Skunked Term
Published: 2021-11-08The other day, I wrote a post about the ambiguity of the word “biannual”. There are more other words with two diferent meanings that can be misleading, and these are sometimes called “skunked terms”.
Wikipedia explains it as follows:
A skunked term is a word that becomes difficult to use because it is transitioning from one meaning to another, perhaps inconsistent or even opposite, usage, or a word that becomes difficult to use due to other controversy surrounding the word.
This name “skunked term” was coined by the lexicographer Bryan A. Garner in his book. He used this name to argue that we should avoid the use of such ambiguous terms. When we think about the actual skunk, we see that the name really fits the meaning. Skunks look cute like squirrels so that people gather around them, but once they “raise a stink”, people start to hate them. (just to be sure, “raise a stink” is also a figurative idiom meaning “to make a strong public complaint”)
Anyway, let’s take a quick look at a couple of interestring examples of the skunked terms other than biannual or biweekly.
literally
“Literally” basically means “not figuratively”, but it is known to be used to mean “figuratively” as well. This is because some people use it in order to emphasize a discription and mean something like “virtually”, e.g., “I literally died when I found out!”.
billion
I was surprised that the first definition of the word “billion” in the Oxford English Dictionary is
originally and still commonly in Great Britain: A million millions
Well, this is totally understandable, albeit surprising to me at first, since billion is the combination of the prefix “bi-“, which obviously means “two”, and million. In the 16th century, this term was purposely created to denote “the second power of a million”.