I've long contended that most uses of the "-ism" terms in popular discourse mostly serve an emotional purpose and otherwise do more to obfuscate than they do to

I've long contended that most uses of the "-ism" terms in popular discourse mostly serve an emotional purpose and otherwise do more to obfuscate than they do to illuminate understanding, especially because most people have very little idea of what the -isms actually entail. As a case in point, there was a recent conversation I was having with someone kvetching about modern-day feudalism, and when I asked them what they thought feudalism was, they were modelling it after Louis XIV's absolute monarchy. Louis XIV was the king who abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in France. (To their credit, after I explained the history of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and why absolute monarchy is almost the complete opposite of feudalism, they did understand the mistake they were making.) As Bret Devereaux points out, I think a large part of the problem is the sheer compression of history. We take about 1000 years of history and compress it into just a few events: the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the Viking Age, the First Crusade, (maybe) the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, and two of those are bookends for the period.