misnomer 'misconception'

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

Heard on KQED's Forum call-in show this morning (10/21/04), from the
American Independent Party candidate for president:
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That's really a misnomer, Bob.  Libertarians are really...
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This is "misnomer" '(popular) misconception, misunderstanding', a usage
i've heard a few times before.  Older usage manuals seem not to have
noticed it; I did a quick survey of twenty or so of them.  It does
appear in Lovinger's Penguin Dictionary of American Usage and Style
(2000):
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A guest on a TV interview show said that Henry Kissinger was born in
the United States, not in Germany as many people thought.  "It's a
common misnomer," he said.
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It's not in Garner's first edition (A Dictionary of Modern American
Usage (1998)), but makes it into the second (Garner's Modern English
Usage (2003)), with several cites.  Garner describes it as "a kind of
misnomer based on a misconception".

Googling on
misnomer misconception
provides quick a few perfectly standard uses of the two words in
conjunction with one another, plus a fair number in which they're
treated as (rough) synonyms:
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Law Offices of Anthony W. Hernandez (Webster TX)

You, as railroad employees, are not covered by the various state
compensation laws. This misnomer or misconception has worked to the
disadvantage of many employees like yourself, by having the belief that
they are cover by Workman's Compensation and that they will
automatically recover benefits without showing more than merely having
been injured on the job.
(http://www.rrlawyer.com/rr/anthony_hernandez_fela.html)
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These are especially interesting.  "Misconception" is pretty
transparent semantically (once you pick out the right sense of
"conceive"), but "misnomer" is not (unless you're a Latinist).  So you
can get the mistake sense of "misnomer" from context, without
understanding that it refers to a very specific sort of mistake.  You
can also appreciate the fact that "misnomer" is not very frequent and
seems to be rather technical or learne'd.  Put those observations
together and you've got "misnomer" or a high-style variant of
"misconception".

The mistake in all of this is misjudging the referential scope of
"misnomer" from hearing it in context -- a common enough (and entirely
understandable) sort of error that often results in semantic change.
Then, of course, we have occurrences of the broad "misnomer" in formal
contexts, which others can model in their own speech and writing.

i'd guess that this one's gonna spread fast.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)