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

[Circlotron]

As far as the high-tech engines, are you referring to Mazda’s newfangled “holy grail” engine with the fancy multistage fuel injection or something?

I believe some newer engines with gasoline direct injection have a particular operating regime where at part load the drive-by-wire throttle is actually fully opened for reduced pumping losses and therefor better fuel economy. The gasoline that is sprayed directly into the cylinder under these conditions is concentrated near the centre so that the fuel-air ratio in the centre is correct and uniform despite there being way too much air present if the fuel was mixed throughout the entire cylinder air volume. A further benefit of operating this way is the flame stops short of the cylinder walls and so there is less heat loss to the cooling system. Also, the residual oil film on the cylinder walls doesn't get burnt off.

[McBryce]

Probably mentioned already, but I couldn't be bothered reading all ten pages of posts. My "pet peev" are people who repeat the last word of an acronym, such as:

"LCD Display", "ATM Machine", "LAN Network", "ICE Engine" and so many more...

McBryce.

[Richard Crowley]

Words mean whatever we generally agree to in the current era.

[Richard Crowley]

One of my pet peeves is "jack plug".  In the UK it seems to refer to the 1/4 inch (retro-defied as 6.5mm) connector with either two circuits (TS = Tip, Sleeve) or three (TRS = Tip, Ring, Sleeve)

I grew up understanding that "plug" refers to the male gender, while "jack" refers to the female of the species. Perhaps "jack plug" is some newfangled politically-correct term here in the era of LGBTQQI (probably more variations that I can't remember?)

So I never know whether "jack plug" refers to a cord-end male connector, or a panel-mount female connector?  One needs the context to be sure.

Furthermore, the elegant and rugged Switchcraft 297 that I grew up with as a child now costs $4-5! 

And Switchcraft is selling cheap Chinese designs with goofy spiral spring "strain relief".


/rant

[bob225]

In the UK it seems to refer to the 1/4 inch (retro-defied as 6.5mm)

1/4 and 6.35mm are interchangeable, Jack is a male plug the receptacle is a jack socket or a just plain socket

you can get both male and female plugs and sockets, electronics is gender friendly/neutral

over this side of the pond we use metric, imperial and whitworth (the latter used up to the 60's) just to confuse the rest of the world, BSP tends to throw a lot of people

[Bassman59]

One of my pet peeves is "jack plug".  In the UK it seems to refer to the 1/4 inch (retro-defied as 6.5mm) connector with either two circuits (TS = Tip, Sleeve) or three (TRS = Tip, Ring, Sleeve)

I grew up understanding that "plug" refers to the male gender, while "jack" refers to the female of the species. Perhaps "jack plug" is some newfangled politically-correct term here in the era of LGBTQQI (probably more variations that I can't remember?)

So I never know whether "jack plug" refers to a cord-end male connector, or a panel-mount female connector?  One needs the context to be sure.

Back when I was working as house sound in a venue, we'd have English bands come in, and their crew would talk about "jack to jack" and "lead to lead" cables. It took me a little while to understand what they were talking about.

[JohnnyMalaria]

I think "jack plug" is appropriate. A plug plugs something such as the kitchen sink plug. In this case it plugs the jack socket.

[David Hess]

Nobody uses Ω anymore?

When I am writing or producing documentation, sure.  But computer systems and unicode are now so screwed up that the Ω symbol is increasingly unreliable.  It used to work great back when code page 437 was ubiquitous.

Firefox does not even allow me to enter it directly without issuing a page back command.

Sounds to me like a Firefox bug (probably a Firefox on Windows bug). At least on the Mac, using Unicode for things like Ω has worked fine for a very long time. Outside of online services involving outdated servers, I haven't run into encoding issues for probably over 15 years.

It has been resurfacing in Windows applications and Windows in various forms since unicode started being used.  In some cases it can be traced to fonts which lack the character and in others to applications which do not support ALT character entry which makes sense for portable systems which lack a numeric keypad.

The decrease in reliability means I ignore it now along with the degree symbol and some others.  Want it fixed?  Take it up with Microsoft.  I am sure they will be happy to fix their mistake along with all of the others I notified them about 20 years ago which remain broken.