I hate the use of the word 'aerials' to describe shots taken from a drone. 'Aerials' are those things that transmit radio waves, not some super-abbreviated version of 'aerial photographs'.
E.G: "Aerials shows police hunt after beheading".
That's because we use the word 'Aerial' wrongly, what we have on our roofs ;-D are TV antenna . Insects have antenna too which are used for receiving signals. Aircraft show themselves off at aerial displays which aren't a showroom for TV Aerials. :)
+1
It isn't lazy language, its what all living languages do, evolve over time when something new like booting a computer shows up and you need to invent a name for it.
And that comes from bootstrapping.
Sure, but that is the same thing, it was just shortened after that.
While a less common modern usage, one might argue its closer to the original use. Aerial (when referring to an antenna) is after all a shortening of "Aerial Wire Antenna" - i.e. one high up etc.
Selfy is my bug bear at the moment. I have to say I've never heard your example used. One increasing thing I notice is the lack of any form of sentence construction, so an instruction leaflet or even web site might say. Side of unit - bottom scews xx top - left side screws yyy etc. its almost as if originally there had been a drawing, but nobody bothered to tell the writer it was not supplied and all the use of dashes.. ugh. Brian
In the early days of radio, you had an aerial wire and an earth wire, with, "aerial" being used in its correct sense as an adjective with the meaning, "of the air".
In the example of the PP, "aerials" is again being a contraction of, "aerial shots".
Therefore, space craft CANNOT have aerials, so must describe their wire-to-vacuo interfaces as, "antennae", the correct plural in widespread use during WWII, before the ignoramuses that are the Yanks tried to foist, "antennas" upon we, the cognoscenti.
Must admit not to minding the word. It is after all a new word, rather than giving an existing one a new meaning. That annoys me.
But the actual plethora of selfies is a different matter. ;-)
In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
Indeed, it describes what it is, though one could argue it comes from self portrait I suppose. But that would sound rather pretentious :-)
Having a teenage daughter, we have a lot of selfies :-) you just need to get into the spirit of things. It's just a bit of fun. But as for the stupid duck face they often pull in them, what's that about
I think it's all part of thing of photos being so easy to take, more prevalent and so less important nowadays. Really, a lot are quite empemeral nowadays. I think those of us brought up on film tend to struggle with that at times
Or if you're in Cuba, aerial food tray antenna.
NT
Indeed, when a film would only last for 36 or so shots, and each canister actually took up real space, then it was worth composing each shot. Now it is possible to just point and shoot while on the run, and sort out the best later. This did come in very useful once when I was driving through mountains in Mexico.
Anybody want to buy a darkroom kit?
Getting old film developed now is pricey
NT
Like those shots of lightning strikes or meteors, that the press call "one-in-a-million" or "freak". We are never told if the camera was set to shoot continuously all night, and the lucky shot is effectively a still from a movie.
It's an Aerial here in the UK but Antenna over the other side of the pond.
However what it is not is an "Ariel" thats a statue on broadcasting hice in Lunnon;!...
And the BBC staff mag..
no - that's "Pravda"
you really think those lightning shots are done by those triggering the shutter release as they see a bolt of lighting cross the sky. I suggest you look up shutter delay etc....
We use the word Aerial to describe an Antenna but when the word aerial is used for something else we normally understand it used in that way too. We also use the term wireless to describe a device that requires wires in it to work.
Which, in itself, is a shortened version derived from the descriptive "Pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps" used to encapsulate the seemingly impossible act of being able to elevate by lifting yourself off the ground by merely pulling on your own boot laces.
In the case of computers, the short and snappy phrase "Booting Up" simply describes the process whereby a very tiny collection of processor instructions (boot code) is used to access and load up a more complex (but still minimal) set of instructions from the "Boot Media" required to access an even more complex software program to load the complete Disk (data and software storage system) Operating System, typically referred to as an OS (lazily dropping the still vital key word, Disk[1]).
This process of initiating more powerful end processes via much less powerful and simpler precursors is common to just about any non-trivial process used by both man and nature. In the case of both forest fires and the power stroke of a petroleum spirit or gasoline fuelled internal combustion engine, a mere spark is enough to bootstrap the processes involved.
The same goes for the humble "Hydrogen Bomb"(tm) whereby a set of electrically triggered detonators is used to detonate a carefully arranged group of shaped HE charges which in turn drive and hold a set of sub critical plutonium masses together long enough (microseconds) to allow the resulting runaway nuclear fission chain reaction to proceed sufficiently long enough to generate a useful energy yield sufficient to heat and compress the hydrogen fuel to initiate nuclear fusion for a sufficient enough time to yield its own final "energy punch".
Virtually everything that happens in natural or man made synthesised processes involves some sort of "Bootstrapping" in one form or another.
It was only with the advent of the first 'main frame' stored program controlled electronic computers whereby the chief operator had the tedious task of loading the first few dozen cpu instructions into memory via the front panel switches using the laborious process of keying the binary instruction codes, literally, bit by bit[2], using the program step and load switches until the code entry was completed and the 'run' switch could be pressed to unleash the full attention of the cpu to the task of executing this bootstrap code that the initialisation came to be likened to that humorous allusion to raising yourself off the ground by pulling yourself up by your own boot laces (straps).
That's a pretty common human impulse to find or create short 'catchy' alternatives to what would otherwise be a tedious repetition of a descriptive phrase for an oft repeated function or frequently referenced piece of technology.
The word aerial, originally simply an adjective, is commonly used as a noun in place of the original "Aerial wire" used to describe a wire antenna for receiving wireless broadcast transmissions in the long, medium and short wave bands.
