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Misnomer
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A misnomer is a term which suggests an interpretation that is known to be untrue. Such incorrect terms sometimes derived their names because of the form, action, or origin of the subject—becoming named popularly or widely referenced—long before their true natures were known.
of the sources of misnomers are:
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Encyclopedia
A misnomer is a term which suggests an interpretation that is known to be untrue. Such incorrect terms sometimes derived their names because of the form, action, or origin of the subject—becoming named popularly or widely referenced—long before their true natures were known.
Sources of misnomers
Some of the sources of misnomers are:
- An older name being retained as the thing named evolved (e.g. pencil lead, tin can, fixed income markets, mince meat pie, steamroller, radio, clothes iron, most music genre titles). This is essentially a metaphorical extension with the older item standing for anything filling its role.
- Transference of a well-known product brand name into a genericized trademark (e.g. Xerox for photocopy, or Kleenex for tissue.
- An older name being retained even in the face of newer information (e.g. Chinese checkers, Arabic numerals, free market economy).
- A name being applied to something which only covers part of a region (e.g. "America" and "American" for the United States of America, which only takes up part of the American landmass; the name Holland is often used to refer to the Netherlands while it only designates a part of that country; sometimes people refer to the suburbs of a metropolis with the name of the biggest city in the metropolis).
- A regional name being retained even when something moves or expands beyond that region (e.g. the United States of America kept its name even after the State of Hawaii was admitted in 1959, which is an archipelago located in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean.)
- A name being based on a similarity in a particular aspect (e.g. shooting stars (Meteors) look like stars from Earth, Greenland is icier and Iceland is greener)
- A difference between popular and technical meanings of a term. For example, a koala "bear" (see below) looks and acts much like a bear, but from a zoologist's point of view it is quite distinct and unrelated. Similarly, fireflies fly like flies, ladybugs look and act like bugs. Botanically, peanuts look and taste like nuts and palm trees are classified scientifically as related to grass. The technical sense is often cited as the "correct" sense, but this is a matter of context.
- Ambiguity (e.g. a parkway is generally a road with park-like landscaping, not a place to park). Such a term may seem misleading at first blush.
- Association of a thing with a place other than one might assume. For example, Panama hats are made in Ecuador, but came to be associated with the building of the Panama Canal.
- Naming peculiar to the originator's world view.
- An unfamiliar name (generally foreign) or technical term being re-analyzed as something more familiar.
- Anachronisms, terms being applied to things that belong to another time, especially much later, such as the Dendera light interpretation of a mural from the Hathor Temple of Ancient Egypt.
- Dispute of criteria on naming. For instance, freeways are generally divided highways with no at-grade intersections or private access, and expressways have no private access but select crossroads. However, two-lane freeway often refers to 2-lane roads without private access but sometimes have at-grade intersections.
Older name retained
- The May balls and May Bumps (boat race) at Cambridge University no longer take place in May but during "May Week" in June.
- Fullscreen is a term commonly used for home viewing releases (DVD, VHS, etc.) of theatrical films to differentiate from their widescreen counterpart. Yet, due to the rising popularity of 16:9 HDTV sets, it is, for the most part, the widescreen versions that are technically "fullscreen" (depending on their original aspect ratio). Plus, most fullscreen versions of modern films, are in fact cut, zoomed, and panned versions of the original widescreen, so while the image fills a 4:3 screen, it is not in fact a "full" picture. The more correct term, when a widescreen film is so modified, is "Pan and scan". Conversely, DVDs of films and television shows originally shot and released in a 4:3 aspect ratio are occasionally described as "pan-and-scan" even though no such modification has occurred.
- Video recording is called filming even when discussing about digital video.
- The term free market (usually referred to capitalism), doesn't refer to an absolute freedom of markets; the market itself is not actually "free", and it has restrictions and resource scarcities.
- The "lead" in pencils is made of graphite and clay, not lead; graphite was originally believed to be lead ore but this is now known not to be the case. The graphite and clay mix is known as plumbum, meaning "lead ore" in Latin, and is still known as "black lead" in Keswick, Cumbria and elsewhere.
- Northwestern University is in northeastern Illinois, a midwestern state. Illinois was, however, part of the historical Northwest Territory.
- Some blackboards are actually green.
- "Tin foil" is almost always made of aluminium, whereas tin cans made for the storage of food products are made from steel plated in a thin layer of tin. In both cases, tin was originally used for the same purpose.
- A windmill is a wind turbine whose mechanical output directly drives machinery to mill grain. The earliest wind turbines were windmills. Most new, large wind turbines generate electricity, and thus are properly called wind generators, but many people call them "windmills".
- In e-mail, the abbreviation CC refers to the practice of sending a message as a "carbon copy", which has nothing to do with carbon copying, an obsolete practice in the internet age.
