sjfcontrol wrote:I sometimes wonder about flammable and inflammable both meaning the same thing, but frankly I could care less.
Ooo, Ooo! I got this one which finally came clear to me in rookie school. Flammable is any material that will burn under ordinary circumstances and when exposed to enough heat to sustain combustion. Think paper, wood, etc. Inflammable is anything with a certain volatility and will burn rapidly and hot. To be inflammable as far as DOT, NIOSH and such folks are concerned, a material under ordinary atmospheric pressure and within temperature norms offers up fumes into its container or surrounding atmosphere.
Where ordinary combustion is actually a chain of chemical reactions where the material degrades and surrenders gasses which in turn "burn" with a flame. Inflammable materials give of gasses without heating beyond normal environmental temperatures. Your gasoline, alcohols, LPG, acetone and the like come to mind.
Now, only in the English language can you cut DOWN a tree and then cut it UP. You can RAISE a barn or RAZE it to its foundation. You drive on a parkway and park in a driveway. We have one word "love" that covers the sexual, the brotherly, the affectionate and the purposeful. The Greeks on the other hand had four words defining each specific type (eros, philio, storge and agape).
Someone mentioned the need to modernize and streamline the English language. I disagree; we have already lost our ability to understand words' original meaning. We redefine them according to popular usage and in turn lose the ability to understand what authors of the past were trying to tell us. A good example is the word "adultery". What do you think of when you hear that word? Thanks to the Council(s) at Trent the word has come to mean a sexual infidelity. But it's meaning is much broader than that. When we say, "adulterate" or "adulterated" as in, "We have adulterated our food supply," we don't mean that we have been "sexually unfaithful" to it. We mean we have corrupted it. In the case of a document or contract we have made it invalid, falsified it. From the Latin to mix, pollute, falsified... So if one thinks "falsify covenant" (or break law) when they hear the word adultery; then one can see that adultery in the marriage covenant can happen long before sexual infidelity occurs.
I know it's been a rambling post but the whole push to streamline and modernize the English language (not just here) and word use robs a language, already lacking inflection, of any eloquence that remains. Let me pick on TAM, you read one of his wonderfully worded posts and set an average kid down in front of it today, I doubt he'd understand a good portion of it. I know they couldn't match it.
I say, "hashtag eloquence".