The word "Wireless" btw, in this case, refers simply to the fact that the communications link between the transmitter and the receiver uses EM radiation rather than a wired connection. Only the most facile of minds would ever consider this to be a misnomer based on the fact that the transmitter and receiver kit is, of necessity, choc full of 'wires'.
As to the evolution of the word 'aerial' to include UHF yagi arrays, this is simply the usual process of extension by association.
There are plenty of examples of such "word misuse" in everyday language. In most cases, the meanings are perfectly clear even if not strictly true to their origins. The classic example is the use of 'battery' to describe a single voltaic cell such as "AA Battery" when strictly speaking it should be "AA (voltaic) Cell".
The word "Battery" has long since become synonymous with any voltaic electrochemical based source of power regardless of whether it's an actual battery of voltaic cells or simply a single voltaic cell such as the classic AA battery or, more arcanely, the single Li-ion cell which makes up the typical 3.7v 'battery' used in mobile (Cell) phones and small tablet computers[3].
OTOH, my 'camera battery' *is* an actual battery. I know this simply because it's a 7.4v Li-ion battery which is double the voltage of a single 3.7v Li-ion cell and therefore, of necessity, must be formed from a battery of 2 series connected Li-ion cells.
Language isn't being 'lazy', it's just trying to avoid excess 'redundancy'. There's normally some level of redundancy built into spoken language simply to allow for forward error correction, mediated most often by 'context'. The levels of redundancy always evolve to an optimum level to minimise both requests for repetition (resends) and the overheads of the message constructs ('packets').
We get away with using the word battery in every day usage to unambiguously referencing all types of electrochemical voltaic energy sources (single voltaic cells or batteries thereof) simply because the other alternatives are so *not* everyday usage such as a battery (of guns) where this interpretation of the word battery would be very much determined by the context (military circles and not using it in a sentence like "I bought a new battery today."(unless you were the materiel supplies officer bragging about your success in securing a supply contract to equip a new fortification project)).
[1] The key word, Disk, is of itself an abbreviation of the data storage system so vital to the technology of a "Stored program controlled computer", standing in for the whole process of data storage management at the heart of any computer controlled processing tasks.A computer OS is essentially a system of control over the whole process of managing data used to represent both software and information (text, pictures, movies, databases and so on). The keyword 'Disk' which stands in as a 'catch-all' for the storage mechanism used for data and control is the whole reason for the existence of a computer Operating System in the first and last place.
Managing data is at the heart of any computer OS (hence the initial reference to a DOS such as MSDOS, DRDOS and PCDOS and so on). Sadly for that class of consumer who prefers to have full control of the management of their computer's resources, the situation has been rapidly deteriorating in the Microsoft dominated PC market ever since the début of windows XP.
Microsoft were either being very ironic (or taking the piss in using an "In-Joke") by naming winXP's successor as "Vista" since the one vital element of the "OS" offered absolutely no vista like view of the file system as had previously been the case with win95 and win2k's classic desktop configuration (using the "open each folder in its own window" option).
I'm guessing the Microsoft OS developers, when told that they had to pander to the the "Consumer", decided to regard this fresh (and very soft) target market with the contempt it deserved (forgetting that actual users would also land up being penalised) by actively removing the folder window auto-sizing feature out of the win2k base that winXP was built upon, effectively lobotomizing explorer.exe. Although the option to "open each folder in its own window" was retained by winXP, the lobotomy pretty well rendered this vista like view of the FS all but useless.
The resulting OSes seem to be designed with a philosophy that 'useful file management features' would be wasted on the great unwashed masses (of consumers) who simply don't deserve such luxuries when all they want is a "White Goods Appliance" they can play games and movies on and communicate with their like minded moro... oops. friends.
Since this "Treat the consumer like a mushroom" philosophy suits Microsoft's bottom line (as it does for countless other profit motivated corporate behemoths), it's almost certainly a philosophy imposed on the developers from on high rather than just merely their utter contempt of computer consumers.
[2] I can well appreciate the impulse to liken the whole computer startup process as a "Bootstrap" procedure after using a very similar technique to initiate the start up of my first primitive versions of a Tape OS I had been developing in the early 80s for an S100 bus kit built computer.Mind you, the tedious initial data entry of the first half dozen or so bytes of bootstrap code was eased somewhat by my having the luxury of a monitor rom by which I could use a keyboard rather than a bunch of front panel switches requiring binary data entry. Even so, entering a dozen or so bytes of data in hexadecimal was labourious enough for me to avoid shutting the machine down any more often than was absolutely vital. The day when I could incorporate this startup code into the 2K battery backed cmos ram chip I was using as a stand in for a BIOS rom couldn't come soon enough.
[3] Although it's possible to form a battery of cells arranged in a parallel connected scheme so that the battery terminal voltage is just that of a single cell, it's extremely unusual to see such single cell voltage battery arrangements. More likely would be the case of paralleled strings of series connected cells such as a pair of 12v SLAs paralleled to double up the AH rating.When it comes to the more specialised Li-ion 3.7v smartphone and tablet batteries, there's absolutely no point in assembling these up from paralleled cells to increase capacity when you can do even better by making the whole volume of the 'special' purpose designed battery a single cell - no wasted space or materials used for redundant cell separators and maximum WH capacity for any given battery volume.
Even when the extra voltage from a 2 cell battery offers some gains in voltage conversion efficiency, it's often still worth going for the single cell option since the WH capacity gain typically exceeds the slightly raised energy demands of the slightly lower efficiency in the single cell switching converter circuitry leaving the battery management process very much simplified to the job of managing just a single cell rather than having to juggle the condition of two or three cells that may otherwise be needed to create the higher voltage battery.
Also, when you're manufacturing a non-standard size and/or shaped 'battery', sticking with a single cell design significantly reduces manufacturing complexity and costs.
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