Words That Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean

Words are very important.  We’re able to convey ideas to other people by using a series of either sounds or symbols that we’ve agreed upon to have some meaning.  The common meaning however can cause many problems because, especially when dealing with science, one word might mean different things to two different people, making communication between them very difficult.  Here’s some of my favourite examples.

• Well, you can’t do a list like this without using the word theory, not while it’s still one of the popular arguments against the idea of evolution.  One person will use the word to mean “a hypothesis which no matter how hard I (or anybody else) try, I cannot prove wrong”  while another person will conceive of it as “an idea I had that I haven’t tested at all yet to see if it’s true.”  I can’t imagine these two definitions being any more opposite of each other.  It can be kind of funny how some really huge arguments still go on because one side doesn’t know the meaning of this word.
• When I was thinking about doing this post a webcomic I read went and posted this comic.  At least I think I had thought of this post before that comic went up, maybe it was the inspiration for this.  Either way, the next word is chemical.  Tell someone that you’re adding chemicals to their food, and watch out for outrage and they worry you’re trying to poison them, or make them fat or some other thing.  Explain to them that water, sugar and salt are chemicals, and in fact, everything is either technically a chemical or made up of them, and check the reaction you get.
• For more negative connotation for something that isn’t (always) inherently bad for you, my next word is radiation.  Watch out for that stuff because it’s going to give you cancer right?  That’s also why cell phones and wifi must be bad for you because they work by using radiation.  Well if you think that’s true then you mustn’t have been paying attention in high school science when they taught you that light, you know that stuff that lets you see things, is radiation too.  In fact, when it comes to EM-radiation (of which light is) the shorter the wavelength generally the more dangerous, cell phones and wifi and stuff use longer wavelengths than visible light, which would mean that before you worry about a cell phone’s radiation killing you, you should put yourself in total darkness and never come out again.
• I have another science term but I’m going to take a break and go to a couple math words next.  This part gets 2 words though because it’s the same reason.  Real and imaginary are probably some of the worst possible names that could have been given to number sets.  Numbers are abstract concepts.  There is no such thing as a five, it’s just an idea that you have.  That being said, what makes some abstract concepts real, while other abstract concepts are imaginary?  Also, because one is a subset of the other that means that even 3 is an imaginary number.  If you’re one of those people who automatically discounts the imaginary numbers just because of their name your wrong, and if you discount them because you can’t find a use for them, then you should do the same for the real numbers too, because any practical use of numbers pretty much demands use of rational numbers, as it’s extremely hard to express an irrational number (a real number that is not rational) in a meaningful way in your calculations, you will basically always round to a rational.
• My next word is graph.  It might take me too long to describe what the word graph means to a mathematician as compared to a normal person, so I’m not going to.  I’m just putting it here as a note for anyone who ever ends up in a conversation with me where I use the word, or if I make a post here and use the word, that I’m talking about something that looks more like a flow chart than 2 axes (plural of axis, not something you use to chop wood) showing some relationship.
• My last word for today (maybe I’ll make more posts like these in the future if I feel like it) is really more of a phrase.  It’s genetic engineering.  Like chemicals and radiation, genetic engineering is something that must always be bad, it’s unnatural, and is us playing God to come up with something, and because it’s genetically engineered that something must be bad for you.  The thing is, we as humans have been practicing genetic engineering, probably from around the dawn of civilization.  In fact without it we probably couldn’t have survived the way we have.  Husbandry, or selective breeding, is a form of genetic engineering, it’s what’s allowed us to have some dogs that are good at running, others good at herding, and some good at smelling.  We genetically engineered those different dog breeds into existence.  We’ve done the same to horses, as well as pretty much everything, plant or animal, that we eat.  So please, just because your food has been “genetically engineered” and has “chemicals” added to it, that doesn’t mean it’s bad for you.