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.