It annoys me when people use Uncle Tom to mean a member of an oppressed group who disloyally sucks up to the privileged group, perhaps to get better treatment from them than his fellows receive. Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin was a good, brave and loyal man: when a fellow-slave escaped to make a better life for herself and her baby, Tom knew where she went, but refused to tell his master, in defiance of a direct order, and was beaten to death for it.

Similarly, I've heard people use Little Lord Fauntleroy to mean a stuck-up, overprivileged young man with no idea about the real world. But the actual Little Lord Fauntleroy is a down-to-earth, fair-minded boy from an ordinary lower middle class home, who discovers one day that, due to the deaths of a series of relatives he didn't know he had, he's inherited a lordship. At first he's horrified, because he's a staunch little republican and egalitarian, and thinks the aristocracy are bad. Later, he uses his influence to make life better and fairer for the poor tenants in the neighbourhood.

You could probably also make a case for Pollyanna, whose name gets used to mean someone who is optimistic to a pernicious and destructive extent, refusing to face up to the existence of problems, as opposed to someone who chooses to improve her life by trying to find the good in everything; but that may be just different value judgements about optimism, rather than factual error.

What others are there?

Tags: books, nanowrimo procrastination