Talk:misnomer

Earliest Usenet uses via Google Groups:

• misnomer: net.columbia - Jan 15 1982, 1:49 am by watmath

  This group is not at all strictly about the columbia, or even the STS, so there is a misnomer.

• misnomers: net.suicide - Mar 26 1983, 7:02 am by mhuxt

  However, seeing that this misunderstanding is the result of some childhood complex I'll forgive the misnomers... but please this attitude problem that you have, why don't you share it with us.

• misnomer's: ba.market.computers - Aug 23 1994, 9:18 pm by bRYgUY K. Carter

  In order to maintain the long-standing misnomer that Engineers can not write or spell, the port was removed, thus continuing the misnomer's tradition.

— Hippietrail 11:08, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

First example

I notice someone changed the first example I gave from specific to general. What I was trying to get at is that sometimes a particular use of a word is termed a misnomer. There's nothing wrong with it per se, but the speaker is saying it shouldn't be used in this particular case. In the second definition, the speaker asserts that the word itself is the problem. "You don't drive on driveways" is an example of the second. I had forgotten that driveway was one of the usual suspects for the second sense. I had in mind, say, an old, washed-out rutted dirt driveway to a country house, still called the driveway but no longer drivable. I'll come up with a better example. -dmh 21:43, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Food for thought

Wouldn't a misnomer be a misnomer in itself? Since its meaning is "incorrectly named", yet that is a correct name for it. So it is incorrect as that it is correct. You follow? Then again, since misnomer is a misnomer, it in effect isn't, which brings us back to the beginning. The cycle continues. A paradox, maybe? 24.49.35.99 07:00, 29 January 2011 (UTC)