On the Topic of Language Misuse

Our misapprehension of the nature of language has occasioned a greater waste of time, and effort, and genius, than all the other mistakes and delusions with which humanity has been afflicted. It has retarded immeasurably our physical knowledge of every kind, and vitiated what it could not retard.
-- A. B. Johnson, Treatise on Language, or the Relation Which Words Bear to Things, 1836