But... but... it's an actual thing.

I'm not as hung up on it as I might sound, but... I mean, if multiple scifi books for some reason used... idunno, "microscope", not just in a dubious or unrealistic way, but to mean "bomb that makes everything get smaller when it explodes", to me it wouldn't legitimize that meaning of the word, it would just mean that there are a lot of authors using that it in an embarrassingly ignorant way.