superstringz said:
I have a particularly egregious (second definition) scorn for people who misuse egregious
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Egregious
Unless you are being ironic, your sentence is misusing egregious. You presumably mean that you have a strong scorn, not a conspicuously poor scorn. The misuses might be egregious, but your scorn for it is not.
WrathOfAchilles said:
Theory and Hypothesis. Pisses me the F right off. So tired of someone thinking of an idea and calling it a theory "I have a theory" bullshit you do. Until it's been proven correct under certain circumstances it's an hypothesis. If it gets proven enough it becomes a law, but you don't start with a theory.
This is also wrong. You start with a theory (eg. there is a force given off by very large objects that pulls other objects towards them) and from the theory you make a testable hypothesis (eg. Objects in the air will fall to the ground). Scientists know that something can never be totally proven, which is why we still refer to "the theory of gravity" or "the theory of evolution".
Think I'm wrong? I'm the Department of fuckin' SCIENCE.
Anyways, I think a lot of these examples come from people not realising that language is always changing and is defined entirely by usage. When St Paul's cathedral was first built, it was called "awful", which then meant "full of awe". If someone refers to a new song as "wicked", unless they are a fundamentalist religious type, we know they mean "of high quality" rather than "evil". To take some examples from the thread, while once meaning a specific punishment of the Roman army, now means to destroy. Queer originally meant strange, then it was adopted by the gay community in the 50s to mean homosexual (posative connotations), then it became used by non-gays to refer to gays in a negative way.