Muppet, it's not a Muppet. (*Cough*Yoda*cough*)
- Contrary to what some believe, arbitrary does not mean the same thing as "random" or "ever-changing." It refers to a decision, definition, or policy which lacks a basis in prior precedent. It is true that policies based largely on arbitration usually change rapidly and seemingly at random, but that is only a side effect. It is not the definition of the word.
- Being agnostic does not mean that a person is "undecided" about the existence of a god; it means that they believe that that both the existence or nonexistence of the divine is inherently unknowable. This is the reason for the word's Greek etymology: it comes from the prefix "a-" (meaning "lacking" or "without") and the root word "gnosis" (meaning "knowledge").note
- "Please bare with me". No, I don't know you well enough. But if you like, I'll try and bear with you (in the metaphorical sense of following where you're going).
- Virus and bacterianote are often used interchangeably to mean 'pathogen' (i.e. a microorganism that causes disease), but are actually specific types of microorganism and are very different. Viruses are non-living, can only replicate inside host cells, are always pathogenic, and are far smaller than bacteria. In contrast, bacteria are alive, can reproduce by themselves, and are far larger than viruses. In addition, many of them are not pathogenic- your skin is literally covered with mostly harmless bacteria. Viruses and bacteria also cause different diseases, which is a fact many people ignore- for example, people worry about bacteria from people with flu, even though flu is a viral disease. This also means that antibiotics are meant to work against bacteria, but are useless against viruses.
- Fluid is not a synonym of liquid, as a fluid is anything that can flow. This includes liquids, gases and plasma.
- Sulphur is an element which, under standard conditions, is a yellow solid, which means it does not have a smell because in order for a substance to have a smell it has to be a gas. However, many people still compare smelly things to sulphur (for example, by saying that something which smells bad "smells like sulphur"). The misconception that sulphur has a smell may have arisen from confusion between sulphur, sulphur dioxide (which is formed when sulphur burns) and hydrogen sulphide (which decomposes to form elemental sulphur, meaning it's often found near sulphur), as the latter two chemicals are both odourants.
- And while we're on the subject, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the body in charge of chemical nomenclature, spells it "sulfur". (This was a compromise between British and American English speakers, in exchange for the British English spelling of "aluminium".)
- A loophole is an unintentional gap or grey area in the law usually caused by inadequate descriptions and definitions. A provision or an exemption note is a written in exception to the law and is very much intentional. Provisions and exemptions are often mistaken for loopholes, especially by people seeking to remove provisions. For example only a small minority of corporate tax "loopholes" are actually loopholes while the rest are very much intentional tax exemptions.
- A softlock is (or was, depending on your point of view) a particular kind of software freeze in which the program still runs, but none of the user's input is functional. Beginning around the 2010s though, the word started to be used to refer to situations where the player cannot progress farther in the game, which on this site is referred to as "unwinnable". Internet searches seem to indicate this new meaning has displaced the old meaning, at least in terms of what results you get when searching for it.
- Lava and magma, while related, are not one and the same. Lava is molten liquid rock that has been expelled from a volcano and is flowing on the surface whereas magma is the same substance that's inside the volcano and has not ejected to the surface. It's similar to how one's stomach contents aren't considered "vomit" unless they actually throw up. Due to lava being used to describe magma in most video games and films, lava is used as the catch all term for liquid rock no matter where it's situated.
- Refute means to provide evidence to prove falsehood. If somebody insists they are refuting a claim, demand they do so.
- A run-on sentence is not "a very long sentence". A run-on sentence is a grammatical error when two independent clauses either lack proper punctuation separating them, or a period indicating that they are two sentences.e.g.. A three thousand word-long sentence can still be grammatical, and won't be a run-on sentence as long as it uses proper punctuation and coordinating conjunctions. Of course, it would probably be better if it were broken up, but it wouldn't technically be incorrect.
