Shameless Plug

["Followup-To:" header set to sci.electronics.design.] On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 08:59:24 -0800, Tim Wescott wrote in Msg.

This reminds me of one of my favorite entries in Strunk & White, Modern English Usage on "flammable" vs. "inflammable". The correct term is inflammable, but on trucks that hold dangerous goods you'll always see "flammable". Quoting from memory: "Unless you drive such a truck, and are hence concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable".

According to my pedantic mind, there's no such thing as a flammable substance, but the general public seems to think otherwise.

--Daniel

So you derive from deriving the derivative from the differential that one should not differentiate between differential and derivative? That's different.

Google hits prove commonness of usage on the World Wide Web. All else is derivative - an important difference.

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Bravo!

Jerry

The meaning of flammable is clear, while inflammable might be disastrously confused with unflammable (not a real word either) meaning non-flammable. The need for clear disambiguation on gasoline tankers trumps the joys of pedantry.

Jerry

snip

Maybe it's just me, but shouldn't this be obvious to anyone who's had even basic physics in school?

-Lasse

Only those who went to school back when they were still teaching how to apply basic physics to real-world problems.

To be fair, some schools do a great job of this, but I have personal experience of a person who got an EE degree from a state college without ever tumbling on to the fact that when you send current down a wire there has to be an equal current through a return path. :(

That engineer was put to work maintaining COBOL programs. This was in the '90s, not in the age of COBOL.

My apologies.

Essentially yes. (Ignores irony). But then, I'm not only a mathematician, I'm also a linguistics freak....

As I intimated, "common usage" is to be distrusted. After all, the planet's population is now so large that virtually any human-behavioural parameter, via the central limit theorem, gets modelled as obeying a Gaussian distribution, whose *central* area dominates the sample results. I call the universal welcome currently accorded to this situation "the cult of mediocrity" and it is an example of positive feedback. Examples abound. Think about it.

The linguistics scene has "descriptive grammarians" (currently in the ascendant) versus "prescriptive grammarians" (started declining maybe 50 years ago). That's why I regularly find books, and even learned papers, which confuse "throes" with "throws", "pour" with "pore", and many more, since schools ceased to bother students with (horror!) rules, substantive examinations etc.

To pull things together: my derivative/differential fusion is based upon a return to fundamentals (mathematical and linguistic). I find that this approach is superior to all others I've tried. YMMV.

Geoff.

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That really peaks (or is it peeks?) my ire. :-)

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Jerry

Are you sure you are not seeing the results from widespread usage of Micro$oft's Spelling and Grammar checkers, coupled with a liberal dose of good old plain ignorance??

The number of times my Australian spelling has been "automatically corrected", without my knowing it, just because Micro$oft's dictionary editors are not linguists (and/or can't spell) peaks _my_ire..!

Yes, they give us our own Dictionary (IMO, just to keep us off-guard) - but it is still crap.

BTW: This topic is now seriously off-topic. Have a nice day. ;-)

Cameron:-)

Amen, both! (Errm, I'd pick "piques", but you knew that, you crank-winders!)

Regards, Geoff.

Geoff, how right you are.. :-)

Cameron:-)

Jerry Avins to stdout:

In Portuguese, 'inflammable' would mean 'not flammable' ('in'/'im' prefix

----> 'not' as in 'impossible' == 'not possible' or 'incapable' == 'not capable').

Yet, we still use 'inflammable' (exact translation for "inflamÁvel")