The post:

• siderea | Improper Nouns [p/a/s, Patreon]

Interestingly, 'improper nouns' – as described by the post – is itself an example of the phenomena it describes (as 'improper noun' is itself an existing term):

There's a thing you probably have encountered and maybe haven't really registered as it went by. It usually plays out like this. Somebody else takes a noun phrase – usually there's an adjective or two involved, sometimes multiple nouns – that seems perfectly ordinary and makes sense on the face of it, and which refers to something in the real world, and the speaker makes some bold assertion about it that strikes you as really weird, and possibly highly prejudicial. What they've said leaves you thinking, "wait, how could that possibly be true?"

That's all you get. That's all the sign of what's happening. That's the glitch in the matrix.

There's a lot of reasons that people make ridiculous claims about all sorts of things, and you will always be tempted to write it off as just ridiculous people saying ridiculous things and thinking no more about it.

But if you can catch yourself in that moment, and not reflexively dismiss it as silliness, you could, instead, ask yourself: "Hey, is that noun phrase maybe a technical term of art which means something much more specific and possibly quite different from what the individual words literally mean?"

Doing this? Is a super power. Lots of people can recognize specific technical terms that they are acquainted with. Few people cultivate the more general ability to recognize – or just suspect – that a noun phrase is a technical term they aren't familiar with.

This is a useful enough idea that it's already been referenced in another post here.