Daft and irritating terminology used in this industry

[crackoff]

Then call it a General Purpose Vehicle. A "Jeep" is a type of GP, not the meaning of GP.

[corylus]

As a far eastern import to this fair (?) Isle, I continue to be annoyed by the use of the word "dike" when one means ditch.

A dike is a body of earth to defend against water, often the creation of one would result in there being a ditch beside one....

 

Think about it, little Dutch boys put their fingers in dikes to save the country, not just dangle them in some water.

 

 

Dike is a word I only use when describing lesbians...which I got into trouble for recently from the 21 yr old who works for me. Two lesbian friends happily use the term but apparently not all dikes.....sorry.......lesbians are happy with it.

 

BUT...and this is the point of this post (so to speak) I would just like to say a thank you to Rover for the above post...I had never thought of the dikes being the banks created to defend against water rather than the watercourse itself. I'm going to annoy people with that later:)

[Stephen Blair]

Actuals!

[Stubby]

Blue sky thinking ? ........

[daltontrees]

I loath the steady degradation of words in my lifetime, you can see it happening and no-one cares except that I do because we are left temporarily without a distinction between two words meaning and permanently without a clear meaning for one or both of them.

 

There's obvious things like 'awesome', which in my day meant filling one with awe (wonderment ). Now it means nothing.

 

But there's the housebuilder's favourite 'home'. Used to mean an integerated household, the secure environment created by a family or group. The word for a residential building, freestanding or detached, was 'house'. Now Barratt build homes, it's not the people that move into their flimsy structures that build the home. Marketing people are the worst, they will bastardise anything to make a sale.

 

Next up is 'impact', which I still say is a sudden, damaging, encounter. 99% of the time the right word would be (and used to be) 'effect'. But that's not dynamic enough for news stories. Yet you will still hear about the 'impact' of global warming on trees.

 

I'll get back in my box now. My dad used to chide me decades ago for using 'brilliant' to mean anything other than 'emitting or reflecting intense light'.

 

Whatever!

[daltontrees]

Plus cannae stand advantageous buds and auxiliary buds. The words are adventitous and axillary, but rather oddly the misused words seem appropriate for the situations.

Edited March 19, 2014 by daltontrees

[daltontrees]

I'm on a roll now! Pet hate for me is 'pollarding'. Originally meant coppicing above ground level to keep grazing animals away from the regrowth. The right word for reducing tree in height was 'polling'. Now pollarding is just a fancy and meaningless word for topping.

[difflock]

A gentlemen from Cookstown used to insist in calling domestic radiators "radihaters" hate=heat in Cookstown speak.

I liked that descriptive "bastardisation"

[Graham]

Then call it a General Purpose Vehicle. A "Jeep" is a type of GP, not the meaning of GP.

 

That's how Jeep got its name. It becomes a generic name. Much like Hoover is now a generic name for a vacuum cleaner.

[corylus]

Heard the following once or twice regarding areas of softwood which had been clear felled.

 

"They've absolutely decimated the place"

 

Well that would be one tree in ten removed then wouldn't it. Argh