Prove it!
āNaturalā is definitely one of my biggest complaints.
Countless horrible things are natural, ranging from asbestos to radioactive elements to the ebola virus and plenty more, but that doesnāt make them good for you.
I often get into frustrating discussions where people insist that ānaturalā foods use āno chemicalsā.
Yeesh.
I try not to get pedantic on this topic, but then I realize that I am a layperson. Iāve just bothered to learn correct terminology, and that means if a word is used in an ad or by a politician, I understand what it should mean. Thatās important because Iām protecting myself from what they may try to sell me.
Itās one thing to allow language to relax. Language does change over time. Itās a wholly different thing to just throw out the meaning of terms so that the words become effectively meaningless.
Hear, hear!
Iām a huge fan of letting language evolve and grow in unexpected directions - but as an extension of art, not as a modification of science. There is a place and a time for twisting the meaning of a word to make a point or to effect a pleasing aesthetic.
Music, poetry, literature and the like all benefit from the joyful practice of playing with words. But when Iām dealing with things like health, justice, history, and physics, the very last thing I want is for people to actively fiddle with meanings and create imprecision and confusion.
Itās a particular problem when you consider who starts actively using these ācreativeā forms of scientific terms. They tend to fall into a few groups: advertisers, politicians, and those supporting pseudoscience.
The goal is to obfuscate. They want to blur the information, or add to validity to a weak (or wholly faulty) claim.
When their claims get repeated, the misuse of science-y terms gets repeated, and our language is not better for it. They arenāt finding ānewā or ācreativeā uses of those words. Theyāre avoiding using weaker words to say what they really mean. Once the media adopts the error, it flows into public use.
Itās really something we should better guard against.
Iām not sure what Cory means to suggest by pointing out that these misconceptions are āprofitableā. Certainly, it doesnāt mean that these wrong ideas are widespread because theyāre being pushed by greedy corporations or what have you. Rather, I contend that the arrow of causation points the other wayāmost of these are obvious-in-hindsight consequences of scientific concepts running headfirst into known cognitive biases like compartmentalization, or just plain confusion of terms. If they are profitable, thatās because you can always find a way to profit from peopleās misunderstandings of important things.
Also, āunnaturalā is an oxymoron: everything obeys its nature.
Marketroids occupy the niche of preying on cognitive biases, and they donāt fuck around; as much disrespect for science as they may apparently display, thatās merely the side-effect of deliberate ploysā¦ they are scientists. And engineersā¦
I think you greatly misunderestimate the malevolence, and mountains of moolah, involved.
Organic drives me nuts, but I finally found something worse. I was in the corporate dining hall for a major tech company the other day and there was a sign touting low carbon food. I nearly fell out of my chair.
Yeah. Personally, āorganicā is my least favorite. It has a precise meaning, and always has, but the meaning that the average layperson has in mind is incredibly nebulous and a lie to boot, and most people donāt even know what the real, firm, well-defined meaning of organic is either.
Organic doesnāt mean āno pesticidesā nor does it mean āgrown by old hippies up on their family farmā. The only thing organic means when it comes to food, is āthe food industry can charge twice as much money for the same amount of product.ā
āNaturalā is also one of my pet hates. Well, as far as I can hate anything connected to language, which isnāt actually that much. Itās usually far more useful to get the meaning of something, rather than focus on nit-picking and pedanticism. Unless, like @catgrin said, they are advertisers, pollies or purveyors of woo using the delightfully mutable aspect of English for their own nefarious ends.
Iāve worked extensively with assorted toxins and although man-made might cause you some grief, if you really want your day ruined, Mama Nature is your go-to gal. 
most people donāt even know what the real, firm, well-defined meaning of organic is either
Very true. I have a masterās degree in chemistry and have had plenty of arguments with equally-qualified or more qualified people about what the definition of an āorganic moleculeā is (there is no official one).
Thatās amazingly stupid sounding and ridiculously phrased, but it does mean something in jargon, and Iām a bit sympathetic because there is not a good shorthand substitute. The intended meaning is something like ālow in contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide.ā So, mostly, low petrochemical input in production and transportation. A good replacement for the silly sounding ālow carbonā is urgently needed.
Okay then, whatās your definition? Iāll admit my formal education in chemistry ends at the eleventh grade. The definition of organic chemistry I was taught was: any chemistry dealing with molecules that contain carbon. That implies to me the definition of organic molecules as: molecules containing carbon.
My definition has nothing to do with whether the molecule is found in nature, or whether itās mostly carbon, or that it polymerizes or does interesting things. Just that itās a molecule that contains at least one carbon atom.
Iām actually very curious as to how chemists like to define what an organic molecule is or isnāt, and what points of contention there are.
OK: thatās a good start, but the carbonate ion is not considered organic despite containing carbon. The same goes for graphite and diamond (though those arenāt molecules), and carbon dioxide is also often not considered organic.
Iāve also seen people claim that a molecule must have a C-C or C-H bond to be organic, but that disqualifies urea. Urea was one of the molecules used to disprove vitalism (see below), so if your definition of organic excludes it then thatās a problem.
Historical interlude: The split between āorganicā and āinorganicā molecules comes from the belief of early 19th-century chemists that organic molecules could only come from living organisms or be made from other organic molecules. This belief was called vitalism- that there was some unique āspark of lifeā that organic molecules had and others didnāt. One way this was disproved was when Friedrich Wƶhler synthesised urea from ammonia and a cyanate salt, both of which were thought of as inorganic.
Back to the definition argument, another possible definition Iāve heard is that an organic molecule has to contain carbon and either hydrogen, oxygen or nitrogen- but that makes things like Teflon or CFCs inorganic when Iād say theyāre organic.
The closest Iāve come to a systematic definition Iām happy with is āA molecular species containing carbon covalently bonded to either carbon, hydrogen, a halogen, or two non-metallic elements one of which is nitrogen or oxygenā- but thatās an ugly one, and Iām sure thereās some edge case which messes it upā¦
sigh
Evolution. Evolved. āThis animal evolved to benefit from this habitatā - sounds active and directional, which is plainly false. Evolving has come to be used in an active sense, which we like, as we hate thinking about things happening without (human) intent. I think even Darwin used it that way.
Evolution is a passive process - the remainder of the mish mash ecological battle is the animal we see now. Itās what fell through the sieve.
This animal did not evolve from A to B. Thatās shorthand, and misleading.
Michael Crichton doesnāt make fun of people who donāt get on the bandwagon.
I think the issue with these terms is not so much that they are solely scientific terms being misused, but that they are terms that are in general use outside of science that have very specific meanings within science.
So, for example, it is perfectly acceptable to say, āI have a theory about why people enjoy shopping,ā that is not an actual testable scientific theory. But, if you were a psychologist talking to a group of psychologists about your ātheory about why people enjoy shopping,ā then the word theory has a much more narrow definition.
What happens then is that when scientific concepts are presented in newspapers, blogs, or in marketing stuff it is conflated with the everyday definitions of the word.
This is most obvious when discussing ātheory.ā Itās been a big point of people who want to dismiss global warming that it is āonly a theoryā and there seems be a really active effort on the part of people who are trying to discredit the theory of global warming to conflate the scientific term with the everyday term.