- Beta or beta male is often used to mean "man who isn't manly enough", however this is inconsistent with actual animal behavior. In a pack the betas serve more as the Number Two to the alpha, but still outrank the rest of the pack and may even kill their masters and take over. The most common example of the alpha/beta male dynamic, wolf packs, is also itself a Dead Unicorn Trope. Wolf packs in the wild are simply families, and the alpha male and female are the parents. The researcher who first popularized that theory, L. David Mech, was observing wolves in zoos, where unrelated canines are grouped together and they take on more of a prison mentality. Mech eventually renounced the theory once he saw that wolves in the wild don't act that way.
- People often confuse Negative reinforcement with punishment. It actually means rewarding someone by taking away a bad thing, e.g. "Do what we say and we'll take your handcuffs off." In operant conditioning, the phrase "negative reinforcement" makes a pair with "positive reinforcement"; they both "reinforce", that is they both increase the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated. "Positive" and "negative" here do not carry the meaning of "good" and "bad", but rather the mathematical meaning of "adding" and "taking away". Therefore:
- Positive reinforcement: adding a stimulus to increase the likelihood that a behavior is repeated; "You cleaned your room! Here's some candy."
- Negative reinforcement: removing a stimulus to increase the likelihood that a behavior is repeated; "You cleaned your room! I'll stop nagging you about it."
- Positive punishment: adding a stimulus to decrease the likelihood that a behavior is repeated; "You left dirty clothes everywhere again! You're grounded."
- Negative punishment: removing a stimulus to decrease the likelihood that a behavior is repeated; "You left dirty clothes everywhere again! You're not getting your allowance this week."
- Terminal velocity is the speed at which a falling object doesn't accelerate any further no matter how long it falls, because drag and buoyancy are cancelling any further acceleration. A meteor, for example, does not reach terminal velocity at any point - it's already moving faster than that when it enters the atmosphere, and goes through it too quickly to slow down. The term also has nothing to do with the degree of lethality of the falling thing's impact, either to the item itself or to whatever it falls on.
- The term graphic novel is sometimes said to mean either "a comic book for adults" or "a comic book that's longer than single monthly issue". The actual definition is "A long-form work of graphic fiction that's published as a single volume rather than serialized". There are quite a few graphic novels written for children and young readers (Smile (Raina Telgemeier) and American Born Chinese are two notable examples), and many long-form works of graphic fiction are originally published as multiple single issues before being collected and bound. Case in point: Alan Moore's Watchmen and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman are often referred to as graphic novels, but they're actually not; Watchmen is a multi-part limited series that was originally published in single-issue installments before being collected as a single volume, while the Sandman series was originally an ongoing monthly comic book before it was published as a series of paperback collections.
- Unique means one of a kind. It does not mean unusual or special. Thus being "more unique" is like being "more pregnant"; it just doesn't make sense. You could however say "almost unique" if there are only two of the thing in question.
- Infinitesimal means really small, not really big (think "infinitely small").
- Members of the far right often use Cultural Marxism (or Post-modern Neomarxism) to mean "anything I don't like." While Cultural Marxism was a real denomination of Marxism taught at the Frankfurt School, the term in this far-right context characterizes the ideas and motivations of any number of different left-wing groups, many of whom are not aligned with each other or with the Frankfurt School, or similar in any way. Used in this way, the term has no meaning aside from being a piece of political invective. If it is understood to mean "the left," then it is imprecise and leads to the impression that the left are a unified Marxist front, which is ridiculous to anyone on the left, or anyone who has observed the left at any length: the left is quite as diverse and prone to infighting as the right, as it is defined as half of the left-right political spectrum. To sum up: neither of the words is particularly meaningful in that phrase as it is used by the far right.
- Atheism is lack of belief in a god or gods, while agnostic means being unsure whether there are any god(s). Nontheism usually refers to religions which don't have any gods, such as Buddhism. And none of these imply the hatred of gods, which would be misotheism.
- Prodigal is the opposite of "thrifty" or "frugal", meaning "wasteful", "frivolous", "Given to reckless or irresponsible spending" or "Living beyond one's means". But the most famous use of the word—by far—is in "The Parable of the Prodigal Son" from the Gospel of Luke, a story about an irresponsible young man who returns home to his parents after carelessly spending all of his money and winding up destitute. Because of this, it's often assumed to mean "Making a much-anticipated return after a long absence" (indeed, a long-absent person who unexpectedly returns to a place or organization is often figuratively referred to as a "prodigal son"). But the Prodigal Son was "prodigal" because he spent all of his money, not because he was welcomed home by his parents afterwards.
