I was told in 1955 that "flammable" was invented to put on trucks because so many people - including many truck drivers - thought that inflammable meant "not flammable". Like independent vs. dependent, indivisble vs. divisible etc.
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-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [tor-relays] Doing the english [Was: Kitten1 and kitten2 compromised (guard/hs/fallback directory)] Local Time: May 21, 2017 11:22 AM UTC Time: May 21, 2017 3:22 PM From: pipatron@gmail.com To: tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ian Zimmerman itz@primate.net wrote:
On 2017-05-20 18:07, Chris Kerr wrote:
Yes, 'sensible', like 'actually' and 'eventually', is a "false friend" whose meaning in English is different from that in just about every other European language (but the other languages are consistent with each other e.g. 'sensible' in French and 'sensibel' in German have the same meaning), which sometimes leads to confusion. Even more confusingly, 'insensible' is not the opposite of 'sensible' but rather means either 'imperceptible' or 'unconscious'.
I have mused about this myself. The most curious thing is that English is not even consistent with itself here. Think about the title of a famous enlightenment era novel. The meaning of the nouns is precisely inverted from the adjectives.
Inflammable means flammable? What a country! _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays