The first part of the paper recalls briefly some of the most relevant views of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists on the problem of consciousness. The paper then analyses some heterogeneus use of the word "consciousness" in the fields of everyday life, religion, ethics, philosophy, psychology and medicine. Since such a word turns out to be always semantically confused and highly misleading, it is proposed its abolition and to replace it in the various contexts with more detailed and precised statements, which can be more easily investigated by a neuroscientist, for instance. After having outlined the work of neuroscientists from the epistemological poin of view, the paper ends up by reminding them to be on the alert because brain categories could always be different from those of ordinary language.