misnomer 'misconception'

[Dennis R. Preston]

arnold,

Shame on you! You have misconstrued. This is clearly 'misgnomer,'
homophonous, to be sure, but obviously meaning something like "bad
knowledge."

dInIs (too many deadlines, not enough time, too many temptations to
be a smartass....)



>Heard on KQED's Forum call-in show this morning (10/21/04), from the
>American Independent Party candidate for president:
>-----
>That's really a misnomer, Bob.  Libertarians are really...
>-----
>
>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):
>-----
>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.
>-----
>
>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:
>-----
>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)
>-----
>
>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)


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic,
        Asian and African Languages
Wells Hall A-740
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
Office: (517) 353-0740
Fax: (517) 432-2736