Making sense of misnomers

What is a misnomer?

The word misnomer comes from the Old French word mesnomer, meaning “to name wrongly.” True to its roots, misnomers are names that are wrong or misleading for the thing they describe. For example, a koala bear is not a bear at all, it’s a marsupial. Peanuts are not nuts, they’re legumes. Misleading names happen for a variety of reasons, often very innocent ones.

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Change causes misnomers

Change is one of the biggest sources of misnomers. Oftentimes we’ll retain an older name for something even after that thing has changed beyond its original name. Think about the misnomer tin foil. When we first invented tin foil, the product was made out of actual tin, so it bore the appropriate name of tin foil. Now we make tin foil out of aluminum, but some people still call the item tin foil without considering its inaccuracy. Society accepts this lingual remnant from the past, even though it’s technically incorrect.

As society evolves and changes, so do our associations. Many misnomers started as sensible names with an obvious association to something else that made sense at the time, but when that association falls out of collective memory, the sensible name ceases to make sense. If that sounds a bit abstract, let’s look at the French horn as an example of a misnomer.

Germans developed the French horn, not the French. So how did it get its name? At the time, French makers stood as the predominant manufacturers of hunting horns shaped in the circular hoop that French horns resemble. Naming this instrument the French horn made a lot of sense at the time because the public made that association between French hunting horns and the shape of the instrument. Now that hunting horns aren’t common, people don’t make that connection and the French horn name evolved into a misnomer. Look at these other examples of misnomers caused by change:

• Blackboards
• Clothes iron
• Steam roller
• Tin can

New understanding causes misnomers

Misunderstanding is even more common among misnomers. Often, we discover something before we fully understand it. When we do not have adequate words to describe something, we give it our best guess. Over time as we collectively develop a wider vocabulary for the world around us, that original name becomes a misnomer.

Take lead pencil for example. Lead pencils contain a form of carbon called graphite, not lead. And unlike tin foil, lead pencils never contained lead in the past. So how did it get that name? Well, when graphite was discovered in England in the 1500s, chemistry was new, and people falsely thought that graphite was a type of lead. They then sawed blocks of graphite into sticks to be used for writing and gave them the misnomer lead pencils. Here are some other similar misnomers sprouting from a different understanding of the world:

• Arabic numerals
• Jellyfish
• Koala bear
• Seahorse
• Starfish

Use misnomers carefully

Sometimes you can use misnomers in your work without hesitation, other times should leave them out. It all depends on diction. For example, if you write “She grabs her lead pencil” in a short story, that’s fine because story writing welcomes casual writing and common speech accepts the term “lead pencil.” However, if you’re writing a formal piece, you should avoid the use of misnomers.