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[Graelyn]

Well, a lot of em, for various reasons. Some just sound stupid, don't fit right, or just cause confusion.

Feel free to add your own.

Empire, Empire Space, The 5 Empires - There is only one Empire, and the other 4 shouldn't be too keen to casually call themselves this. It's also confusing to the new folks, who must think that only Amarr space is +5.0sec...
Alternatives - Concord Space, Enforced Space, The 'Inner Sphere' (or something equivalent)

POS - I know they're not supposed to be officially called this (towers are supposed to be called Starbases), but as soon as POS became the nickname (the term wasn't some kind of cutesy compliment, CCP...) they just let it stick. News releases and stuff are guilty too, shoehorning the term to mean 'pilot-owned-starbases', which is wrong too, since many of our missions show the towers in use by every group under the stars, egg or no, and usually with much cooler looking attachments....
Alternatives - Starbase,  Space Tower (no.), something....tower-y?

Gallentean/Caldarian - We all know it's supposed to be THE GALLENTE PEOPLE and THE CALDARI PEOPLE, but somehow even though we all mocked the shit out of TonyG for it, these terrible words have slowly spread into the rest of the lore, into the chrons, and now even into RPer vocabularies like some sort of rabid space syphilis. Fuck that noise.
Alternatives - Use of these godawful terms is an automatic 50DKPMINUS.

MERCS - We've got to head this one off at the pass quick. With the release of DUST getting closer and closer, the designated term to address these new supersoldiers is commonly being seen as 'mercs'. Even the overview stuff leaking into our EVE builds marks DUST stuff as 'Merc Stuff'. Nien! That term means a lot in a universe where more than half of all armed force in existence is already for sale. This will get especially misleading when DUST players attach themselves permanently to Alliances and factions. They're not for hire at that point, they are the actual army of a group.
Alternatives - Dusters? Is that too clunky? (Oh god, here come the DUSTERS....snerk) Something else?

Finally, the big one, and the one I feel strongest about by far.

Us.

CAPSULEERS
I have cringed every time I've heard this term in the history of ever, this supposedly terrifying name of the dark demigods that roam the viscous and bloody oceans of the skies oh my god what a dorky name I bet they're in the chess club. 
Even CCP didn't like it, as the first years of lore barely touched the term, instead referring to the players only as 'pilots', which apparently (and correctly) was eventually judged to not have enough Oomph. They needed something else, and 8 years in we still need that something else.

Worse still, the term does not even refer to the group it is meant for, IE player characters. There is currently no 'lore term' for a player character, especially when capsuleers serve as NPCs all over the place. Every 'empire' (argh) has hundreds of them in their employ directly and on a short leash. Every rat you fight in a mission that's flying a T2 variant? Guess what! NPC in an egg. It was one of the things in Empyrean Age that Tony got dead on. Roden sure isn't a player character either....

There needs to be a new term, something that differentiates a mere guy in an egg from the independent, monitored by CONCORD, able to form into near-sovereign recognized nations as a group type of pilots that truly taint the dreams of people like Omir, Kosakami, Sarpati, and Kuvakei.

Alternatives - The Unbound? That's the only one I've come up with so far...

Anyways, those are mine, how about yours?

[Gottii]

"Brutor".  By far the worse term in EVE.

[Esna Pitoojee]

1. As an addendum to the Empire/empires bit - I see (and often find myself) referencing 'the great nullsec empires' to describe some of the longer-existing alliances and blocs. It's not really a sperate thing, but it just adds another layer of confusion to the whole matter.

2. CONCORD vs DED - it's my understanding that the DED are the people who actually come out and shoot you or otherwise act as CONCORD's enforcement arm, while CONCORD is the overreaching organization - but the two terms get used interchangably a lot (partially because NPCs do the same thing).

[orange]

For those infomorphes who actually run around surface locations - Grunts, Ground-Pounders, Sobs (Sons of Bitches) or Apes.  (The last is a nod to Heinlein.)

Perhaps for PCs, to borrow the term I have seen SF pilots use, captain* or maybe even free-captain.   PCs own their ships, own entire stations and regions of space. Those who choose to align themselves to an NPC faction have done so freely and are not obligated to follow the factions they choose.  We are free to align with whoever we want and there is little mechanical impact if we betray our fellows or depart from the group we join.  *I tend to down play captain used for my characters, since my characters are infomorphs first, starship captains second.

Minmatar Republic space, Gallente Federation space, Khanid Kingdom space, Ammatar Mandate space, Intaki Syndicate space, etc.  However, as a group, they might all be called space empires.

Capsuleer territories are an bit more cumbersome to name, but free-captain empires or free-empires might work.

[Alain Colcer]

I always thought of null-sec as the outer-rim. Much more elegant term.

[BloodBird]

For my part, I try (or tried) to actively use terms like 'State space' 'Federal space' etc. to denote where I were or went or needed to go or knew of folks or whatever. Whenever the need to say or mention any actual area in space came up either IC or OOC I'd be painfully sure to use the proper term.

Also ties in with terms for the different peoples around the cluster, for instance; people speak of 'Caldari' in Caldari space, 'Minmatar' for Minmatar space, and 'Amarr' for Amarr space. But also 'Gallente' for Federation space. ARRRGH. This one has been a pet-peeve of mine since... forever. IT'S Federals, damn it! At this point the Fed is the only one of the 'big 4' that don't hold to "by X for X" where X can replace Amarr/Caldari/Minmatar in both places. To state that the whole Fed is run by the Gallente is entirely wrong and miss-leading, both IC and OOC. A result of this is the re-inforced impression that the Gallente somehow 'rule' all others and helps fuel the miss-conseption that unhappiness in the Fed is wide-spread for all other member-cultures.