- Clapham Junction is in Battersea (now part of Wandsworth), not Clapham (part of Lambeth); the borough boundaries have changed since the arrival of the railway.
- Quad bikes are actually ATVs (All-terrain-Vehicles) or OHVs (Off-Highway-Vehicles). The word "bike" (short for "bicycle" meaning "[having] two wheels") incorrectly implies that they have two wheels, instead of the four indicated by "quad".
- Chess players with little skill are often referred to as "woodpushers", even though modern chess pieces are mostly made of plastic.
- In minor league baseball, while the New York-Penn League does in fact still include teams from New York and Pennsylvania, it would more accurately be called the "New York-Penn-Massachusetts-Vermont-Maryland-Ohio" league. It has also previously included teams from New Jersey and Canada.
- Baseball's Pacific Coast League was originally made up only from teams located on the West Coast of the United States, but the PCL now has franchises as far east as Nashville, Tennessee. Minor league baseball's other AAA league, the International League got its name because it originally had teams in both Canada and the United States, but it currently has no Canadian franchises.
- Telephone numbers are sometimes referred to as being "dialed" despite the fact that rotary phones are now rare.
- "To tape" is a synonym for "to record", even in reference to recordings made onto digital media instead of analog devices such as cassette tapes or videotapes.
- When a computer program is electronically transferred from disk to memory, this is referred to as "loading" the program. "Load" is a holdover term from the mid-20th century, when programs were created on punched cards and then loaded into a hopper for automated processing.
- In American football, a "touchdown" is scored when the ball is advanced across the goal line, but, unlike in rugby football (the game from which American football is chiefly derived), the ball does not have to actually touch the ground for a score to be awarded.
- In American college sports, the Big Ten Conference has kept its name despite the addition of an eleventh member (Penn State) in 1990. Their current logo incorporates an 11 in its negative space.
- Bicycles are (in the UK, NZ and Australia at least) often referred to as "push bikes" , although strictly speaking that term actually refers to the bike's pedal-less predecessor (which literally had to be "pushed" along by the rider's feet) .
- Up to and including Windows XP, the Hearts game included is called "The Microsoft Hearts Network", despite there being no network play in the later versions. (The Windows Vista version is simply called "Hearts".)
- In most countries, the term television channel became associated with a nationwide television network.
- Similarly, the Coca-Cola Classic branding, which was introduced in 1985, does not refer to the original Coca-Cola formula, despite it being promoted as the "Original Formula".
- Big-budget live action movies are now done with extensive use of CGI footage.
- In golf, the clubs commonly referred to as "woods" are usually made of metal. The club heads for "woods" were formerly made predominantly of wood.
Similarity
- Guinea pigs are not pigs and do not come from Guinea. The "Guinea" may be a re-analysis of "Guyana", though they originate from the Andes and not Guyana.
- A multi-valued function is not a mathematical function in the proper definition.
- The same can be said about a generalized function, as such a function cannot be evaluated in some point(s); the only integrals with such functions have a common sense meaning.
- A disk laser usually is not disk at all; only the pumped region (sometimes) has a disk-shaped form.
- A lead crystal is not a crystalline solid but an amorphous glass.
- The Nintendo GameCube is not a cube because the sides are not all squares.
- The Hundred Years' War did not last for 100 years but 116. It was actually a series of separate campaigns and battles which continued for 116 years (from 1337 to 1453).
- The First World War and the Second World War never occurred worldwide.
- The Blitz was the sustained bombing of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941. Although the word Blitz is a shortening of the German word blitzkrieg, meaning "lightning war", it was not an example of blitzkrieg but was an early example of strategic bombing.
- Catgut is made from sheep intestines.
- Podcasting is not limited to the iPod, nor does the technology involve any casting as the consumers pull audio data onto their audio players. However, like broadcasting, it is a way of distributing audio or visual data to large numbers of people.
- Heat lightning is actually lightning that is too far away for the thunder to be heard, but generally occurs during hot weather
- Sugar soap contains neither sugar nor soap.
- Smoked glass is so-called because it looks like smoke, not because it is literally kippered. It is actually a type of stained glass.
- Salad cream (a mayonnaise substitute) is so-called because mayonnaise is often (although not exclusively, as implied) used as a salad dressing. Unlike mayonnaise, salad cream is not particularly creamy.
- An egg cream is really chocolate flavored syrup with seltzer and milk. It typically contains neither eggs nor cream.
- Eggplants, although egg-shaped, are not ova.
- An egg roll is an appetizer usually made by wrapping a combination of chopped vegetables, not eggs.
- Head cheese is actually a meat product.
- Grape-Nuts are made from neither grapes nor nuts.
- A Mountain Beaver (Aplodontia rufa) is a primitive rodent unrelated, though fairly similar in appearance, to beavers not usually found in mountainous areas.
