Because “gas” is an informal and quicker way of saying gasoline that was adopted by the general public for convenience sake.
Language doesn’t exist to be technically correct, it exists to facilitate practical conversation. The more you look at it from this perspective the more things will start to make sense.
Huh yeah You made me interested enough to click on the Wikipedia article, and such drama behind it too apparently:
The term gasoline originated from the trademark terms Cazeline and Gazeline, which were stylized spellings and pronunciations of Cassell, the surname of British businessman John Cassell, who, on 27 November 1862, placed the following fuel-oil advertisement in The Times of London:
The Patent Cazeline Oil […]
That 19th-century advert is the earliest occurrence of Cassell’s trademark word, Cazelline, to identify automobile fuel. In the course of business, he learned that the Dublin shopkeeper Samuel Boyd was selling a counterfeit version of the fuel cazeline, and, in writing, Cassell asked Boyd to cease and desist selling fuel using his trademark. Boyd did not reply, and Cassell changed the spelling of the trademark name of his fuel cazelline by changing the initial letter C to the letter G, thus coining the word gazeline.
By 1863, North American English usage had re-spelled the word gazeline into the word gasolene, by 1864, the gasoline spelling was the common usage. In place of the word gasoline, most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), use the term “petrol”, and North Americans more often use “gas” in common parlance, hence the prevalence of the usage “gas bar” or “gas station” in Canada and the United States.
Coined from Medieval Latin, the word petroleum (L. petra, rock + oleum, oil) initially denoted types of mineral oil derived from rocks and stones. In Britain, Petrol was a refined mineral oil product marketed as a solvent from the 1870s by the British wholesaler Carless Refining and Marketing Ltd.
When Petrol found a later use as a motor fuel, Frederick Simms, an associate of Gottlieb Daimler, suggested to John Leonard, owner of Carless, that they trademark the word and uppercase spelling Petrol.
The trademark application was refused because petrol had already become an established general term for motor fuel. Due to the firm’s age, Carless retained the legal rights to the term and to the uppercase spelling of “Petrol” as the name of a petrochemical product.
Nerdy fact: a gargoyle is only a gargoyle if it’s there for drainage from a roof or other architectural feature. If it’s just decorative, it’s a grotesque or just a plain old statue.
It is also worth noting that the word “gargoyle” and “gargle” have the same root word.
gargle (v.)
1520s, from French gargouiller “to gurgle, bubble” (14c.), from Old French gargole “throat, waterspout,” which is perhaps from garg-, imitative of throat sounds, + *goule, dialect word for “mouth,” from Latin gula “throat.” Related: Gargled; gargling. The earlier, native, form of the word was Middle English gargarize (early 15c.), from Latin gargarizare, from Greek gargarizein.
Didn’t they also drag it out in city centers in order to deliberately undercount the urban population? I seem to remember that it went on forever, and then they just quit without finishing some conveniently high-minority areas.
They exist, but are only really relevant at the local level, or rarely as a spoiler effect if one gets vaguely popular. This isn’t so much that people don’t want other options, but mostly because the US system is badly designed. The US has a first past the post, winner take all type system, ie, if you win the most votes in a given election, you win that spot and it’s all yours. That makes some intuitive sense, but is actually not the most democratic option, as it means that parties that have, say, 20% of the population supporting them don’t get 20% of the seats, they get none of them, because for each individual seat, they won’t win the most votes. Worse, such a party will cause the major party it is less similar to to win, because it’s voters voted for them rather than the major party it was most similar to, so even if the voters on that side of the political spectrum are in the majority, their votes are split among multiple parties where their rivals that stay as one party can then be the single largest one. The US system accidentally makes it mathematically inevitable for two and only two parties to dominate.
Historically they have switched up once or twice, when one party became so unpopular that it basically became nonviable, and a different party rose to replace it, and once the current major parties have swapped ideology more or less, but this kind of thing is very rare.
Thank you for your elaborate reply. It sounds very…disheartening to have such a system in place, both for voters and the people who are members of these other parties.
If it can be proven to be "self dealing" aka your NGO, charity, or non profit purchases or accepts a tax deductible donation of say, a portrait of you, from you or one of your businesses for hypothetically, 100 million dollars, then you may, if you did something particularly odious such as say, run for president. Then you might lose the legal ability to run that sort of organization.
This is the correct answer. Overcharging (and self-dealing) is typically used in tax fraud and money laundering.
Of course, no one would actually do that, especially if they were to later do something as public as running for president. The entire justice system, due to its fair and impartial nature, would come crashing down on their head with every resource at its disposal, and the people would riot in the streets if it treated such egregious crimes as less important than passing a bad $20 bill.
This is how I taught myself a lot of English as a child. I kept reading, and reading, and reading - and all those unknown words became meaningful from the context.
Do you often find yourself daydreaming of a life you never lived? Do you sometimes wonder if your accomplishments will be remembered? Are you able to pass through solid objects like doors or other people? Do you occasionally feel light headed or sleepy for no reason?
While this is giving me a chuckle, I can attest that I had to provide someone my passport and driver’s license today and they were looking at me in the eyes and talking to me And I did a transaction with them and I entered another brick and mortar store today and paid for goods and services and I really think I’m a real human.
Yes, but have you walked into a solid object like a wall to ascertain whether you can pass through it? I mean I check every once in a while to make sure I haven’t gained any supernatural powers. I recommend head first for entertainment value. Please report back.
Actual live-in nurses are pretty rare and very expensive, but I think you’re overestimating how common they are.
Most of what you see is just caretakers who come during the week on a set schedule, which is usually a lot more affordable than nursing homes because you’re paying for someone’s labor versus labor + living accomodations.
To answer your second question, it would cost whatever rate the nurse agreed to work for. It would have to be pretty competitive. In most cases, having to live at the patient’s house isn’t seen as a benefit of the job.
It’s called petrol and benzin elsewhere in the world. Gas/gasoline is just a name for automobile fuel.
Btw, on the periodic table at room temperature and typical atmospheric conditions, gases are “fumes”, sure, but all of the first 72 elements are gaseous at 5000°C.
How do you know that you actually figured out the meaning though?
How many words did you guess wrong about and now you think you know but you don’t actually. You’ll never know if you read the context properly without looking it up after.
Try to guess the meaning of the word lugubrious from the following sentence:
Although he was wealthy, he often found himself lugubrious.
There isn’t a single clue in that sentence as to the meaning of the word.
Don’t just guess; actually learn properly instead.
Your example falls under “I don’t understand the message.” There are no context clues and the sentence relies on that one word for it to make any sense to me so it’s something I would actually look up.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter. If I had a whole page describing this man, I’ll most likely get the gist. I’m just not the type to look up every word I come across.
You know, there can be different strategies and those that are not used by you don’t have to be wrong. They can all be useful in different circumstances.
Because the US doesn’t have proportional representation and uses “first past the post” voting, basically any vote for a third party candidate is wasted.
There are other parties but their main effect is to sway elections by “stealing” votes from the two main parties. There’s a group trying to form a party called “No Labels” right now but if you look at their financial backers, you can clearly see they only exist to try to weaken democrats.
Admittedly there are some other parties that genuinely try to get elected, such as the Green Party, but they rarely succeed in even the tiniest local elections.
As others have said context is important. If you can infer its meaning, and it’s not critical to understanding, then just roll with it. If it’s critical, or you can infer, look it up.
I would highly recommend also looking up its pronunciation. Once you start using it wrong internally, it can leak out and utterly confuse people. Though that might just be a “me” problem. 🤷♂️
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