Ploughing through the Codex just now, I come across this (with particular reference to MRSA), by Brigitte Nerlich of the University of Nottingham, England:

Words matter in public health

... media coverage of hygiene and cleanliness in hospitals tended to portray doctors and nurses engaged in a heroic "battle" against "intelligent super bugs. This was personified by the modern matron wielding the weapon of "cleanliness." Interviews with hospital matrons revealed a gap between the media portrayal and the reality on the wards. Matrons said that the limitations in their authority over contractors, and time constraints made it impossible for them to spend even half their time as a "visible presence" on the wards. ...

I thought to myself: now there's a lady who knows what she's talking about!  So I looked up her website and come across this:

'Carbon compounds': Lexical creativity and discourse formations in the context of climate change
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/Minisites/carboncompounds/index.html

Pilot work has identified four major discursive clusters of carbon compounds in the UK: a moral and religious cluster (e.g. ‘carbon sinner’, ‘carbon guilt’, ‘carbon criminal’ etc.); a dietary cluster (‘low carbon diet’; ’carbon calories’, ’carbon calorie counter’, etc.); a financial cluster (‘carbon trading’, ‘carbon finance’, ‘carbon market’ etc.), but there are many more clusters that need to be explored, together with overarching compounds, such as ‘carbon footprint’.

But Pooh's brain is rather worried.  How many of the people that use these terms have any idea of what carbon actually is?