Metafold

Metafold is not a term any of the traditions who actually study these phenomena use. It is a popularization — the word a journalist or curious layperson reaches for on hearing that the Overfold is somehow the same shape as Higher-Dimensional Folding, the FTL mechanism. The shared root ("fold") does the damage: it invites the assumption that a thin place is a fold that happened to stay open, or that a starship transit and a boundary-zone wrongness in the air are the same physics wearing two names.

They are not. Folding is a deliberate, bounded transit — an aperture opened, crossed, and collapsed, leaving no trace. The Overfold is a standing condition of a place, not an event with a beginning and end, and it carries none of folding's topological machinery.

Example: A newsnet piece captions a Survey Corps boundary-zone photograph "Metafold Detected Near Dun-Ri" — to the irritation of both a Fellowship contemplative, who has a centuries-old and perfectly good word for it, and a folding engineer, who would like the record to show that nothing was, in fact, folded.

Hyperfold

Hyperfold is the same error sold rather than mis-reported. It is a trade name — adopted by commercial concerns for proprietary aperture equipment and the operations built around it — and it describes no mechanism, names nothing any of the traditions recognise, and appears in no technical literature except as a thing being corrected. Its commercial appeal is precisely its emptiness: it sounds like the physics and commits to nothing, which is a useful property in a filing.

The same folding engineer's irritation extends to it, with one distinction they will make if pressed: the journalist who writes metafold has misunderstood something and is guessing in good faith. A concern that puts hyperfold on a hull has chosen a word that cannot be held to a meaning, and has generally chosen it on advice.