Historians know sophister as the term for "a captious or fallacious reasoner," and calculator as an 18th-century term akin to our modern bean counter. The term economist, nowadays applied to a specialist in the description and analysis of goods and services, back then had another, equally dismal sense: economist named "a person devoted to thrift or someone notably parsimonious."

What about Burke's opening lament about the age of chivalry? We moderns understand the age of chivalry as the medieval system, principles, and customs of knighthood, and we use chivalry as shorthand for the qualities idealized by knighthood: bravery, courtesy, honor, and gallantry toward women. But although chivalry was first recorded in English in the early 1300s, the word's modern meaning didn't appear until the mid-18th century, a few decades before Burke helped popularize it. For the first 400 years of its existence, chivalry enjoyed more cavalry-specific senses, appropriate for a word with its roots in the Latin word for "horse."