Abused Words

From time to time I notice people misusing a word. Here are examples:

“Exponential” has a well defined mathematical meaning but a lot of people think it means “large.” 2 4 8 16 is an exponential series but so is 1/2 1/4 1/8 1/16. It makes no sense to say that one number is exponentially greater than another.

People often use “Orders of magnitude” to mean “a lot.” It actually means powers of ten. If I estimate the population of San Jose at ten thousand when it is really about a million my estimate is off by a factor of 100, 10², two orders of magnitude.

“Decimate” is widely misused to mean “destroy ninety percent of,” more casually “destroy most of.” That isn’t what it means. Decimation was the punishment for a Roman legion that had committed mutiny or supported the wrong side in a fight over who would be emperor. It consisted of executing one tenth of the legionaries, selected at random.

“Organic” has acquired a new meaning in recent decades unrelated to the old, one jarring to anyone with a background in chemistry. The only common food I can think of that is not organic is sodium chloride, table salt.

In the same contexts where “organic” is used to mean “grown without pesticides or other icky things,”¹ “Chemical” is used as a vague negative term for the sorts of icky things that organic food is supposed to not have. Table salt is a chemical. So is water.

“Literally” is routinely misused (XKCD on the subject). Someone who says that the day’s exertions left him literally dead still has a pulse. Webster’s has now surrendered to the misusage, a clear case of treason against the English language

“Ice Age,” a technical term in geology, is often confused in popular speech with “glaciation.” An ice age is a time when there is an ice cap on one or both poles; we have been in one for more than two million years. Ice ages alternate between glaciations, when ice covers substantial parts of the globe, and interglacials when it doesn’t. The current interglacial has been going for about twelve thousand years

“Acidification” is the correct technical term for a reduction in pH, such as the effect on the oceans of increased CO2, but in that context is misleading since the ocean is basic; lowering its pH moves it towards neutral. The ocean becoming less basic may be a problem for ocean dwelling organisms adapted to the present pH of the ocean but it is not turning the oceans acid, which is what the term suggests. If you start with sodium hydroxide, a base, and neutralize it with hydrochloric acid you end up with salt water.

A “Pedophile” is someone sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Jeffrey Epstein had sex with women some of whom were below the age of consent but the youngest seem to have been about fourteen so he was not a pedophile, however many news stories describe him as one.

“Guarantee”: “I guarantee” is routinely used to mean “I am sure” with no implication that the speaker will compensate the listener if what he says turns out not to be true. It is a rhetorical fraud, transferring the rhetorical force of a real guarantee to an imaginary one. The issue was brought to my notice by a Facebook post whose author first said that a certain statistic was not known and then that he guaranteed what it would turn out to be.

“I guarantee it.” (Joe Biden, responding to a question about the US remaining a reliable NATO partner in future decades)

"The exception that proves the rule" originates in early law;² a legal rule stating that something was an exception was evidence of the existence of the rule it was an exception to. “Parking permitted on weekends” is evidence that it is not permitted on weekdays. The phrase is routinely misused to dismiss evidence by the illogical claim that evidence against a proposition is evidence for it.

“Begging the question” sounds as though it means raising a question to be answered: “You have gotten your weight down, that begs the question of how you did it.” It doesn’t. It means assuming your conclusion, making a circular argument.

"Statistically significant" does not mean large enough to matter. To say that an effect is statistically significant is a statement about how sure you are it exists, not how large it is.

Even people who get that right often get the actual meaning wrong; saying that evidence supports a theory at the .05 level is commonly misinterpreted as meaning that there is a greater than 95% chance that the theory is true, less than a 5% chance that the evidence in its favor was due to chance. What it actually means is that if the theory is false in the particular way described by the null hypothesis there is less than a 5% chance that the evidence in its favor would be as strong as it is; it is a statement about the probability of the evidence conditional on the theory being false not the probability of the theory being false conditional on the evidence. The former is what classical statistics gives you, the latter is what you want, and they sound similar which makes it easy to confuse them.³

I'll reluctantly admit that the death penalty is probably a little too harsh, at least for a first offense. I've therefore come up with a lesser, probabilistic penalty: Every group of ten misusers of "exponential" draw lots, and the nine winners are required to beat the loser to death with sticks. In addition to the obvious benefits with respect to "exponential", this will over time tend to correct the misuse of "decimate" to mean "utterly destroy", since the word will once again have a common referent.

(Rolf Andreassen on Data Secrets Lox)

1. A more detailed definition, courtesy of the USDA.

2. Wikipedia traces it back to “the legal phrase ‘exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis’, an argument attributed to Cicero in his defence of Lucius Cornelius Balbus. This argument states if an exception exists or has to be stated, then this exception proves that there must be some rule to which the case is an exception.”

3. A more detailed explanation from my old blog.