They could be used as a terminology for commonly recurring patterns. But ask your colleagues about the difference of a facade an adapter and a decorator and you will see that in reality they are useless for that. The chosen names are just too generic to have a precise memorable meaning.
People think they can use it as an abstraction, but for most patterns it’s not abstracting in a way that programming languages support. The only thing I can do with an adapter is add it to the class name and feel intelligent. People tend to do that less to real abstractions (List instead of SequentialIteratorFactory or IteratableMonad).
The most offensive thing people are doing with design patterns is trying to use them like bricks to build code. You will end up with code that’s 90% boilerplate and 10% actual logic strewn all over the place.