Three economic words with too many senses

As people who read my previous blog might know, I'm not a huge fan of mainstream economics. But there are a few commonly used words that annoy me because they are used in a sloppy and confusing way, or because I think they are misleading. Here's my top three.

Investment

Investment is one of the favourite words of the economic analyst. Apparently every country either has not enough of it or, occasionally, too much. The problem I have is that there are really two perspectives on investment that are often not differentiated when people use the term:

1. 'Investment' = spending of money by an individual to secure more money in future
2. 'Investment' = spending of resources at a societal level to increase productivity in future

Perhaps I can illustrate with an example. As an individual, I might decide that the best way to have an income in retirement is to buy a house which was previously owner occupied and rent it out. Does this pay back for me personally in the long term? Possibly. But the productivity of the economic system is not increased - no new factories were built, no new processes were discovered. Even though for me the house was an investment, it was not an investment in future productivity for society as a whole.

Basically, when people talk about the need to increase investment in a country as a whole, they should be talking about creating or improving productive assets, not buying up existing assets and creating asset price bubbles in the process.
 
Capital

I am constantly confused by what people mean when they say 'capital'. As far as I can tell, the original meaning of the word was assets used in production, for example tools and factories. But then there are people who use it to just mean 'money for investment', and/or 'the total monetary value of physical assets and savings'. The problem is that monetary savings and physical assets are very different things - the mapping between them is not constant. And not only in the mapping between capital as assets and money not constant, it is to some extent arbitrary, as demonstrated during the cambridge capital controversy. 

Production

Another favourite word in economics is the verb 'produce' or the noun 'production'. But the word produce suggests an act of creation, which isn't really an appropriate word for some activities. For example, mining is not an act of creation, it is an act of extraction or depletion of natural capital. Produce seems to be becoming generalised to refer to almost any economic activity with an output, but in some cases it seems inappropriate given the original sense of the word.