"You keep using that word..."

If I told you I'd been to the Samaritan Outpost here in town, where would you think I'd been? You might not know for sure, but you might assume something like a charitable organization or a medical clinic or something to help people, right?

According to the dictionary, "Samaritan" means "a charitable or helpful person (with reference to Luke 10:33)." But I think it only means that due to usage, similarly to how "literally" now means "in effect" or "virtually." Which is to say, that doesn't mean it's very precise.

Luke 10 contains a story about a Samaritan, true. But there is a qualifier. He was a "good" Samaritan. A Samaritan is actually "a member of a people inhabiting Samaria in biblical times, or of the modern community in the region of Nablus claiming descent from them, adhering to a form of Judaism accepting only its own ancient version of the Pentateuch as Scripture." It is also an adjective referring to someone from Samaria.

Using "Samaritan" to indicate someone or something charitable seems to me like naming all of the math tutoring centers "Chinese" and expecting that we'll all get what it means because, come on, right?

Another Bible thing the Christian vernacular has co-opted is "prodigal." It actually means "spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant." We use it to mean "back-slid" or "hopefully temporarily unrepentant" or "having strayed from the faith of one's youth."

"God is calling the person who spends money in a recklessly extravagant way, come without delay..."

Hey, it rhymes!

What else? Are there other terms from the Bible that we have made to mean something that, outside the context of the Bible, doesn't actually make sense?