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As a mechanical engineer with an interest in windmills, motorcycles, locomotives, poetry and sex, I have a rather specialised list of candidates for the title of "most misused word". Where do I start?

I'll start with "absolutely". People around here say "absolutely" when I would say "yes". Advertisers write "absolutely free" when they mean "free, conditional on the purchase of something else". People assure me that there is absolutely nothing to worry about, when my mailbox is full of invoices and bank statements implying that there is plenty to worry about.

Tempting, but there are so many other words in common misuse.

Consider "vintage". I have a colleague who drives a 1930 Ford roadster. He is, needless to say, a member of the Vintage Car Club, as is a friend with a 1929 Essex. These are proper vintage cars. However, local newspapers, television newsreaders and magazine sub-editors refer to any car more than 40 years old as vintage. In New Zealand, a vintage car is correctly defined as one made between the beginning of 1919 and the end of 1931. In England the definition is more exclusive. There, a vintage car has not only to have been made during that period, but also to be "of particular appeal to keen drivers". As a guide to what is meant by this, the time period coincides with the independent existence of the Bentley Motor Company. In New Zealand an Austin Heavy Twelve is vintage. In England it is not, because it is so dull to drive. A Bugatti, any Bugatti of that period, is vintage in both countries.

Another frequently misused word is alloy. To their credit, I have never heard an American or Canadian misuse this word (Americans prefer to misuse transitive and intransitive verbs instead), but in the British-speaking world, most people believe it to mean aluminium, an error attributable to several generations of inexcusably lazy motoring journalists. This misuse has its roots in the aircraft industry, with aluminium and magnesium alloys being referred to as "light alloy" to distinguish them from heavy alloys such as bronze or inconel. Motor noters got into the habit of omitting the adjective and another bad habit was born.

Then there is the word "train". In railway parlance, a train is either the collection of vehicles hauled by a locomotive or by locomotives, or a number of self-propelled railway vehicles. It is not the noisy thing doing the hauling; that is a locomotive or an engine (both terms are correct, but train is not).

In 1969, I found that two of my classmates were Lesbians. They were brother and sister, brought up on the Greek island of Lesvos. Of course, they could not refer to themselves as such, because the word had been misappropriated to be applied to homosexual women.

So many misused words! Bug is another one. To an American a bug is any arthropod. To an Englishman a bug is a bedbug, and a recommendation to friends to avoid that hotel. To an entomologist, it is an insect with piercing and sucking mouthparts.

In my opinion, formed by several decades of listening to Kiwi men's conversation, the most misused word has four letters, the first being F and the last being K. I have chosen this word as the most misused, including its participle form (ending in -ing), because I have so rarely heard it used to refer to the delightful act for which it is both noun and verb, while hearing it used as a general-purpose verb and adjective for almost any other meaning. (To no one's surprise, the runner-up is "bugger".)

Learn more about this author, Bert Meinders.
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