- The idiom The exception proves the rule is often misused as a Hand Wave for any inconsistency in a person's argument, despite how this makes no sense if you actually think about it, e.g., If someone says "all birds are black" does the existence of doves prove they're right? Of course not. The real meaning of the saying is more akin to "the exception proves the rule applies by default" i.e if you see a sign at an intersection that says "no U-turn" you can infer that a U-turn is permitted whenever there isn't a sign forbidding it.
- Circa means "approximately" and is usually used to refer to dates. Therefore, you shouldn't use it when the exact date or other number is known: "Alice was born circa 1987" is fine, "Alice was born circa May 5th, 1987" is not.
- A reprisal is an attack, particularly in warfare, carried out in retaliation for a previous attack. It is not the repetition of a musical number or a performance; that would be a reprise. Even This Very Wiki made this mistake in the title of the trope Role Reprise, which was titled "Role Reprisal" for years.
- Real is an adjective, really is an adverb. While the former is often used in place of the latter (e.g., "She's a real nice girl"), this is considered colloquial at best and straight up wrong at worst, unless you meant she is a girl who is both nice and real as in not imaginary.
- To earn money means to be given it in exchange for performing some work, service etc. To be given money for nothing is to simply get money.
- Brainchild refers to the concept or product created by a brain, not the owner of the brain doing the creating. For example, the World Wide Web is the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, not the other way round. The logical inverse would be something like brainparent but that's never caught on.
- Satire is not synonymous with "a joke", as people often misuse it to mean when saying "that was just satire", to mean "that was just a joke" (sometimes as a "Just Joking" Justification, though just as often out of ignorance). Satire has to be poking fun at a specific thing (be it a work of fiction or something in real life.) For example, the film Spaceballs is a satire of Star Wars, but just calling any comedy a satire is incorrect.
- To Care About someone is to have sympathy for them or concern for their well being. To Care For someone is either to literally take care of the person, or, idiomatically, to like that person or thing.
- Mansplaining is when a man condescendingly explains a subject to a woman without considering her own credentials ("Whitesplaining," "Straightsplaining," "Cis-splaining," and others are related terms). Certain...sectors of social media have begun using that word any time a man disagrees with a woman online, regardless of his own expertise or any legit points he makes.
- People of Color refers to all racial minorities in countries where whites are the majority. It is not just a "nice" way to refer to black people.
- Deign isn't a "fancier" way of saying "dare". It means to do something you feel is beneath you, such as: "I didn't deign to respond to such a stupid comment."
- In American English, a majority is over half, or 50 percent. A supermajority is over two thirds, or about 66.67 percent.* A plurality is more than any other group/category etc, although less than 50 percent (e.g., if candidate A gets 40 percent of the votes, and the other three candidates get 20 percent each, candidate A gets the plurality of the votes).
- The above is not the case in Britain, where a majority is what Americans call a plurality, and plurality is the state of being more than one.
- For some reason, it's become fashionable for people on the internet to use Classical Liberal to mean something like "conservative-lite". The correct meaning of "Classical Liberalism" is something more like what's now called Libertarianism.
- A train's Conductor is not its driver. That would be the Engineernote . Conductors are the attendants who check tickets and assist passengers during the trip. The reason for this confusion is the multiple definitions of "engineer". Most people think an engineer would be the person who designed the train; that would be a mechanical engineer. A locomotive engineer is the person who drives it.
- Locomotive and train are not synonymous. A locomotive is just the front part (where the engine is), whereas a train is the locomotive plus all the boxcars and the like.
- Millennials are a generation (Generation Y, in fact) born somewhere between the early '80s and the mid-'90snote . It is not a slang term for "young adult." As of the 2020s, most Millenials are in their thirties, with the oldest ones entering their forties and the youngest ones are in their late twenties. The terms most people who misuse the word in this way are probably looking for are Generation Znote and/or Zoomers, most of whom are in their teens or early-to-mid-20s.
