I’ve heard people use it in contexts that make it clear they are not talking about optometry.
Today, it was at a public school system Professional Learning speech by one of the district administrators. She meant Stigma, but said stigmatism. Not astigmatism in relation to children needing glasses, but in discussing how teachers should treat students with special needs, not singling them out as if they had some kind of deficit.
Hearing or seeing professional educators make mistakes when presenting themselves to the public makes me want to climb the walls.
Is it ignorance, or someone trying to sound smart by using a bigger word?
Stigmatism and stigmatization are similar sounding and don’t come up in conversation that often. It’s not too surprising that people will get the two confused on the rare occasions they use them.
I’m saving my wrath for people who can’t figure out the difference between its and it’s.
I think the most charitable explanation is she thought “stigmatism” made sense in that context. I mean, the only other explanation is that she intentionally threw out the wrong word to see if anyone was paying attention. I doubt that was the case.
Being a professional doesn’t mean someone is an eloquent speaker at all times. I know I can throw out some verbal doozies when I’m put on the spot and don’t have the benefit of a backspace and delete key. My boss is another one who can step in it sometimes. One time we were in a meeting and he was talking about phytoplankton, but he kept calling them “chlorophyll” (the mix-up isn’t crazy as it sounds, given the context). Not wanting to correct him in front of an audience, I just silently endured the second-hand embarrassment until finally our uber boss sitting in the audience cracked a joke about it. I mean, shit like this happens to even the best. I know my boss is a smart guy. He just got flummoxed. Big deal.
I don’t want people to judge me harshly for my innocent mistakes, so I really try to give other people a break for their flubs.
A lot of people are just careless about language, and language itself isn’t particularly logical or intuitive. This is the kind of error I see in college-level student essays all the time (not “stigmatism,” specifically, but “analyzation” for “analysis,” “humored” when the student actually means “amused,” and so on). If you haven’t read widely, you probably are not going to be able to tell the difference between the right word and the almost-right word.
Nobody gives a shit any more, basically. I follow BBC Earth on Facebook because they post some interesting stuff, but every other post is clearly written by someone who doesn’t speak English as a first language and doesn’t care enough to check whether they got it right before posting something for a large organisation they’re paid to write for. One the other day was “how to poo a baby jaguar.” They meant “how to help a baby jaguar poo.” VERY different meanings.
Those are quite bad mistakes for college-level essays.
People have been lamenting in similar terms that nobody gives a shit any more for literally centuries.
I think the more interesting question might be the social phenomenon of why language errors (real or imagined) stir strong emotions for so many people. It’s rare that language errors result in any significant failure to communicate intended meaning. I doubt anyone has ever come to harm because of an its/it’s error. So it’s really just a questions of aesthetics - similar to valuing good music over bad music.
I share OP’s appreciation for precise and elegant use of language. But conversely I don’t usually find it a cause for any great concern if some people have different priorities (although obviously is somebody has a professional responsibility to use or teach language that’s a different matter). But in general there are much more significant ways in which large swathes of humanity disappoint me…
Is it a misuse, or it it an original sense reasserting itself? The first meanign of stigmatism was "Branding; collective marks made by branding, or by tattooing or the like.: This is now marked as obsolete by the OED. The optician’s “absence of astigmatism” sense arises only in the late ninteenth century.
My guess is that, as the “mark of censure or condemnation” sense of stigma becomes more popular, the older sense of stigmatism, or a related sense, “identification of groups to be censured or condemned” is undergoing a revival. I’d find it hard to say that this is a misuse. Given the context, it’s unlikely that anybody would be confused about what was meant.
With writing in particular, people often think this is just some problem with the “modern generation,” but all you have to do is look at comments by professors at Yale a hundred years ago, and they have the exact same complaints. Writing is not a natural skill, so it doesn’t make sense to expect young people, (or those who rarely do it), to be able to write well from the start. It takes years of development–much more than one gets in high school.
It is someone trying to sound smart by using a bigger word whose meaning is completely different from what they’re trying to say. The name for it is “malapropism”: “bad for its purpose”, the word itself exists but does not mean what the speaker thinks it means.
It’s frustrating to me when someone uses a non-existent word when there is already one that does exist. I hear “conversate” too often, when they mean “converse”.
And don’t get me started on “alternate” vs “alternative” because I can go on about that forever and still not manage to change anybody’s mind.
“Conservate” exists as a word and is even in some dictionaries. It may not exist on a third grader’s spelling list, but it exists within the vernacular. So when I hear someone use it, I assume they don’t know or care that self-appointed grammarians haven’t yet acknowledged its existence. What I don’t assume is that they are using a “non-word”. It may not be the best word. But it expresses enough meaning to know what someone is trying to say.
(So I put in “fixin’” in the dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster’s search boxes just to see what would come up. I’m surprised that both have “conversate”, but don’t have the most commonly meaning for “fixin’” from my region. So does that mean “fixin’” is not a word? I think not, because just about everyone within a 350-mile radius of me knows what “I’m fixin’ to go” means. What this tells me is that dictionaries have both a bias and a significant lag before they reflect contemporary lexicon. The fact that “conversate” exists in dictionaries but not a word that has more usage should thus tell you something about the “realness” of it.)
Not (fortunately) a frequent mix-up, but once when I was waiting for a minor day surgery at the local hospital, I couldn’t help overhearing an anxious father trying to explain to the nurse on duty that his daughter might take longer to come round from a general anaesthetic, “because she’s got a slight case of necrophilia”