Just for fun, what are some popular misnomers that you notice or ones that maybe irrationally upset you? Maybe something regional that is odd from your AO?



"Rakers" on chainsaw chains, they're called "depth gauges" as they do not perform a raking function.

"Bubbler" or pronounced "Bub-lah" for drinking fountain...that one is an oddity to me.

"Buggy" for a shopping cart? For a guy from rural PA, a buggy is a thing the Amish drive about.

Post some up here for discussion.

side-bet...how long before the thread goes astray and people are calling each other names? <20 post, I'd wager.

Seems to me your post is based on the misconception that the way words are used is somehow prescribed, perhaps by some official determination, rather than evolving and changing over time and varying from location to location and group to group.

In English at least dictionaries are there to record usage, and the way it has evolved, not to prescribe it. Some, like our Macquarie Dictionary, even produce word maps to show regional variations, Your shopping cart is a shopping trolley here, for example, and may well be a buggy somewhere else. Ask for a drinking fountain here and you'll get blank looks, because we know them as bubblers. There are numerous other examples.

AFAIK prescribing the proper use of words is something the French do - and even there the Academie Francaise is pushing it uphill.

Do those chainsaw rakers gauge any depths?


<20 post, my ass.....Dumbass......

Thongs - everybody wears them down here

P issed - inebriation down here

President Elect.

Pickup vs a truck. Huge difference.

Cartridge vs caliber is always a good one too.

Giving a shït vs couldn't give a shït

Taking a shït vs leaving a shït. I ain't taking that shït with me.



Explain that........shït.

"Could care less" versus "Couldn't care less"

Caliber versus cartridge is the one that set me off on this earlier, and your post reminded me of that. Sadly, it was on an RCBS ad that the nomenclature was improperly applied.

Depth gauges on the chainsaw set the depth of the cutter height as it slopes back...but I understand the comment.

I was correct though, I said less than (<) 20 posts, and you proved that correct well.

T,

I'm with you, I'm leaving one, not taking one.

Personally I prefer malapropisms to misnomers.

And a "Coke" is a Coke (tm) not a generic term for a soda..................and there is no "pop" attached to the soda word.............it's just a soda.

Bubbler was a brand of drinking fountain from years ago. Folks in some parts of the country still use the brand as a generic label.

Some saws have rakers. A common type two-man saw is the M peg and raker.

Bubbler

(ir)regardless

Who said I'm not useful???

Finally something I can be proud of...

As far as depth gauges on the chainsaw setting the depth of the cutter height.....BS. They "rake" the the wood slivers out of the way. Everyone knows that. Seesh.

Mauser "thumb slot"..

When in fact the feature was officially designated
by Paul Mauser as a patented gas port.

****

".275 Rigby" , like it was an official cartridge.

To my knowledge no period ammunition was
ever produced for Rigby rifles with any such headstamp.

Rigby simply overlabeled 7mm Mauser ammunition
and designated it as '.275 bore'.

Had an English lass comment "I want to get screwed tonight"

Funny look on my face I guess - she followed it up with "That's drunk to you Yanks".

Damn - another one that got away!

"Sno-go", for snowmachine. Any brand snowmachine can be a "Skidoo". Snowmachines are also called "sleds", but in the Arctic, at least, the "sled" is what is towed behind a Sno-Go/Skidoo/snowmachine to haul one's gear and meat.

Same generic use for :
Coke
Kleenex
Clorox
pop

Some Eskimos call caribou "deer", which of course they are.

Arctic Char are "trout", which they are not.

Burbot are "mud sharks"

At Interior villages in the Yukon River drainages, it is anyone's guess what a "silver", "coho", or "red" salmon may be, unless one can see the fish. It changes from village to village. There are no red/sockeye salmon runs there. "Reds" was used to designate cohos or king/chinook in spawning color, "silver" designated the late run of chum salmon, which maintain their sea bright colors far upstream, unlike the early run of chum "dog" salmon which start coloring up almost immediately. I think traditionally the less fat "dog" salmon weredried for the dogs, the fatter late run of "silvers" was caught for people food overwinter. Speculation on my part.

