Misnomer

A misnomer is a wrong or inaccurate name or designation which is intended to be misleading. This generally refers to objects or organizations that do not fit the meaning of their name or are the opposite of their stated name.

Examples[edit]

• baking soda — the common name for sodium bicarbonate, which is not a carbonated beverage despite "soda" being in its name.

• Big Bang — a bang is a loud sound, and sound needs a medium to travel through. No medium was present in order for there to be an audible sound when the big bang supposedly occurred.

• black hole — by definition, since a black hole exerts so much gravity such that light can't escape, a person looking at one wouldn't see any color at all (since black is technically a color defined by a large absence of light).

• Bulbapedia — a wiki that covers all topics related to Pokémon, not just Bulbasaur.

• coffee cake — the dessert is, for the most part, a baked sponge cake made without coffee (rather, often served with it).

• copy edit — the term refers not to copying, rather the improvisation of written/typed content.

• court packing — amidst the Barrett Confirmation Hearing, liberals have attempted to falsely redefine the term "court packing" to refer to filling vacancies (as Senate Republicans have done during the Trump era) when the term actually means increasing the number of Supreme Court seats.

• court reform — liberals use this deceptive term to mask their agenda of packing the court.

• Democratic (as an adjective in reference to the U.S. political party) — a grammatically incorrect and inconsistently applied term employed by Democrats to describe their party affiliation; for example, since a member of the Republican Party can be referred to as "Republican" or "a Republican" (where the term can be used as a noun or adjective), and a member of the Libertarian Party can be referred to as "Libertarian" or "a Libertarian" (again, where it can be applied either as a noun or adjective), it's logically inconsistent to refer to a member of the Democratic Party as "Democratic" (where it can only be used as an adjective), despite the latter being the lamestream norm for terminology; furthermore, the term is used as a euphemism to hide the fact that the Democratic Party does not promote a democratic system.

• Democratic People's Republic of Korea — North Korea is not democratic and not a republic.

• Fairness doctrine — this FCC policy was applied unfairly to inhibit free speech from conservatives.

• Greenland — despite its name, eighty percent of the island is covered by a glacier.^[1]

• hamburger — most are made without ham, despite the name; rather, the word refers to the fact that hamburgers originated in Hamburg, Germany.

• Iceland — being the opposite of Greenland, only one-tenth of Iceland's land is covered by glaciers;^[2] in addition, despite being located in an area in the North Atlantic Ocean where one would expect freezing temperatures, the climate in the area tends to be mild due to volcanic activity

• magic acid — this is the name given for the fluorosulfuric acid/antimony pentafluoride mixture that has superacid properties.

• Moderate Democrat — while a very few number of arguably more moderate Democrats exist in U.S. politics, such as Dan Lipinski and Collin Peterson, most improperly apply the term to describe typically establishment-leaning though left-wing Democrats, especially when used by liberals and the mainstream media.

• Molotov cocktail — this type of incendiary grenade is not an alcoholic beverage.

• Nervous system — despite its name, the body system has no direct association with being nervous.

• pencil lead — the material used in pencils for writing is graphite (a crystalline allotrope of carbon), not actual lead.

• Planned Parenthood — the abortion-providing organization prioritizes the murder of unborn children over helping individuals actually plan parenthood or find other non-murderous methods of relaxing burdens; in 2016, PP performed roughly 82 abortions for every adoption referral.^[3]

• pork barrel — the political term refers to wasteful government spending bills.

• politically correct — political correctness, being an aspect of liberal traits, has nearly nothing to do with being correct.

• positive Christianity — this term was used by the Nazis in their first party platform^[4] to describe their anti-Semitic favored view of Christianity that was completely remote from the religion's original teachings; despite favoring evolutionism and despising the religion as well as Judaism, the Nazis pretended to support Christianity when in public in order to infiltrate churches and use them to spout their propaganda in the manner of a parasite.^[5]

• Pro-choice — a term used by liberals that refers only to the consideration of the mother's "choice" in regards to abortion.

• Progressive — while the term in a general sense is supposed to refer to progress, progressives actually favor regressive policies.

• People's Republic of China — similar to the example on North Korea, this is used to deceive and to disguise the fact that China is neither a republic nor controlled by its people, but is actually a totalitarian dictatorship controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

• red herring — the idiom has neither to do with the color red nor the associated fish species.

• root beer — the sweet, carbonated beverage usually contains no alcohol despite "beer" being in the name.

• snickerdoodle — a type of cookie that is covered in cinnamon and sugar.

• Southern Poverty Law Center — a far-left hate group, the SPLC focuses neither on poverty nor upholding the rule of law.

• strange quark — this quark type is no stranger in its properties than its counterpart "flavors".

• Unintended pregnancy — with exceptions for forcible and statutory rape, the term almost always refers to pregnancies that result out of procreative sexual activities (especially premarital and extramarital) engaged in for the purpose of sheer pleasure and not procreation; since all procreative activities may result in pregnancy, the term "unintended" only refers to personal desires, as most situations involve young adults who have the mental capacity to understand the biological implications though deny individual responsibilities in their (often reckless) behaviors.

• Weak force — of the four fundamental forces, the weak nuclear force is actually stronger than gravitation,^[6] as its name refers to it being effective only for extremely short (subatomic) distances.

• web cookie — rather than coming in chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin variants, the term refers to data stored by websites in computers.

• wormhole — the hypothetical notion in physics has nothing to do with worms.

Disputable[edit]

• white chocolate — while it contains cocoa butter, some contend that it is not chocolate due to not containing cocoa solids that milk and dark chocolates do.

• pumpkin pie — it often is and has traditionally been made with squash (often butternut) rather than actual pumpkin due to the more potent flavor in the former; most canned "pumpkin" in actuality is squash.^[7][8]

References[edit]