OT: Where did our language go?

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, Tim Streater snipped-for-privacy@streater.me.uk> writes

I meant loudness, but a longer word contains more energy so same effect overall . One word I'm not keen on is "incentivize"

Is incent a word in English ?

How about emburglerization ;-)

I recently had to get some quotes for some tree trimming, and one of the contractors asked about the 'meterage' involved. I had not heard that term before.

Do you mean a 'loozer'?

Wrong where?

I remember that series! Their proudest creation was a light blue Mini, driven by a little old lady wearing a hat, and endlessly going round a roundabout while signalling a left turn. They also claimed to have invented the plastic wrapping that can never be torn open.

Anywhere.

I didn't say it wasn't.

Well its a reasonable way to express the idea of buying say timber in bulk. Or fabric.

snip

Look up Hoppus foot. The timber trade has a language of its own:-)

You need AJH for this:-)

Every trade has its jargon. Who talks of EMF? We call it 'voltage' And to someone using big elecromechanical s*it, reluctance isn't something the wifey displays after dark... Any more than propeller pitch is a resin used to paint airscrews.

Google supplies the content, mostly.

As a physics teacher, I always bristled at the use of 'Amperage' instead of Current, yet quite happy with Voltage instead of Potential Difference.

Along similar lines, when did we Brits start talking about the letter 'HAITCH' rather than 'AITCH' - and why?

I wouldn't understand "meterage" other than measuring a length or height. I would use volume if we are talking bulk of the tree or, as you say, Hft for the solid timber, It was a good unit to visualise round timber and estimate the likely yield of sawn board volume, just as pint, foot and acre are easier to visualise than their SI equivalents.

Some Brits might do that, not all. Believe me. But has anyone mentioned the modern totally meaningless 'innit?'

I have no trouble visualising a cc, ten cc, 100ml or a litre. Or these days a mm, a cm, 10cm, a meter or a kilometer.

And a hectare is lot easier (100m square = 10,000 sq m) than an acre, whose definition I have completely *forgotten*.

There's a bloke on telly who keeps saying "an 'istorical". Will in my day possible an hôtel" but never 'an historical'

No bruv.

The origins are interesting. Apparently Irish Gaelic uses a sort of emphatic confirmation that is translated as 'and all and all' ..and that ended up in Australia and a rising inflection, and in Hindi there is an equivalent 'is it not so?' interrogative that became 'innit'. Even the French say 'N'est ce pas?'

Innit is simply wog spik for 'isn't it?'

Just as we call everything Indian a curry, when the word scarcely existed in Hindi before the Empire.

"Curry is an anglicised form of the Tamil kaṟi (கறி) meaning 'sauce' or 'relish for rice' that uses the leaves of the curry tree (Murraya koenigii)"

In Farsi there is a similar word that means stew, that sounds like khorsh, or khoresh.

The word is a substantive of the verb khordan "to eat" and literally means "meal".

So we are just as guilty really...

In message <sSHlNFIcS79mFw+ snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk>, Tim Lamb snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk> writes

Well..... We happily have 'mileage' and 'poundage' (used to be the percentage commission you had to pay when sending postal orders).

I have always understood that EMF is the open-circuit voltage. The abbreviation 'PD' is quicker to express than 'voltage'. 'Amperage' suggests more the current-carrying capacity rather than the actual current.

What's Hft? Wikipedia doesn't have any relevant definitions, and a general Google search finds references to a Home Farm Trust charity, High Frequency Trading (stock market) and a maker of fork-lift trucks.

You can guarantee that if it is an imperial unit, it will not be related to anything else in the universe by a factor of 10 - the most sensible base since we have 10 digits (fingers plus thumbs) and are taught to calculate in base 10.

The ability to be able to "visualise" the size of a unit is of negligible importance compared with the ability to calculate and to convert between units.

For example, a ml or a cc of water weighs 1 gramme (I prefer the French spelling, rather than gram) so if you have a container whose dimensions you can measure, you can easily calculate its weight when full of water. Trying doing that in inches and pounds! There are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon or 277.419 (not even a bloody integer!) cubic inches in a UK gallon. If you want the answer in pounds, it's easier to convert everything to metric, get an answer in kilogrammes and then convert back to pounds. You still need to remember a conversion factor, but 2.2 lb =

I had this problem back in the 70s when I was helping my dad install a copper hot water cylinder at our holiday cottage. Would the baulks of timber that it was going to rest on be able to take the weight of the full cylinder? We'd no idea - not even to an order of magnitude - what the volume of the cylinder was. We'd no calculator, and not even a phone to ring my mum and ask her to use dad's new calculator to work it out. We only had a tape measure with inch markings - no cm equivalents.

V = pi r^2 l - approximate pi as 3 for a rough answer

V in cubic inches was easy enough. "All" we needed to know was how many cu in there were in a gallon and we could use the approximation 1 UK gallon weighs 10 lb. But without the 277 conversion factor we were f*cked. So I converted everything to cm (using 1 inch = 2.5 cm approximation) and worked it out on the only scrap of paper I could find, with a blunt pencil. And then converted back from kg to lb for Dad who could "visualise" a lb better than a kg. What a faff. We must have got it right because the cylinder is still there, at the top of the stairwell, 50 years later.