I did a village subsistence use survey for F&G one fall, from Kaltag to Eagle, and up all the side drainages.

I was a little bit confused for the first few villages.........

This one has always bugged me a great deal. It is now, however, added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. This addition lends great credance to the first reply of my OP.


https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless

Pickup cap! Weirdos.

Calling the floor the ground.

Calling anything with three or more wheels a motorcycle.

Semi-truck. It's a full truck, possibly pulling a semi-trailer. Semi-trailer truck is more accurater!

Mid-west. Yes, Wyoming is approximately mid-west, that other chit is back east.

Knew a professor that was insistent that birds, no matter what type, don't have beaks, they have bills and only squid have beaks. I went along with it, but, like calling pronghorn, antelope, it's just easier to let it go.

Calling a Camper shell a can a pee

Hence why, although not a misnomer.

The crazies in the northwest.

Lots of stuff seems to have 2 or 3 names around these parts.

Tissue, Kleenex
Truck, pickup, rig
Soda, pop, cola
Semi, tractor trailer, big rig, 18 wheeler
Coho, silver
Chinook, king, blackmouth
Keta, dog salmon, chum
Pink, humpy
4 wheeler, quad, atv
Trackhoe, hoe, shovel, excavator
Bobcat, skid steer
Knuckle boom, grapple loader, log loader
Truck Cap, canopy
Reprod, second growth, dog hair

The annoyance is when folks know exactly what’s being discussed yet still point out the word use.
Like with clip and magazine. If you know what the guys taking about when he says he has a 30 round clip. Then it’s fine.

BJ when it's obviously a SJ.

I have pondered on this myself.

Scared the shït out of me? More like it scared it back into me, with the pucker factor.

I was perplexed by the term hummer for years, then late one night.....

I have always thought fountains were "burblers" for many reasons.

Not to hijack the thread or anything but I wish "...a coke was a cola, and a joint was a bad place to be..."

Tin foil

Unthaw

I'd say yes and no.

Somebody mentioned the French. The French have a governmental agency that attempts to enforce rules. They especially want to keep foreign words out of the popular jargon when they conflict with existing French terminology.

We don't have any particular governmental agency, but we do have some private entities that try to enforce standard usage. As an example, when I got into journalism, everyone was expected to use the Associated Press style book as a reference. It had grammar rules, but it also had some actual words. When I got to college, everyone had to get a copy of Turabian's Manual of Style which followed what was called "The Chicago Method." It was more about grammar, but it did have some rules about how to pronounce things. When I got into Broadcasting, I had to submit to an evaluation of my speech, and I was given a list of deficiencies that I had to clean up. I remember the one that really rang the bell: "Dubya instead of Double-You." I was told I'd never get a job in radio if I could not pronounce the call sign properly. It was funny, because I'd grown up next door to Powell Crosley's brother, Louis. They'd started WLW radio as a way to sell their radios, and then went on to own the Cincinnati Reds. Lou said "Dubya-El-Dubya." and "Sin-sin-Na-ta." They also funded the Crosley School Of Broadcasting that I was attending at the Univ. of Cincinnati. He and his brother, Powell had grown up on a farm on the north side of Cincinnati, and were just good old farm boys. There was a mini-dialect of Anglo-Protestant farmers that was spoken on the fringes of Cincinnati that is now totally gone. It differed considerably from the Dutch-Protestant truck farmers and was different still from the Germans. When a guy opened his mouth back in the day, you could tell where he was from and what church he attended.

Bottom line: Americans don't have any carved-in-stone rules, but there are influences that force us to a standard speech.

I really interesting case is KYHillChick. She has two modes. The one is a very effete-sounding Midwest accent. That's her day-to-day speech. The other turns on when she gets below Richmond, Kentucky, or when she gets a long distance call from her family down at the KY-TN border. Pronunciation, grammar, her whole affect changes. It has to do with fact she went through accent-reduction training at Berea college during her degree program and then 30 years as a secretary up north here in Cincinnati. As soon as she gets close to home, it's like she's kicking off her shoes.

