Well, people like to throw around the term Nazi much in the way. I think in general society does a pretty good job of containing the spread of that word so that _for the most part_, when somebody says Nazi, you can assume they are referring to a party that existed in Germany ~1935, or something very close (self-declared decsendents of Nazis etc) .. Further, I think you will often be checked if you try and mislabel something as Nazi, and rightly so..

It's certainly not the same as with Fascism and I would probably agree with the OP in this thread that the main is reason is that while people have seen plenty of movies about Hitler et al, the same can't be said for Mussolini. The Italian origins of the word seemed to have been lost largely due to historical ignorance..