DAR (piano technician)
I don't know how many times I have had a customer tell me they think their piano "may need to have it's pads replaced."
For the record, of the 8 to 10 thousand parts in a piano, none of them are ever correctly referred to as a "pad." (They are referring to the felt "hammers" and 99% of the time they don't need to be replaced and will never be replaced.)
All the time people tell me they have or know of a fantastic old piano with the back made of solid brass. They are referring to the cast iron/steel harp (usually painted gold) and no piano harp has ever been made with brass (it's far to soft).
Just the other day I was again told of a neighbor who has a 12 foot grand piano. Ah, no they don't. The longest in common production is about 9 foot. Bosendorfer had/has a 9' 6" but those are rare. Fazioli has a 10' 2" but there are only 20 of them.
Sometimes I correct people, usually I don't anymore, unless they are annoying.
Language is made up of temporarily agreed upon grunts we make to communicate ideas. These agreed upon grunts are constantly changing and adapting. It's nearly an anarchic system. Once in a while we agree to call a planet a certain name, or change it to another, but if enough people don't agree it doesn't happen. There are no rules and dictionaries reflect common usage and they are constantly changed.
In our fields of specialty, philosophy, piano tuning, chemistry, we need to sometimes be very specific. This allows us to function at very high levels of accuracy, precision and depth. A group of philosophers can easily speak in such a way that those untrained will not understand. Same with chemistry and I dare say, same with a group of piano technicians talking about some arcane aspect of string inharmonicity or competing temperaments. But I am resigned to the fact that the general populace is just going to use language as it suits them and if you want to be strict about it (and throw the word illiterate around as SAV does above) we are all generally ignorant and illiterate outside of our fields. So you gotta be a little flexible unless people are just plain erroneous to the degree that their usage is causing problems. The word chemical has a bad/scary reputation because of poison and "contamination." Probably most people think that if an argument is "valid" it follows that it is true (not in philosophy). When people see the felt on the hammer that hits the piano string the first word that comes to mind is always going to be "pad." (And people talking about powering hydrogen cars are going to speak of hydrogen fuel as an "energy carrier" even though from a physics standpoint this is just so wrong).
As Bruce Hornsby famously sang in his hit song in the 80's, that's just...