- "Horny toads" or "horned frogs" are actually lizards.
- In baseball, the common term "ground rule double" does not refer to actual ground rules but is, in fact, provided in the standard rules, such as in Official Baseball Rules, Rule 6.09(d) through (h). Likewise, an uncaught third strike is often referred to as a "dropped" third strike, even though it is not necessarily dropped but it is simply not legally caught by the catcher. In addition, the foul lines on a baseball field are located in fair territory (Rule 2).
- At Stanford University, the term "Stanford Cardinal" is often thought to refer to the bird. It actually refers to the school's team colors.
- Photoshopping is often done with image editors other than Adobe Photoshop, such as Paint Shop Pro.
- Vinho Verde is often supposed to be pale green, due to a too-literal translation of its name; in fact, in Portuguese as in English "green" is a metaphor for "young", and most Vinho Verde for the export market is white (and a pale yellow in colour).
- Though a starfish is star-shaped, as the name suggests, it is not a fish.
Difference between common and technical meanings
Other
- Apes are commonly referred to as monkeys.
- The East River is not a river, but a tidal strait.
- Fermat's last theorem from 1637 was not correctly proven until 1995, and was therefore, until then, not a theorem, but a conjecture. 'Last' also refers to it being the last to be proved, not the last formulated.
- A firefly is not a fly, but a beetle, though it does fly.
- Koala "bears" are marsupials not closely related to the Ursid family of bears. The name "koala" is preferred in Australia, where koalas are native.
- A light-year is a unit of distance measure, not time. It is the distance traveled by light in one year.
- A peanut is not a true nut in the botanical sense, but a legume. Similarly, a coconut is not a true botanical nut.
- Percentages in baseball (such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage) are not given in the form of a percentage but as three place decimal averages similar to a probability. They need to be multiplied by 100 to become percentages.
- Machines commonly known as steamrollers are usually not now steam-powered. A better name is road roller.
- Tear gas is not a gas, but a (solid) crystalline substance.
- The titmouse is a bird, not a mouse.
- White chocolate is not actually considered chocolate by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States and other bodies, even though it contains cocoa butter.
Ambiguity
- Former UK ISP Freeserve was not, as the name appeared to imply (an apparent implication picked-up upon in the advertisements of at least one rival), a service which didn't charge for use; it was so-called because would-be customers were free from the need to contract to using the service, i.e. it was pay-as-you-go (and thus quite expensive for heavy users). This is one of many cases where the situational sense of "free" was or is confused with the fiscal sense.
Association with place other than one might assume
- Arabic numerals originated in India, though they came to be associated with the Arab world.
- Norway Rat (Rattus norvegicus) did not originate in Norway, but from North China.
- Panama hats are made in Ecuador, but are associated with Panama as they were widely worn during construction of the Panama Canal.
- Mongolian barbecue is neither Mongolian in origin nor barbecue.
- French fries did not originate in France. There are some doubts about their origin, but they most likely were invented in Belgium. They're called "French" because vegetables sliced in that manner are called "julienned", which sounds French.
- Several sports teams play at venues in the metro area they represent, but not in the city proper. Some examples are:
- The Detroit Pistons and their WNBA sister team, the Detroit Shock, play in Auburn Hills.
- The Washington Redskins play in Landover, Maryland.
- The New York Jets and New York Giants play in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
- The Buffalo Bills play in Orchard Park, New York (plus, from the 2008 season, one home game a year in Toronto). This makes the Bills the only one of the three NFL franchises representing New York cities to actually play in that state.
- Millwall F.C. moved from Millwall, Isle of Dogs, to New Cross in 1910, and now play in Bermondsey.
- Arsenal F.C. are no longer based in their original home of Woolwich; they first moved to Highbury in 1913 and then to Holloway in 2006.
- Chelsea F.C. are in Fulham — they have never been based in Chelsea as land prices there are far too high.
- Of the 16 Australian Football League teams, nine are based in the Melbourne conurbation, with a tenth in nearby Geelong (which is not officially a part of the Melbourne conurbation, but is heavily integrated with it). Of these, only the Melbourne Demons and Geelong Cats play their home games in the communities they are named after. Also, in Western Australia, the Fremantle Dockers play their home games in nearby Perth instead of Fremantle: they share their home ground with the West Coast Eagles.
- Several colleges and universities are named after cities other than the one where they are located (typically because they moved within the same metropolitan area):
- French horns originated in Germany, not France.
- Motorsports Grands Prix do not necessarily take place in the countries giving their names, mostly because there is already a Grand Prix taking place in the country where the track is located; for example the San Marino Grand Prix formerly took place in Imola, Italy because the Italian Grand Prix is held at Monza.
- The Canary Islands are not named after the canary, but dogs, the Latin word for dogs being canis. In fact, the bird was named after the islands, and not the other way around.
