Technical misnomers, ambiguous or plain incorrect terms in general usage.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Voltage is all right IMO. But amperage isn't.

[Messtechniker]

I also love this one. Music power for nanoseconds:
200 W power rating for some tiny active loudspeakers.
And on the tiny wallwart it reads 5 W!
One day I will catch one of those marketing guys and spank him a bit.
Oh well, it's probably not worth it.

[tautech]

I also love this one. Music power for nanoseconds:
200 W power rating for some tiny active loudspeakers.
And on the tiny wallwart it reads 5 W!
One day I will catch one of those marketing guys and spank him a bit.
Oh well, it's probably not worth it.

Yeah, PMPO   

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

PMPO they call it :-)

[TerraHertz]

Inflammable and flammable vs non-combustible.

"Next".  It mystifies me why most people use 'next' to mean "the one after this one coming up soon."

Misuse of "post" and "reply" words in buttons on forums. For example one private forum I frequent, in which a reply entry box is always present, and the button used to cause your text to be posted, is called "Reply".
Where the sensible thing would be to have no text box till you click "Reply", you type a message, then click "Post".
The person in charge of coding that forum cannot see anything wrong with how it is now. Like the damned words don't actually have specific meanings in English.

[David Hess]

Inflammable and flammable vs non-combustible.

The etymology of inflammable explains this.  The common understanding is wrong but English education is not what it used to be.

Latin is a dead language, as dead as it can be.  First it killed the Romans, and now it's killing me.

"Next".  It mystifies me why most people use 'next' to mean "the one after this one coming up soon."

Momentarily is the one which bothers me.  Why is the plane only going to land momentarily at its destination?  Isn't that where the passengers were suppose to leave the aircraft?

Misuse of "post" and "reply" words in buttons on forums. For example one private forum I frequent, in which a reply entry box is always present, and the button used to cause your text to be posted, is called "Reply".
Where the sensible thing would be to have no text box till you click "Reply", you type a message, then click "Post".
The person in charge of coding that forum cannot see anything wrong with how it is now. Like the damned words don't actually have specific meanings in English.

Blame Eternal September.  This forum configuration contributes to the problem.

Eternal September means that those who do not understand threading are condemned to reinvent it.

[madires]

When talking about the data transfer rate of serial interfaces most people use the term "baud" instead of "bps". And another commonly misused term for the throughput or data transfer rate of networks, lines and internet access is "bandwidth".

[JohnnyMalaria]

When talking about the data transfer rate of serial interfaces most people use the term "baud" instead of "bps". And another commonly misused term for the throughput or data transfer rate of networks, lines and internet access is "bandwidth".

baud is correct (named after Emile Baudot) and when applied in the digital domain is defined as 1 bit/second.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Inflammable and flammable vs non-combustible.

Strictly, inflammable is correct. In derives from the Latin inflammare meaning in (or into) flame.


Flammable and non-flammable originated in the early 20th century within the fire fighting world due to concern that (quite clearly) people might think inflammable = non-flammable. A wise move, I'm sure.


Consider inflate. It means to blow into. It doesn't mean cannot blow into!

[JohnnyMalaria]

Deplane. 

No - alight!

You don't decar, debike, debus, dehorsedrawn carriage, deskateboard, derollercoaster, dehovercraft, deship, deboat, dedogsled


Literally, alight means to relieve weight. i.e., "get your fat ass out of my car."

[madires]

baud is correct (named after Emile Baudot) and when applied in the digital domain is defined as 1 bit/second.

I prefer to use baud for the symbol rate. For example: a QAM256 modulated signal with 1 Mbaud has a data transfer rate of 8 Mbps. I think the confusion stems from the early days of modems (POTS). A 300 bps modem was called a "300 baud modem". Back then one symbol represented one bit. The result was the same. But later on with improved modulation we had 9600 bps modems with 2400 baud, but people called them still 9600 baud modems.

[JohnnyMalaria]

But later on with improved modulation we had 9600 bps modems with 2400 baud, but people called them still 9600 baud modems.

Oh, that's a good point.


Back when modems were that slow (I used to use one with big rubber cups for the handset), people would get bored because of the low baud [baud being pronounced incorrectly in true English style]

[Zero999]

I agree with the whole AC/DC motor thing.  All motors are AC.

All except the Faraday homopolar disc motor/generator.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=faraday%27s+homopolar+disc+generator&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjSjvqToKjbAhXHfrwKHeeoC5gQ_AUICygC&biw=1457&bih=972

No, only generator. There's no such thing as a "homopolar motor". A static field on a static disc would make a magnetized static disc.