Me? As I said, I entered college with a quite a few quirks. My father was 2nd Gen German-American-- spoke German until he entered Kindergarten. I've got a lot of leftovers from that in my own speech. The other is being in what's called "Mid-Ohio." I was several years out of college, and well beyond my last air shift in radio before I realized that I'd started to lose my native mode of speaking, and I made a point of reintroducing it back into my everyday speech.

Stuff that's still in my vocabulary:

1) Everything is jake if it's okay, copacetic, or all right. If you are worried about whether your buddy is mad at you, you say, "Are we jake?"

2) If I've had business dealing with a man, I've had truck with him.

3) When it's time to go, I how up. That one perplexed me all my life. I even asked my dad. He'd forgotten. I finally realized Dad was in the pack artillery in WWII. They shot 75mm howitzers, carried on mules. To "how up" is the same as "pack-up" in the infantry. Duh.

4) When I can't hear what someone is saying, I say "Please?" It's from the German , "Bitte?" I picked that up in 1st grade. My teacher was a German Catholic. They all had that idiom. When I moved into a predominantly Catholic neighborhood as a kid, it stuck.

5) I make the mistake frequently of saying "What can I do to you?" It's a German-related quirk that I picked up from my father. You're supposed to say "What can I do for you?" It's gotten me into trouble a couple of times.

The amusing irony is that some of the examples given in this thread are actually non sequiturs, which means the examples themselves are misnomers.

Hot water heater????

The world continues to go round-n-round, but....

Channel locks for slip joint pliers
Crescent wrench for adjustable wrench
Alemite for zerk fitting

Once a spike-always a spike

Scrub buck

Meat hunter

Red herrings

‘Nother” as in, “that’s whole ‘nother’ ballgame”.

Don’t know if it’s incorrect or not but it bugs me when the local weather guesser says, “blah, blah, blah, to your north” vs “to the north”. I didn’t think one could possess a direction.

How about "mango" for a green pepper? I started running into that about 30 years ago.

Oriented vs Orientated

Hot tub vs hot tube

My all time favorite is the term "slingshot" being used for another type of stone launcher.

😉

One I have never understood is calling the cupboard at camp a "press".

Fine hair splitting: If you're a local weatherperson, it helps to say "our north." The point is to include yourself in the audience. If you're a national weather nitwit, you should say "your north." Sometimes on a national or regional scale one guy's north is another guy's south. Yeah, I know, confusing. However, think of how a low-pressure center moves east. Chicago may get it as preciptation from one direction. Lousiville might get from another.

Why do they call them APARTments when they are so close together?

supposibly

anyways

+1 Big Time

This is a favorite...


ranks right up there with the often used " front shoulder"...

Religion of peace vs animals

Truck cap is a topper around here.

Breakfast - dinner - supper...... in that order

Sweatshirt, not hoodie

Cooler, not coozie

Pop, not soda

My pickups are trucks, not an outfit or rig, certainly not a car, so.......pissonya.....

I agree on the "midwest" thing. Here I am in Oklahoma (the cultural center of the universe), and the "midwest" is North and East of me???

Take your pick......

Bel Fourche South Dakota is the geographical center of the US:

https://www.bellefourchechamber.org/gcon/

Lebenon Kansas is the center of the 48 states.

http://clui.org/ludb/site/geographic-center-lower-48-united-states

Rugby North Dakota is the center of North America.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/geographical-center-north-america

Dickweed!!!!

We're pregnant

Here you very rarely hear the term 'out east' but I'm told it's common in other parts of the country.

[quote=mauserand9mm]Thongs - everybody wears them down here

Thongs are for your feet not your ass.

Ever see a fat girl in a “thong”? I think that’s where “butt floss” term came from.

But really?........A fat girl in a thong is a sight to see.

Then you have the pronunciation of Belle Fourche (Fooche), so that's fun.