- Derby and Lancaster are no longer the county towns of Derbyshire and Lancashire respectively; those roles are now filled by Matlock and by Preston respectively.
- Chinese checkers did not originate in China (or even Asia).
- India ink is made in China.
- The "English horn" refers to an alto oboe with an angled mouthpiece. "English" simply mistranslates the French for "angled"; "horn" would seem to indicate a brass instrument rather than a woodwind.
- Despite its name, the Jerusalem artichoke has no relation to Jerusalem, and little to do with artichokes. Jerusalem derives from Girasole, the Italian word for sunflower, by folk etymology. The taste of the tuber of a Jerusalem artichoke merely resembles the taste of the leaves of the Globe Artichoke.
- Only four of the sixteen teams in the Pacific Coast League – Portland, Tacoma, Fresno and Sacramento – are located in close proximity to the Pacific Ocean.
- All fourteen teams in the International League are located within one country, the United States (however the Syracuse Chiefs were affiliated with a Canadian team, the Toronto Blue Jays (the Las Vegas 51s of the PCL are now affiliated with the Jays)). Historically, the league name was not a misnomer; it included a team in Cuba from 1954 to 1960, had a team in Puerto Rico for part of the 1961 season, and featured teams in Canada throughout its history until the last Canadian team moved to the U.S. for the 2008 season.
- Scotland Yard is located in England.
Naming peculiar to the originator's world view
- The tremolo arm on guitars is used to produce vibrato; not tremolo. Conversely, a vibrato unit produces tremolo, not vibrato. Both terms are due to electric guitar pioneer Leo Fender.
- As European explorers mistook the Americas for India, the native peoples were called Indians. Similarly, the West Indies were so called after India. Ironically, the term "Native American" is not only just as wrong as "American Indian", but it is wrong in the same way; while the latter term implies that the people descended from the original population of the Americas were born elsewhere, the former term implies that they are the only inhabitants who were not.
- Newfoundland was considered newly found by John Cabot, who named it when he sighted it on his 1497 voyage, but had first been inhabited at least 5,000 years before. In fact, Cabot was not even the first European to see the island; Vikings established a short-lived settlement on the island about 500 years before Cabot's voyage.
- Greenland is mostly Arctic and Iceland is mostly tundra (the settled portions of Greenland are green). Thus Iceland is mainly green and Greenland is mainly icy.
- Anti-Semitism is prejudice against Jews, not all Semites.
- The term "American" is frequently used to mean a citizen of the United States of America, despite the fact that anyone who lives in the Americas is technically an "American".
- Christian science and creation science are religious movements, not sciences.
- The "Original Six" is thought by many casual ice hockey fans in North America to refer to the six original teams in the National Hockey League. More accurately, it refers to the era beginning in 1942 and ending in 1967 when the league featured only six teams. The concept of these six teams being the "original" league is a misnomer; only two of the six were members of the NHL in its inaugural 1917–18 season, and several NHL franchises, including both charter members and expansion teams, folded prior to 1942. However, from the point of view of modern hockey fans, the term is accurate in a practical sense for the following reasons:
- As noted above, the Original Six formed the entire league from 1942 until it doubled in size in 1967.
- While only two of the Original Six were charter NHL members, all were founded no later than the NHL's first decade of existence, and each of them predates the other 24 NHL teams by at least 40 years.
Reanalysis
- In logic, begging the question is a type of fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. However, more recently, "begs the question" has been used as a synonym for "raises the question".
- A quantum leap is properly an instantaneous change, which may be either large or small. In physics, it is the smallest possible changes that are of particular interest. In vernacular usage, however, the term is often taken to imply an abrupt large change.
Other
- While Dry cleaning does not involve water, the process does involve the use of liquid solvents.
- The term hyperinflation usually refers to "inflation exceeding 100% a year". It is extreme, but not beyond inflation.
- The term scientific socialism usually refers common socialism rather than scientific.
- A radiator usually transfers more energy by convection than by radiation.
- In some countries, the term television channel is actually used for a television network.
- Many music videos are actually shot in film, but stored in video.
- In the United States, the term "college" traditionally refers to an institution which does not grant doctoral or professional degrees. However, there are some "colleges" which have a full range of graduate programs, such as Dartmouth College and Boston College.
- The Oktoberfest beer festival actually begins in September and ends in October; although it originally started in October, the dates have been pushed forward because the weather in September is more favourable.
- The "funny bone" is not a bone — the phrase instead refers to the ulnar nerve.
- During its peak, rush hour often lasts more than an hour, with very little, if any, movement.
- None of the Local TV-owned TV stations is branded as Local. This mandate belongs to Post-Newsweek Stations.
- A parkway is a type of street or road where parking is generally prohibited.
- A residential driveway is intended for parking.
See also
- List of common misconceptions?
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