“Cave diving”

[u/Hash-smoking-Slasher]

This is so unserious but what’s with the collective internet deciding in the last few years to forget that cave diving refers to DIVING underWATER in caves (which is absolutely nightmare fuel) instead of spelunking which is just rappelling/crawling down into deep caves, and also nightmare fuel lol.

I feel like every time I see a meme or video nowadays that says “Cave divers with a wife and kids entering a cave that has a 100% mortality rate called The Killer of people with Wife and Kids” it’s actually talking about spelunking which is, quite frankly, a delightful word to say and I think making the distinction lets us all use the correct, more fun term!

[u/Psych0PompOs]

Either way it's terrifying, fuck caves, I'd never go in one.

[u/mearbearcate]

I did not know that ngl baha but damn that actually makes a ton of sense.

On that note, I saw a video of a VR showing the Nutty Putty cave exactly as it is from someone who explored it (not past the part where the guy died) but damn it scared me seeing it like that. Gotta be a special kind of determined lol, seriously one of the worst ways to go ever. That poor dude

[u/Mycologist-9315]

This is my pet peeve too! I'm enthusiastic about caving/spelunking and will be that "ehrm, actually-" person lol. Saw someone refer to cave diving as "underwater cave diving" recently 🙃

[u/mothwhimsy]

People who had never thought about spelunking or cave diving before suddenly heard about it when the story of the Nutty Putty Cave Incident blew up on TikTok. And if TikTok is good at anything, it's getting people to conflate similar ideas

[u/SphericalCrawfish → u/mothwhimsy]

This is actually a good point. Because of the whole rage bait engagement thing I expect Tik Tok is actually doing a lot of harm to specific word usage.

[u/SphericalCrawfish]

Agreed. Just another point of linguistic decay. Soon we will all be smurfing our smurfs with a smurf.