In this situation, though, it's economists who are using an out-of-the-norm term and upset when people don't immediately abandon existing usages. Economy literally means "home management," after all.
That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.
"Etymologically derives from an older term that meant" is not the same as "literally means", though for some reason the confusion of etymology and meaning is common on HN.
You're wrong, here. Words are defined by how people use them, and the way people actually use the term "economy" is much closer to the original etymological meaning than how economists use it.
Economists are free to take a term and redefine it for their own purposes, but the public meaning is every bit as valid. They don't have a trump card that invalidates every other meaning because they want to use it to designate a particular abstraction.
There’s two definitions of the same word both of which predate economics, but the slightly older one mostly died out.
“Home economics” was used in the 1950’s to distinguish it from the more common use of the term back then, while economics classes don’t need that clarification. Today few people are aware of the older definition.
"economical" is a different word than "economy", and also "affordable" or "thrifty", while a related concept to either the original sense of "economy" in English from the 15th C or the even older Greek root (the two are different) is not either off those simply transformed from a noun to an adjective without other shift of meaning.
By died out I meant the household aspect is gone, the original meaning included things like paying a carpenter to fix your roof which just seems like an alien use of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeconomicus Outside any transaction playing a role in the overall economy.
I suspect it shifted with the rise of companies and machinery. So I agree people talk about a ships fuel economy they are referring to efficiency, but the non efficiency aspects of the original definition is absent. Meaning people talking about the economy being good because they got a raise isn’t referring to household budgets but the wider economic system.
That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.