The most misused words in the English language

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by freeztar

Or, "it's a fir piece".

Btw, can someone explain to me how that saying came about?

I think "fir" is a mispronunciation of "far". Piece is as a "leg" in a journey. Taken together, "fir piece" is a long way to go.

[belovelife]

how about "itch a scratch"
instead of "scratch an itch"

one of my things

also why do we park on a driveway
and drive on a parkway

[lemit]

I was born on a piece of ground. I still own that piece of ground. I got it and a few more pieces of ground when my parents died.

When people walked across country, like I did to a one-room schoolhouse for two years, they would wade through fencerows, ditches, plowed fields, timber, and underbrush. They would cross cow pastures with one eye on the bull. They would get their clothes torn on barbed wire fences. They would collect cocleburrs and sandburrs in the socks they couldn't always afford to replace.

They would need to cross the near pieces to get to the far pieces (the "fer" pieces). My mother and her sisters--one of them a school teacher--used to joke about the fer pieces they had to walk to school or to pick up the mail or to get piano lessons, as opposed to the fur pieces worn by some of the wealthy women.

If you read "Huckleberry Finn," I think you'll find "fer piece." If you don't find it, at least you'll know a little more about the kind of world I grew up in, you'll have read one part of the mythical "great American novel," and you'll be much the better for it. And please read the note on language.

People talk about street creds. On this particular use of language, I have dirt road creds. But I have come a fer piece from there.

--lemit

[lemit]

For those of you who haven't looked at the Astronomy and Cosmology forum, this is something I promised those who have.

I hope this hasn't been mentioned here and I just missed it. (I missed "natural" on the first page, so my concern is legitimate.)

"Meteorite" seems to have cannibalized "meteor." I know that people who want to appear a smidgen more intelligent than they really are love syllables, but it seems that other people have started using the post-impact term for the pre-impact object.

Now, about "natural." My vague, childlike understanding of chemistry is that except for the radioactive rare-earth elements, everything is natural. I know that many things are manipulated (in the most precise meaning of the term), but I have the possibly pantheistic belief that even manipulated nature is still nature.

--lemit

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by lemit

For those of you who haven't looked at the Astronomy and Cosmology forum, this is something I promised those who have.

I hope this hasn't been mentioned here and I just missed it. (I missed "natural" on the first page, so my concern is legitimate.)

"Meteorite" seems to have cannibalized "meteor." I know that people who want to appear a smidgen more intelligent than they really are love syllables, but it seems that other people have started using the post-impact term for the pre-impact object. ...

--lemit

Roger that rocky misuse. Moreover, "before impact" we have 2 nominatives; meteoroid & meteor. In the case of meteoroid, we have rocks rushing around in space, and in the case of a meteor we have a meteoroid that is actively falling to Earth (or other space body) and burning brightly as it goes.
This concludes another unscheduled pedantic rant.

[lemit]

Being a night person, almost to the point of being suspect of vampirism, I was just watching the space shuttle and the EVA's. (I don't know if that abbreviation is still used.)

I noticed that every time an astronaut moved from one place to another, the NASA spokesman used the word "translate" instead of "transfer." I looked at Merriam-Webster and got the following definition of "translate:"

translate - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

When I looked at "transfer," I got this:

transfer - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Now, since "translate" seems to be a transitive verb except when referring to the act of translation, and since the intransitive form seems to be acceptable for "transfer," it seems to me that "translate" is being misused.

I know we have some NASA people around here. Any explanation why NASA would ignore a perfectly usable word in favor of a word that's clearly out of place?

Thanks.

--lemit

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by lemit

I noticed that every time an astronaut moved from one place to another, the NASA spokesman used the word "translate" instead of "transfer." I looked at Merriam-Webster and got the following definition of "translate:"
…
I know we have some NASA people around here. Any explanation why NASA would ignore a perfectly usable word in favor of a word that's clearly out of place?

I’m not now nor have I ever worked for NASA, but being with the terminology, can explain this.

This particular spaceflight term comes from the conventional meaning of the term “translation” in geometry, “moving every point of a figure a constant distance in a specified direction”. The other term of importance in the geometry of rigid bodies borrow by spaceflight is “rotation”, in which the orientation, or attitude, of a body is changed, but the location of its center of mass is unchanged, which is conventionally divided into 3 principle axes oriented on the maneuvering body: roll, pitch, and yaw.

Because, as lemit notes, translate is a transitive verb, to be syntactically correct, “the astronaut translated from the front to the rear of the shuttle bay” should add an object to read something like “the astronaut translated his location from the front to the rear of the shuttle bay”.

An important feature of a translation is that it assumes the body to be at rest relative to some convenient coordinate frame before and after the maneuver – a sensible practice for astronauts bopping about in shuttle bays.

In spaceflight, the term “transfer” usually refers to a specific kind of maneuver in which an orbiting craft changes from one orbit to another, as in “maneuvering thrusters were fired to transfer the satellite from a low-Earth orbit to a geostationary orbit”. The simplest such Earth-orbiting maneuvers require a change in velocity, or delta-v, at its beginning and end, with the path followed between the two called a transfer orbit. Strictly speaking, the starting and end paths need not be orbits, but given the energies available in present-day spaceflight, every spacecraft is always orbiting some primary body.

So, in short, the difference between a translation and a transfer in spaceflight terms is that one does not, and the other does, result in a change of velocity relative to the starting reference coordinate frame.

It’s not unusual for words to have meanings different from their common ones when used in specialized technical contexts. One can avoid confusion when writing or speaking for a non-technical audience by qualifying the words – eg: “geometrically translate” for “translate” – but in talk between specialists such as heard in spacecraft radio communication, short forms are used.

[lemit]

I was listening while I was doing other things, and that word just kind of stood out. If I had had a little more of my brain invested in what I was listening to, I might have remembered that NASA people, even public relations types, use a lot of jargon. Thanks for not being too condescending in reminding me of something I already knew, having watched all the early space flights, with overawed descriptions by Walter Cronkite.

Thank you, also, for the little lesson in geometry. As you probably know already, I'm one of the non-science people around here. I was impressed with your explanation, since I could read it and understand it very easily.

Again, thanks.

--lemit

p.s. That's non-science, not anti-science. Actually, I grew up experimenting on everything I could find to experiment on. I "dissected" every animal I could find, a wide assortment on a farm. I disassembled and reassembled a Model A Ford. I did all kinds of electrolysis experiments and built electric motors. But I have almost no formal training in science, so I love all the information I get here, and I need all of it.