There's also the fact that the wire-level protocol command for other protocols to switch to encrypted communication is STARTTLS, which makes people think that the thing where you switch to TLS is called TLS and the thing where you start the connection with TLS is called SSL.
This is not the case either. They are both TLS. You can use STARTTLS with pre-standard TLS (SSL) if you configure your TLS implementation to do so.