Examples of pedantry in TCS Larry Wasserman has a recent post where he talks about the "p-value police". He makes an interesting point (all emphasis mine) (the premise in italics that I added, and his response below it):


  The most common complaint is that physicists and journalists explain
  the meaning of a p-value incorrectly. For example, if the p-value is
  0.000001 then we will see statements like “there is a 99.9999% confidence that the signal is real.” We then feel compelled to correct
  the statement: if there is no effect, then the chance of something as
  or more extreme is 0.000001.
  
  Fair enough. But does it really matter? The big picture is: the
  evidence for the effect is overwhelming. Does it really matter if the
  wording is a bit misleading? I think we reinforce our image as pedants
  if we complain about this.


Which got me thinking - 


  Are there good examples of pedantry in TCS ? Such an example would
  consist of 
  
  
  A claim that is commonly made in the popular press
  A standard correction that people insist on making
  The correct "big picture" that the claim does capture even while being imprecise.
  
  
  where the claim is mathemtically wrong  but "morally right" and the
  correction is technically correct but doesn't change the intuitive
  understanding.


To lead things off, my example would be:


Claim - NP-complete problems take exponential time to solve
Correction - No in fact we just don't know if they can be solved in polynomial time
Big picture - NP-complete problems are HARD


Caution: I know there are many on this forum whose head will explode at the idea of claims that are wrong but "morally correct" :). Remember that these are statements targeted towards the public (where some degree of license can be permitted), rather than statements made in a research paper.
Hm, its tough even to think of examples of claims about TCS that make it to the popular press. 

One thing I have seen occasionally is the claim that factoring is NP-hard, when explaining cryptography. This is related to the less innocuous error of claiming that quantum computers can solve NP hard problems, but restricted to the context of cryptography, this is a relatively mild error. The point is just that we (users of cryptography) seem to believe that there is no efficient algorithm for solving the problem. The particular conjectures we use to justify this assertion are besides the point.