Common usage: Person X is a visionary, or book X is a visionary look at the future. e.g. "The Road Ahead" is a visionary book. This may be a miss-use of the word through the implication that the person/author is somehow witnessing the future clearly. This is misleading on a couple of counts. First, it's applied to people who usually don't have this skill (e.g. not predicting the scope of the Internet until it is obvious) or look like they have this skill, but actually rely on friends in labs, research students etc to do the real work. The second reason is much funnier. The next time you see someone describing Bill Gates or Bill Joy as a visionary, just think of the classical definition - someone who is irrational, either really seeing visions, phantoms, spirits, or with an out of control imagination!

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