Yes, there is such thing as a homopolar motor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homopolar_motor

But the biggest fault: Talking about a Voltage and Amperage when you talk about electric tension and electric current.  (in Dutch we use spanning (tension) )

Electric tension sounds incorrect to me. When most people talk of voltage, they really mean potential difference.

[Bassman59]

Real-estate agents (oops, sorry, I mean Realtors ©) here in the US use +/- to mean “approximately,” as in
“This house is +/- 1500 square feet.” And they have a stupid symbol for “square feet,” too.

Many many audio “engineers” confuse phase and polarity. They’ll say, “can you flip the phase on the bottom snare drum mic,” when what they actually want to do is to flip the polarity. That’s not helped by mixing console designs that use a Φ symbol on the switch, or by calling it “phase” in the user manual.

[glarsson]

Electric tension sounds incorrect to me.

What about the high tension lines transporting electric energy to your town?
What about the high tension leads transporting electric energy to your spark plugs?

[djacobow]

I am in the energy industry and I hate HATE HATE when people talk about electrons, like "those are solar electrons" or "we can't track the electrons" or "those electrons came from another state.

I tell them over and over that the electrons in the wire do not go anywhere, and they give me blank stares every time and think I'm nuts.

Explaining that moving energy and moving electrons are not the same thing only makes it worse, because now I'm pedantic egghead, and also, that sounds like techno babble to them.

[Nominal Animal]

Could of.  More then.  First A than B.  Missing commas, or other punctuation.

I don't talk in English often, but I read a lot, especially technical stuff.  The above errors throw me off, because I do not associate the words according to how they sound.  Usually, I need to read the sentence several times and sound it out, to find the most likely interpretation.   If I see them in documentation, I'd rather switch tools/sources/vendor than put up with it.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

I don't talk in English often, but I read a lot, especially technical stuff.

What amazes me is how many native speakers write it's when it's its.

[AndyC_772]

I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned "engineer" being used in place of technician, installer or operator.

If my cable TV box isn't working, I don't want the company to send an engineer. If they sent a real engineer, they'd be sitting in front of the box with a JTAG probe attached, probably spending days or weeks identifying the true root cause of whatever memory corruption causes the picture to freeze under very specific circumstances.

What I want instead is for them to send a technician, who can follow a prescribed diagnostic procedure, and who will hopefully know from experience that adding a -6dB attenuator in the signal path has a good chance of making it work reliably. Total time taken, about 20 minutes, and my cable box becomes usable again.

Back in the R&D lab, an engineer can (and should) replicate that empirical 'fix', determine exactly how and why it makes the symptoms of some underlying problem better, then fix the code and ensure the fix is rolled into to the next firmware update.

Very different skills, very different job functions, and neither could do the job of the other - yet still the confusion over the title.

[Mr. Scram]

What amazes me is how many native speakers write it's when it's its.

Its like their totally confused, which means your confused as well.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Missing commas, or other punctuation.

That's a difficult one. American English uses commas far more often than British English (i.e., proper English   )

For example, I would never have put a comma in the snippet of your comment above. But, now that I live in the US, I use them more. However, I get confused because one half of my brain wants to put the comma there, the other doesn't. Using "but" at the start of a sentence riles many people.

After so many years here, non-American English spellings look strange.

Dates also jar my brain. For example, if I see 5/7/18 I have to ask myself "do they mean 7th May or 5th July?". Come on - write it unambiguously, e.g., 7 May 2018. This really irks me when people write dates on forms that are obviously going to be seen by an international audience.

(Apologies for my inconsistent use or lack of commas. I'm grammatically tainted. Not wrong, just tainted.  )

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Dates also jar my brain. For example, if I see 5/7/18 I have to ask myself "do they mean 7th May or 5th July?". Come on - write it unambiguously, e.g., 7 May 2018. This really irks me when people write dates on forms that are obviously going to be seen by an international audience.

Lol, yes, that, happens all the time, then you start searching for the column with a number >12, don't you?

[Mr. Scram]

It's only the US that does that, though apparently the international standard for date formatting is YYYY-MM-DD.

[rdl]

What amazes me is how many native speakers write it's when it's its.

Its like their totally confused, which means your confused as well.

I hope all that incorrectness was intentional.

[Mr. Scram]

I hope all that incorrectness was intentional.

Poes Law is in full force.