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Strewth the spelling of English is weird!


old man emu

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I got on a Viscount at Coolan hotta years ago and I commented at the door, sheesh the only thing holding this thing together is the paint. (Got red wine in a coffee cup on the way top Melbourne though) (needed it) A few weeks later the wing came of a similar one going into Port Hedland ( wing spar failure) and the tail horiz stabilisers came off one in a storm just of the end of runway 16 and it went into Botany bay . Took days to find it.. A burning engine took the wing off one going in to Winton and another with a similar problem managed to Land at Mangalore. Nev

 

 

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Inflammable and flammable are synonyms and mean "able to burn" even though they look like opposites. "Inflammable" comes from the Latin verb inflammare, which means "to cause to catch fire". "Flammable" was coined later from a translation of the Latin verb flammare ("to catch fire"), which inflammare is related to. Inflammable came into English in the early 1600s. Things were fine until 1813, when a scholar translating a Latin text coined the English word flammable from the Latin flammare.

 

In English, we think of "in-" as a prefix that means "not": inactive means "not active," inconclusive means "not conclusive," inconsiderate means "not considerate." Therefore, inflammable should mean "not flammable." To avoid confusion, choose flammable when you are referring to something that catches fire and burns easily, and use the relatively recent nonflammable when referring to something that doesn't catch fire and burn easily.

 

 

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"Disgruntled" is an example of what lexicologists call an "unpaired opposite" - a word that has no opposite. A common misuse of the expected paired opposite of "disgruntled" is found in P G Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, published in 1938: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.” So, if you were the opposite of disgruntled you would be pleased, satisfied, and contented. "Gruntled" was an invention by Wodehouse for comic effect.

 

The assumption behind is that putting dis- on the front of a word makes it negative in meaning in some way. Sometimes, however — very rarely and only in old words — dis- is what the grammarians call an intensifier: it makes an existing sense stronger. A second grammatical term, frequentative (or frequentive if you prefer). This is a trick of word formation, now obsolete, in which an ending created a verb to suggest that some action is often repeated. The one used for this most often is -le. The verb gruntle is the frequentative of grunt. The first sense of gruntle was of a repeated grunt, especially the noise that pigs make in company. Gruntle appeared in the fifteenth century; by the end of the next century it had begun to be used to mean grumbling or complaining.

 

If we put the intensifier and the frequentative together in one word, disgruntled has its current meaning a state of “moody discontent, sulky dissatisfaction or ill-humour”.

 

So, "disgruntled" is an adjective and "gruntle" is a verb. A disgruntled post office worker will often gruntle.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Trump thinks HE knows everything.In his own opinion He's a GENIUS and has said so many times. It's amazing the world has managed to get here before he came to help. Still It's god's will according to most Republicans and we are told HE works in strange ways, and Trump fills the bill there. Geez is this really happening? Nev

 

 

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