"Anymore" It better be the last word in the sentence with the preceding language referring to past tense.
Example, I don't do that anymore.

"Went" This word can be used so incorrectly it causes brain gnash, making it difficult to provide an example. It's just so wrong is stops me cold.

Other than that, The substitution of "caliber" for the word "cartridge" is too common.

John Wayne educated the world on its pronunciation in "The Cowboys".

Nothing worse than a good "Thats what I'm talkin 'bout" when nothing has even been spoken about.

Concur, that one also causes brain gnash...........Makes the orator sound retarded, or intellectually goofy at the least.

Married to a retired English teacher with a bunch of degrees, I’d best watch my p’s & q’s. She yells at the TV when they say stuff like, “Drive save”. You can’t drive safe unless you are driving a safe, but you can drive safely. Same with buy local. Can’t do that either. You need to buy locally. We have a relative from Australia and the stuff she says doesn’t compute lots of times either. A f-ag is a cigarette, a torch is a flash light, a boot is the car’s trunk, the bonnet is the hood, a jumper is a jacket. And my favorite a cockwomble isn’t what us guys with the boxers have, it’s an ignorant person.
If I question some language item, I’ll get all the teacher explanation about it being an adjective modifying a verb, or a gerund or a dangling participle... For as many years as I spent in business, no one has ever asked me to diagram a sentence.

To call many of the things mentioned in this thread "misnomers" is a misnomer.

Calling an ATV or a UTV a 'bike'. If you're going to 'ike' it, it's more correctly a quike.

Not a misnomer, but a common misuse. "If you have any questions, contact Bob or myself". How the hell can anyone contact myself? They can contact me, but not myself.

Along those same non-misnoner lines, there is the ever-increasing misuse of "I". Somehow, people think that saying I instead of me is more intelligent, even when it is blatantly wrong. I is a subject pronoun, and me is an object pronoun.

Oh but there is a "pop" when that sumbitch freezes in your car and leaves a huge mess

"I" is correct in sentences such as "Bob is taller than I." That's because it is an incomplete sentence, the full version being "Bob is taller than I am." We often leave off the "am" but it is there nonetheless.

I am appalled at the rampantly incorrect usage of "me" as in "Me and my family went to Disneyland." You can tell it is wrong if you just leave out the "and my family" and see that you would not say "Me went to Disneyland."

Flammable vs. inflammable.

Mispronunciations:

Nu-Cu-Lar instead of Nu-clear

Ath-a-lete instead of Ath-lete.

Texan talk:

Clont instead of client.

Wha instead of why.

The worst offender, IMO: calling the US a "democracy", and pretending it is a "democracy." Or pretending that a President is "elected" by a "democratic vote."

The US is a constitutional republic. In other words, it is a nation founded upon and based upon a written law, written at its founding.

Some insist on calling a magazine a clip. Still.

"real a tor" for Realtor.

Worst of the lot: "Calvary" for cavalry.

AXE me question? Do I have to chop up a few words. (Ebonics)

In Ireland a vacuum cleaner is a hoover, a cooker (Pronounced kuker) is a stove top.
What is ekspecially?

In southern Manitoba, a Liberal is a losing politician. Should be a universal thing.

Why is every motorhome, camper trailer and 5th wheel called a Winnebago?

Ya, like when folks refer to wheels as rims. I almost bought a set off a guy one time, but he used the wrong term so I shidt in his mailbox and told everyone I knew he was retarded.

My pops was in the Cavalry (Garryowen) out of Ft. Hood...I remember losing it on a few people because of this.

I seen that error many times.

Did you tell her she had a nice fanny? In South Africa my wife referred to the sports sack around her waist as a "fanny pack" which amused the PH's a bit.

I am thinking of "They visited Disneyland with my family and I".

That's what I was taught, leave out the extra phrase (can't remember the proper teminology here, that's ironic) to tell if the correct pronoun is being used.

"Us fellows went to the store" vs. "We fellows went to the store". Us went to the store, we sent to the store.


Then there is the long standing rule to never end a sentence with a preposition.

Grammar anarchist: "Where are you going to?"
Grammar Nazi: "Never end a sentence with a preposition."
Grammar anarchist: "As you wish. Where are you going to, ass hole?"

I have a friend who is a real gun-term nazi. Fun to tell him I am gonna go buy more clips for my assault rifle and watch his blood pressure rise

"Spent shell casing". To me, it's a fired cartridge case. Also, "bullets" when it should be ammunition.

Saying someone is "ignorant" when describing a "rude" person, rather than someone who is uneducated. "Oh, she's so ignorant." Translation: "Oh, she's so rude." And it's usually pronounced ignurnt. TikkaNut will know of what I speak.

Worked with a female Detective that would use the terms
SPENT SHELL CASING for a fired catridge case and
UNSPENT SHELL CASING for a live live round of ammunition.

Does calling the M1 Garand a Ga-RAND fall under this subject?

[

"Spent shell casing". To me, it's a fired cartridge case. Also, "bullets" when it should be ammunition.
[/quote]...... Drives me nuts when people refer to ammo as bullets. Rant over.

Bugs the crap out of me reading older material, right up into the 1930s or so when they refer to a "Western city" and they're talking about Indianapolis or Springfield IL.

Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery explored the "West" in the early 1800's. One might think folks would quit calling Ohio and Indiana the West before the 1930's.

Me too

I’m just real tore the fugg up over such things.

Absolutely.

Everyone knows it's pronounced "Juh-RAND"....

How about the "Western Conference"?

Well,as far as the NHL goes, (the only league I pay attention to) none of it make sense other than they have to divvy up the teams somehow.

Park on the driveway.

Drive on the parkway.

I'm guilty. In my neck of the woods, it is still Ga-RAND. SAKO rifles are Say-Ko. Mannlicher–Schönauer rifles are Man-Licker Show-NOWERS. Hollows are "hollers". Red squirrels are "fairy diddles". And on and on.

I call them compartments, seems more descriptive.

That's right. Center of the country and then half way to the west coast is mid-west. Maybe Bonneville Salt Flat?

'Apart' means a fraction of a whole/
hence a 'block of apartments'.

There was a dialect study a decade or so that my wife and I participated in. This one below might be it, or be a reference for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html

I remember the question on the differenc between a creek and a crick?

I grew up on a crick where the water uzuls dove for perliwinkles and there's nothing not unwrong with me... (stream, American dipper, caddis fly, west slope of the Cascades, OR)

Is that MtnBoomer or Boomhauer?

“Hot water heater”

Should be “water heater”. After all, why would you need to heat hot water?

Decimated at one time meant to eliminate 10% but now it means to basically destroy the whole thing

When talking about the differential on the front of 4wd. "Front rear end" or shootings deer in the "front shoulder ". Or un-thawing a frozen dinner

‘maters and ‘taters.

Remember that the TX frontier was ended by Bob Wore.

That was interesting - thanks.

You want real confusion, try Cockney rhyming slang. Some terms my Dad used to use:

Have ya been up the apples? Have you been up (the apples and pears) stairs?

Let's have a butcher's. Let's have a (butcher's hook) look.

How's the trouble? How's the (trouble and strife) wife?

It's a specific kind of heater that heats water so it's hot. Ohh, wait, pay me no nevermind!

What if you put a casserole in the fridge, is it still a hot dish?

But, isn't it actually a .284 ? Or did Rigby really build a .275 bore rifle which would put it very close to the .270 verses the .284? There has to be something I'm missing.
kwg

Rigby barrels were regular European 7mm mauser spec.

.275 land Dia.
.285 groove Dia.

btw: there was another UK rifle company
that adopted 7mm Mauser, and did have
ammunition manufactured with its own
namesake h/stamp, do ya know who..?

Hint; the name was kinda 'boring'..

Digging a well. No you had a well drilled.

In Minnesota, yes.

"Riding" anything when you are, in fact, driving it.

You never hear the term here but for you easterners, where does 'out east' begin or end?

How about where does "down east" begin and end?