Misnomers, misconceptions and coincidences.

[Lencoboy]

I thought this might be an interesting thread for you all.

Of course, we've all heard of the phenomenon known as 'brandnomer' aka 'genericised trademark', e.g, where all vacuum cleaners are often referred to as Hoovers, regardless of actual brand.

Also 'Centigrade' is still often used as a misnomer for the Celsius temperature scale, which I guess has always been an easy error of reference as both begin with the same letter and almost always expressed textually in abbreviation (the letter 'C') prefixed with the 'degrees' (°) symbol, though nowadays it seems to be mainly older generations who quote 'Centigrade' in reference to the Celsius temperature scale, but of course many weather forecast announcers at the end of news bulletins erroneously quoted 'Centigrade' instead of 'Celsius' for many years, even well into the 80s (especially before around 1985 or so) as evidenced by many videos on YouTube featuring such historical bulletins.

Another source of confusion and controversy is how we pronounce years in the 21st Century. For instance, most people (including myself) pronounce this year (2024) as 'twenty-twenty-four', while some others pronounce it as 'two-thousand-and-twenty-four', which is more of a mouthful IMO. For instance, in the 20th Century we almost always used the former pronunciation in reference to years; for example we verbally pronounced the year 1984 as simply 'nineteen-eighty-four' and not 'one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-four', though of course both are fundamentally correct.

But another interesting one I remember being told when I was younger was that the word 'basic' was an acronym of 'Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Introductions Code', but thinking about it now, the word 'basic' is actually derived from 'base', which means the 'bottom' or 'root' of something, though of course, the terms 'simple' and 'fundamental' are often justifiably used interchangeably, both of which pretty much mean the same thing.

Funny how a lot of these misconceptions, misnomers and coincidences often arise, and are often the subject of much confusion, controversy, and even amusement and indeed intrigue.

[ErinKC]

I think I pretty interchangeably say twenty-twenty-four and two-thousand-twenty-four, but you're right it's different than how we did it with the 19s. I think part of it is that while nineteen-o-one or nineteen-o-4 sounded totally fine, twenty-o-one, etc... sounds weird. So, at the start of the 2000s we all probably defaulted to saying two-thousand-and-one, etc... and it stuck even though twenty-ten and beyond sound fine to most ears.

I'd be curious what people said in the 1000s - one-thousand-and-one v. ten-oh-one, etc...

[Fishmanpa]

Question: Your mental health and diagnosis put you in a unique category. You've been basically cared for and treated for your condition and it would appear that will be for the forseeable future. Your threads all are about the same general theme and focus on the past. I get it to a degree as things have been and are continuing to change. Today's world is vastly different from the past.

The question is; Do these threads that you post really stress you out that much that you feel a need to get affirmation/reassurance? Just curious as to your thought process that causes you to post about these realities and self-biased opinions.

FMP

[Lencoboy]

Question: Your mental health and diagnosis put you in a unique category. You've been basically cared for and treated for your condition and it would appear that will be for the forseeable future. Your threads all are about the same general theme and focus on the past. I get it to a degree as things have been and are continuing to change. Today's world is vastly different from the past.

The question is; Do these threads that you post really stress you out that much that you feel a need to get affirmation/reassurance? Just curious as to your thought process that causes you to post about these realities and self-biased opinions.

FMP

I totally understand what you're saying FMP.

I was merely pointing out many observed ambiguities and general lack of consensus regarding many things, which there's generally no harm in doing.

I am also both miffed and at the same time intrigued by certain abbreviations/acronyms that are sometimes mythically believed to be the actual words/terms, but are actually made up later on (sometimes in rather clever and thought-provoking ways), especially the aforementioned word/term 'basic'.

[Lencoboy]

The word 'supersede' is sometimes misspelled as 'supercede'.

Another potential cause for confusion among some is the noun vs verb misspelling; e.g, 'practice' is a noun and 'practise' is a verb (i.e, to 'do' an activity), and ditto for advice (noun) vs advise (verb).

There's also 'cause vs 'cos, both shortened forms of the word 'because', then there's doughnut vs donut, and of course okay vs OK, though neither variation of each are actually wrong.