That’s fair. Had an opportunity to use “e.g.” today but just said “for example” instead.
I had another interesting one. Reviewing a document someone else wrote that said an old thing was “grandfathered” in and the document didn’t apply to it. A Chinese-american coworker (who has been speaking English for decades) didn’t know that one, “grandfathered”. Another unnecessary term when “previously approved” or “previously authorized” would be so much clearer.
This is all reminding me of a Wikipedia article I stumbled on ages ago about people who want English kept “pure” to Germanic and early modern English roots. …m.wikipedia.org/…/Linguistic_purism_in_English. E.g. (lol), saying birdlore instead of ornithology, and bendsome instead of flexible.
I have no idea why, but convention. And not a thing where nerds like me gather to dork out about something, but a scientific standard. Whenever I’m explaining something, and someone asks why it operates that way, I’m always like, “it’s that way by… uh… y’know, it’s always been that way.” No clue why I always blank on that word specifically.
I had to look it up for this post. My brain’s inability to recall the word for detonation velocities lower than the speed of sound wasn’t an issue until rotating detonation engines started to make news and I’ve needed to explain the difference between explosions and deflagrations to people.
Add comment