Anyway, in short, I prefer this; Amarrian/Amarr Imperial space, Minmatar/Matari Republic space, Caldari State space and Federal space, to completely avoid and miss-communications.

There are a few others, like I agree on 'POS'. Heck, 'Starbase' works just fine, or just 'Tower' because you can then supplement it with it's function "Research Tower", "Security Tower" "Industry tower" etc, or just remove 'base' from the first term - Research Star, Industry Star, Death Star etc. etc.

Null-sec space and the "Empires" out there (I'm cynical and think of these, IC and OOC, as a collection of wanna-be jokes with no compare to the actual Nations or the ASCN who was the closest to ever gain 'empire' status in null) are just one collective term - Null factions. There is no point referring to individual ones; they die off and get replaced to fast to get a lasting term. The fact the Curse Alliance got mentioned in a cron as a major impact on Angel space pisses me off; they vanished about as fast as they came and every null-faction is about as much of an 'impact' on the NPC factions as CA was. Basically if the impact they had was that bad, the NPC factions in null should have stopped existing years ago, making this a lore-breaker as well as a miss-nomer.

Lastly; I don't really see what's so bad about the name Brutor - am I missing something obvious or anything?

[Matariki Rain]

Lastly; I don't really see what's so bad about the name Brutor - am I missing something obvious or anything?

The definitive dark-skinned race in EVE having a name that sounds like it's related to "brute" and "brutish" is an ongoing source of WTF.

[Caellach Marellus]

Two years on I see POS and still think "piece of shit"  Till I actually knew what a POS was I just assumed players were just venting frustrations out in channels about blowing up people they disliked.

[Horatius Caul]

CAPSULEERS
I have cringed every time I've heard this term in the history of ever, this supposedly terrifying name of the dark demigods that roam the viscous and bloody oceans of the skies oh my god what a dorky name I bet they're in the chess club. 
Even CCP didn't like it, as the first years of lore barely touched the term, instead referring to the players only as 'pilots', which apparently (and correctly) was eventually judged to not have enough Oomph. They needed something else, and 8 years in we still need that something else.

Worse still, the term does not even refer to the group it is meant for, IE player characters. There is currently no 'lore term' for a player character, especially when capsuleers serve as NPCs all over the place. Every 'empire' (argh) has hundreds of them in their employ directly and on a short leash. Every rat you fight in a mission that's flying a T2 variant? Guess what! NPC in an egg. It was one of the things in Empyrean Age that Tony got dead on. Roden sure isn't a player character either....

There needs to be a new term, something that differentiates a mere guy in an egg from the independent, monitored by CONCORD, able to form into near-sovereign recognized nations as a group type of pilots that truly taint the dreams of people like Omir, Kosakami, Sarpati, and Kuvakei.

Alternatives - The Unbound? That's the only one I've come up with so far...

Tony (augh! stop throwing things!) seems to have taken to having in-universe characters refer to us as "Empyreans" - and it does seem to refer directly to the "unbound" class of capsuleers, as I think I've even seen other egger characters use the term to refer to us.

EDIT: to answer the question:

KHANID FAMILY, KHANID KINGDOM, KHANID BLOODLINE
Someone dropped the ball royally during development of RMR, and decided to make the Khanids an asian bloodline, despite the fact that it was a splinter faction named after a True Amarr Royal House. Suddenly the Royal House had to be retconned to have taken its name from a lesser race out of... admiration? Honour?

As an Amarr roleplayer I've countless times had to explain the differences between the three Khanids, how not all Blood-Khanid live in the Kingdom, how Bloodline Khanid cannot be members of the Royal Family...

They could have simply chosen the Ealur, but noooooo...

I have no idea how to fix this shit, short of renaming one of the three.

[BloodBird]

Royal Khanid/Imperialist Khanid... as for the family, I've no idea. Least they could do was clarify the difference in PF and the info sources.

[Matariki Rain]

In case it helps, EM dialect prefers "towers" and "customs offices".

"Podders" is do-able. "Eggers" sounds like breakfast. "Capsuleers" are either steampunk explorers or from the Golden Age of science fiction. "Empyreans" are from a marketing or recruitment drive. The awkwardness of them all reminds me that the technology is a relatively new thing, possibly still searching for names that fit it. Our best bet would be to come up with some terms that work, and use them lots.

Distinguishing between PC and NPC pod-pilots gets tricky when you're in a PC group that's aligned (albeit independently and deniably) with one of the factions which also supposedly has podder employees.

[Hamish Grayson]

Privately owned Starbase.

[Gottii]

Lastly; I don't really see what's so bad about the name Brutor - am I missing something obvious or anything?

The definitive dark-skinned race in EVE having a name that sounds like it's related to "brute" and "brutish" is an ongoing source of WTF.

This.  Its flat out racist really.  I die a little bit inside every time I have to use the term in RP.

[Senn Typhos]

Considering how much it gets used, and how much I love it, the name of our currency irritates me.

We had to add a "K" to a word just to make a pun about Icelandic money? Really? Everyone in the universe is dumb enough to spell it "kredit" just this one time?

[Bacchanalian]

Apes.  (The last is a nod to Heinlein.)

As someone whose RP includes considering anyone not suitable for the pod a lower form of humanity that are regularly referred to as "cattle" or "apes", screw Heinlein (I've really been meaning to pick up that copy of Stranger in a Strange Land sitting on my bookshelf, but keep getting sidetracked)!

Incidentally, the word "capsuleer" has always bugged me and while endlessly debating the master race with Mata IC I think we've both stumbled over possible alternatives without ever really settling on a good one.  It's just awkward.