[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.

Leo J. Burke

 

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces
surrounded by teeth.

Charles Luckman

 

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't
met yet. She's now in a maximum-security twilight home in Australia.

Dame Edna Everage

 

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Mark Twain

 

Exit, pursued by a bear.

William Shakespeare, Stage direction in "The Winter's Tale"

 

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in
the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

 

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Flammable

 

In the 1940s there a change in the wording for a substance that would easily
burn: inflammable became flammable. The problem with inflammable is the in-
at the front. English has many words in which it means "without" or "not". A
majority have been imported from Latin with the prefix already attached,
such as infertile and inarticulate. Others, such as inexpensive and
invariable, have had it added in English. We don't turn words into their
negatives using in- any more; we prefer un- or non-, or sometimes a-, but
the aura of negativity surrounding in- is still very strong in our minds.

 

Unfortunately, Latin had another in- prefix, whose root sense was the same
as English in but which could sometimes strengthen the meaning of the word
it was attached to, as in indoctrinate and incantation and also in
inflammable. This is much less common or obvious, so much so that
inflammable can all too easily be taken to mean "not capable of burning",
when it really means "very easily set on fire".

 

It's impossible to establish how often confusion over inflammable led to
accidents but evidence exists in US newspapers more than a century ago of
the mistaken meaning of inflammable:

 

These bricks are said to be light, impervious to wet and utterly
inflammable. - Davenport Daily Leader, 29 Jan. 1892.

 

[The dresses] will be rendered almost inflammable, or at least will with
difficulty take fire, and if they do, will burn without flame. - Nashua
Reporter, 30 Jul. 1903.

 

This confusion has survived to the present day. A US study published in
2010, Hazard Connotation of Fire Safety Terms, by Michael S Wogalter and
others, found this to be so among American adults: "Inflammable has the same
meaning as Flammable but was rated as if it was of very low flammability,
consistent with previous research."

 

>From the beginning of the twentieth century the potential confusion started
to worry American safety experts and insurance companies. Under their
urging, flammable had begun to appear in safety advice and local bylaws in
the first decade of the century but it was then a technical term unknown to
the wider public. In 1920, they ran a campaign to try to change the
language. This notice appeared widely in technical journals:

 

The National Safety Council, The National Fire Protection Association, and
similar organizations have set out to discourage the use of the word
"inflammable" and to encourage the use of the word "flammable" instead. The
reason for this change is that the meaning of "inflammable" has so often
been misinterpreted.

 

It was convenient that these bodies had words with which to replace the
potentially disastrous ones. Flammable had been created early in the
nineteenth century from the same Latin verb flammare, to set on fire, that's
also the source of inflammable; flammability had appeared two centuries
earlier still. Though they had never caught on, they were available to be
resurrected. Advocates also preferred non-flammable to non-inflammable.
Perhaps strangely, non-flammable preceded flammable in the US by about a
decade. It did so earlier still in the UK, where it was a term of art in
naval gunnery as early as 1888.

 

Despite this early effort, progress was slow. Flammable really only started
to take hold in the US from the 1950s. For example, the official shift from
inflammable to flammable on fuel trucks took place as recently as 1964.
Purists hated the change, ranting at the time that the fine literary word
inflammable was being replaced by a corrupt form, an unnecessary dumbing
down of language in order to accommodate the ignorance of the great
unwashed. Objections died out eventually and Americans are now more likely
to use flammable than inflammable both in speech and writing, substantially
more so than Australians, Canadians or Britons.

 

In Australia, flammable began to appear only in the 1960s. The first modern
example of flammable found in British usage is dated 1952 and it wasn't
until 1959 that the British Standards Institution issued the following
advice: "In order to avoid any possible ambiguity, it is the Institution's
policy to encourage the use of the terms 'flammable' and 'non-flammable'
rather than 'inflammable' and 'non-inflammable'."

 

The use of flammable and non-flammable in technical contexts is now
universal. However, flammable is still not fully accepted in everyday speech
and even where it is, confusion remains about the technical difference in
meaning between it and combustible. Many people think the latter is a more
severe state than the former but in fact the reverse is true.

 

The figurative senses of inflammable and its relatives and the medical
application of inflammation are unaffected, since they don't have the same
safety implications.

 

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Who once addressed the Mayflower-minded members of the Daughters of the
American Revolution as "my fellow immigrants"?

A: Eleanor Roosevelt.

 

How many tons of jelly beans did the White House buy during Ronald Reagan's
presidency?

A: 12 tons.

 

What unusual coincidence has been noted about he names of the secretaries
who served Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy?

A: Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy (John); Kennedy's was named Lincoln
(Evelyn).

 

Who said, "Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth--to see it like
it is, and tell it like it is--to find the truth, to speak the truth, and
live the truth"?

A: Richard M. Nixon, in accepting the Republican party's presidential
nomination in 1968.

 

What is the only U.S. presidential landmark operated outside the country by
the National Park Service?

A: Campobello, the summer home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in New
Brunswick Province, Canada.

 

What four state capitals are named after American presidents?

A: Jackson, Mississippi; Jefferson City, Missouri; Lincoln, Nebraska; and
Madison, Wisconsin.

 

What was the Secret Service's code name for Barbara Bush?

A: "Tranquility." President bush was known as "Timberwolf".