If you feel "secure," you may or may not actually be secure. It doesn’t matter, as far as your feeling is concerned. So if we say "a false sense of security," we’re missing the point, actually. The sense, or sensation, of security cannot be "false" or "true." It simply is. What is false, of course, is the actuality: no security despite the sensation thereof. It is the actuality that is false rather than the "sense." In short, "a false sense of security" really means a [genuine] sense of security that has no basis in reality, that based on false assumptions or beliefs.

It is said that a person dying of hypothermia (loss of body heat) begins to feel warm in the final stage of the affliction, just before death. Is this sense of warmth false? No: The sensation is real enough. But there is no warmth in fact. Similarly, the sense of security is real for one who has "a false sense of security"; but the security is non-existent.

OK, so maybe we’re splitting hairs. But do you get the idea that it can be fun to be verbalert?