A Kick By Any Other Name

There is a whole lot of back kicking going on in the name of side kicking these days. First let's start with the definition of a back kick:

Now let us define the side kick; you connect with the heel of your foot, your foot turned sideways or with the toes turned slightly towards the floor, and your shoulders NOT facing more than 90 degrees from your opponent, so that you can maintain your stance:

From Royce Gracie to Jon Jones, the vast majority of the time a side kick will do very little to the fighter's stance and they will basically remain in their fighting stance as they would with any other strike, as is seen most often with side kicks in Muay Thai. In other words:

The issue at hand is almost every YouTube video presenting side kicks seem to actually be doing back kicks. One of the best kicking experts on YouTube is Kwon Kicker, but his "side kick" looks like a back kick:

Bruce Lee prided himself in his stepping side kick above all other techniques, but that was a back kick as well. In Bruce Lee's defense in some of the different Kung Fu styles Lee was exposed to, kicks are put into more general categories, so that round kicks and crescent kicks might be called the same thing, front kicks, oblique kicks and low Jon Jones style side kicks might be considered generally the same thing, and highly chambered side kicks and back kicks might be considered "tiger tail kicks":

Here Ramsey Dewey can only can show significant difference between side kick and back kick by keeping his nose pointed 180 degrees away from his opponent when he presents his mythical back kick. But he always looks at his opponents when he back kicks in free sparring, proving that contrary to his presentation here there is no difference between the two kicks:

Here Sensei Seth gets together with a respected TKD instructor to accidentally demonstrate absolutely no meaningful difference between a spinning side kick and a spinning back kick whatsoever:

And back to Wonderboy, in the following video we can see that he chambers his lead leg side kick almost identically to how most strikers chamber their back kicks, to exactly the same effect:

My conclusion is that as a side-stance hater I see little difference between the side stance and turning your back to your opponent anyways, so there isn't any meaningful difference to me between "side kick" and "back kick." However it seems that the vast majority of side kicks on YouTube are actually back kicks!