The word 'bokeh' and its improper use of another way of saying out of focus areas. Bokeh refers to the quality of those out of focus areas, not the areas themselves.
It also bothers me when people take pictures of themselves with their camera, usually via mirror.
Picky, picky. Guilty on both counts, although in defense of the latter, it's a good way to check rangefinder accuracy and depth of field, if it's a camera you just bought. Which is what I did just a few days ago, after buying a nice Canon IID 1.
<linguist hat>
Regarding
bokeh, you indicate that bokeh's original meaning is a qualitative, rather than simple observational measure. Quoting from Wikipedia:
"The term comes from the
Japanese word
boke (暈け or ボケ), which means 'blur' or 'haze', or
boke-aji (ボケ味), the 'blur quality'."
(I have Asian fonts installed on my machine, so I can see the kanji and kana. You might only be seeing question marks or some such.)
As the
original definitions indicate, strictly speaking, bokeh means 'blur' only. The -aji suffix not only means 'quality' but also 'flavor'. So, we can say with some accuracy that the
bokeh-aji of a lens is a qualitative expression, while simply
bokeh is descriptive.
Nonetheless, I would still argue that when a person whose native language is not Japanese uses the word
bokeh in a photographic context, there is an implied meaning or reference to the quality of the OOF image. We almost always attach qualitative statements to the word when we express it, I have noticed. Thus the semantics remain intact, even if the word is used in ways that might be deemed inaccurate.
</linguist hat>