- Prehistoric is often misused to mean "when dinosaurs roamed the Earth" or, worse, just vaguely "a long time ago". It actually means before recorded history, i.e. before writing was invented, which was about 5,200 years ago. While the dinosaurs would count as prehistoric, so would cavemen 10,000 years ago (which is a pretty big Time Skip). Current archaeological knowledge places the beginning of urbanization in the Fertile Crescent at a few thousand years before recorded history, which means that even cities were a prehistoric development.
- Constant doesn't mean "a lot", it means "without ever stopping". It can be used hyperbolically to mean "a lot", but if you want don't want to be hyperbolic, say, "frequent" or "repeated". Ditto for the word incessant.
- A prognosis isn't what's wrong with a patient — that'd be a diagnosis. A prognosis is how long the patient has to live.
- "-itis" does not mean "disease", it means "inflammation".
- Some people think "vertigo" means "fear of heights"— actually, vertigo is the sensation you get when you're so dizzy you feel like you're spinning, and the fear of heights is acrophobia. While you can experience vertigo during an episode of acrophobia, and vertigo might happen due to high altitude, causing acrophobia (as in, "Oh no! I don't want to get up there as it makes me dizzy!"), they are not the same thing.
- Curiously, the film which popularized the term actually makes this distinction:
Scotty: Because of this fear of heights I have, this acrophobia... I have acrophobia, which gives me vertigo, and I get dizzy. - A metaphor is not saying, "X is similar to Y" — that'd be a simile or an analogy. A metaphor is saying something is something else when in fact it's only similar. "The world is like a vampire" is a simile; "The world is a vampire" is a true metaphor.
- Some people use "flu" and "cold" interchangeably. They're not interchangeable — a cold refers to any one of a number of viral diseases involving sneezing, sore throats, etc, while flu is short for influenza, which is caused by several distinct types of viruses and has more serious symptoms.
- Similarly, people sometimes get fever and flu confused, likely because they are both physical ailments starting with F and because a fever is frequently a symptom of a flu. Put simply, a flu is a virus, while a fever is a response your body has to a disease, and most commonly manifests as a sudden rise in temperature.
- Propaganda is often incorrectly thought to be an inherently derogatory term. It actually just means any information (whether true or false) spread with the the intent to make you feel a certain way about a person or thing. Presumably, most people wouldn't view anti-Nazi propaganda as a bad thing. It's also often erroneously thought to specifically mean information disseminated by a government, however, this isn't part of any official definition, and entities such as activist groups or even individuals can make propaganda.
- Flaunt vs. flout — The former means "to ostentatiously display", while the latter means "to blatantly disregard". The typical context in which the two are confused is when someone talks or writes about "flaunting a law". In pretty much every situation you see that phrase, you can be sure that the law in question is being flouted, not "flaunted".
- Vibrato is a musical technique involving bending the pitch of a note by variations in the shape of the larynx for singers or finger/hand or breathing techniques for instrumentalists; it can be done electronically with frequency modulators. Tremolo involves speedy repetitions of the same note, as with flutter-tonguing a wind instrument or rapid-fire bowing or plucking on string instruments; this can be done electronically with amplitude modulators. However, when early guitar amplifier pioneers such as Nathan Daniel of Danelectro and Leo Fender of, well, Fender decided to build amplitude modulators into amplifiers to simulate tremolo electronically (initially by alternately reducing and raising the power several times a second), they called the resulting features "vibrato", while the "whammy bars" that allowed electric guitarists to rapidly raise and lower the tension of their strings for a quick vibrato effect were sometimes called "tremolo arms". To this day, many guitarists and guitar manufacturers still get these two terms confused.
- While it's a neologism, it's generally accepted that to rickroll someone means to trick them into listening to "Never Gonna Give You Up", and that it can also be a noun, meaning "a video or page that tricks the viewer into listening to 'Never Gonna Give You Up'" or "an instance of someone being rickrolled". If you deliberately clicked on 'Never Gonna Give You Up' or a parody of it, knowing what it was, then you didn't get rickrolled.
- A "Flash game" specifically refers to a game programmed in Adobe Flash. Most of the time, these will include vector graphics and programming in the ActionScript language. Don't go around calling any game playable in your browser a "Flash game" unless it actually is; a broader, and more often correct, term would be "web game." There are game programs such as Shockwave and Unity that are playable in browsers — these aren't Flash either. Starting in the 2010s was the rise of HTML5 programs, which run in the browser primarily using JavaScript, and are more widely compatible. With Flash's death in 2020, most Web Games you'll play nowadays will be HTML5.
- Murder means "The unlawful killing of a human with malice aforethought" (i.e it has to be done on purpose and premeditated.) Manslaughter also describes the unlawful killing of a human, but is less severe than murder due to it either being non-premeditated (voluntary manslaughter), or being an accident but still partially the killer's fault (involuntary manslaughter). Homicide just means any time one human is killed by another, even if it's completely justified.
- Nadir and Zenith are often confused despite being opposites. Nadir is the point directly below a certain spot or an observer, or, figuratively, the lowest or worst point (e.g "The nadir of my experience in school.") Zenith is the point directly above something, or the highest and best point.
- More of a misunderstanding than a misuse, but Plastic Surgery has nothing to do with plastic (as in the substance). It instead uses "plastic" the adjectival sense of "malleable", as the goal of such surgery is the "mold" the person's face or other body parts into a new "shape."
- Old English is often incorrectly used to describe things like the language in William Shakespeare's plays, or the King James version of The Bible. That's actually an early form of Modern English, and Middle English is the probably nearly-comprehensible (to a modern English reader) variant found in, for example, Geoffrey Chaucer's writing. Old English looks and sounds like German, and has a few extra (now obsolete) letters.
- Some people use the term diarrhea to mean any instance of loose stool. The medical definition is actually loose stool in conjunction with defecating four times per day or more.
- Mediocre does not mean "slightly bad". It is actually a term that means "neutral" or "average". A good way to remember this is that the "medi" in the word comes from the Latin "medius", meaning "middle", i.e. in between good and bad.
- Being fired and being laid off both result in losing one's job, but they're not the same thing. If a person is fired, they had their job taken from them as a punishment, but if a person is laid off they lost their job due to someone else taking the job, the employer trying to reduce staff, or similar.
- An heir(ess) apparent is somebody whose claim to a future title is secure, unless they die or actively choose to renounce it first. If a person is currently next in line, but it is possible that someone else may emerge with a stronger claim, then they are the heir(ess) presumptive. Many people don't know the phrase "heir(ess) presumptive" and mistakenly use "apparent" for both situations.
- An Aroma is necessarily a good smell (e.g "the aroma of cinnamon"). The term odor is neutral, but more often than not refers to a bad smell.
- To exacerbate a problem means to make it even worse than it already is; to exasperate means to frustrate or annoy somebody. Getting them mixed up tends to exacerbate the confusion and exasperate anybody who knows the difference.
- Playing devil's advocate means someone is taking a contrary stance on an issue not because they truly feel that way, but for the sake of argument to be sure all angles are considered. If the person honestly believes every word they're saying, they're not playing devil's advocate. They simply disagree with you.
- A Couple is always exactly two people/items. A Few is a small indeterminate number, but usually at most 5. Several is a somewhat bigger indeterminate number, typically at most 7 or 8.
- People sometimes confuse breed and species. While "breed" is a term of art rather than a scientifically-defined one, it always refers to a variety within a domesticated species.note Anyone who, for instance, calls a Pallas' cat a breed of cat or a warthog a breed of pig is making this mistake, as these are entire species (and non-domesticated ones at that). Similarily, all domesticated dog breeds are the same species (Canis familiaris); thus the Great Dane, husky, dachshund, etc. are not species of dogs in their own right.
- There is nothing wrong with the term Drive Slow. "Slow" is what's called a flat adverb — an adjective whose adverb form is the same — and it was actually the common form for a lot of adjectives up until roughly the 18th century when some grammarians in a form of hyper-correctness insisted adverbs must end in "-ly".
- Luck of the Irish is not at all "extreme luck" or "good luck". The term originates from the American Gold Rush, where a bunch of Irish immigrants managed to strike it rich and led to the phrase being coined by Americans, rather derisively, essentially saying that the Irish managed to coast by in life because fate smiled upon them while they had to work hard. Its negative connotation is familiar with enough Irish today that it's probably worth avoiding using it if you're talking to one.
- In order to be a lie, a statement has to not only be false, but made with the intent to deceive. If such a statement wasn't made with such an intent for whatever reason (such as it being part of a work of fiction, or due to the speaker having Fake Memories), it's simply a falsehood.
- Fanon, fanfiction, and head canon are sometimes used interchangeably, but their actual meanings are generally accepted to be somewhat different — a fan fiction (or fic or fanfic) is a story based upon a separate author's story that is accepted by everyone to have no influence on the canon. A head canon is someone's personal speculation on a work of fiction (for instance, if Alice is never seen with anyone but a viewer named Bob believes she's a lesbian, that would be his head canon). Fanon is when a large chunk of the fan-base has the same head canon.
- Enervate means "to weaken", not "to energize", despite sounding similar. Dungeons & Dragons uses it correctly in the name of its Level Drain spell "enervation"
- Gangrene and frostbite are not synonyms. Gangrene refers to any instance of dead tissue on a living body, which can also be caused by bacterial infections or constricted blood flow. Frostbite is specifically when the gangrene is caused by cold temperatures. Also, hypothermia is not the same as frostbite either — while a hypothermic person may get frostbite, hypothermia itself is just a dangerously low body temperature.
- Prone specifically means lying on one's stomach, while supine means lying on one's back. People often get the two confused, or think that prone just means lying down in general. A good way to remember is that supine means facing up.
- A 50-50 chance means that there are two outcomes (such as that something will either happen or it won't), and that both outcomes are equally likely. Simply stating two possible outcomes doesn't mean there's a 50-50 chance, especially not when one outcome is in fact unlikely or impossible. If you have four pairs of shoes you wear equally often, and two of them are brown, then there's a 50-50 chance you'll wear brown shoes on any given day. But if only one is brown, then you'll either wear brown shoes or you won't, but it's not a 50-50 chance. The Daily Show had fun with this when a man claimed that the Large Hadron Collider would either destroy the world or not, and therefore there was a 50-50 chance that it would. John Oliver responded that after the apocalypse, he and the man could try to repopulate the world, because it'd either work or it wouldn't.
- A fedora isn't any brimmed hat: it's a specific type of brimmed hat with a indented "pinched" crown and a wide, soft brim that can be angled (or "snapped") up or down in the front. The smaller variant of brimmed hat, which became associated with young adult hipsters (and misogynistic nerds) in the 2010s, is actually a trilby.
- To weaponize something means to make it easier to use as a weapon. This does not necessarily mean making it more dangerous or lethal.
- A cadet is a student enrolled in a military or law enforcement training academy, derived from an archaic term for a younger heir to a noble family. But thanks to the longtime ubiquity of the term "Space Cadet", which evolved into a generic term for a science-fiction character involved with an outer space-based military or law enforcement agency, many people assume that it refers to any officer or soldier in the armed forces. For what it's worth, the term Space Cadet can be traced back to the Robert A. Heinlein's 1948 novel of the same name, which uses it correctly: it's called that because the main character is a trainee in the Interplanetary Patrol.
- Beneficiary and benefactor tend to get confused a lot. The two are roughly reciprocals: A beneficiary is someone who receives a benefit (especially a financial one) from another person, while a benefactor is someone who gives a benefit (again, especially financial a financial one) to another.
- A longboat is a large, heavy-duty ship's boat whose main purpose is to move large amounts of people and cargo between ship and shore.note The name is sometimes used as if it were a synonym for any kind of ship's boat — whaleboats seem to be especially frequently mislabeled longboats, despite being much smaller and lighter, a very different shape, and made for hunting whales.
