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.
-------- 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
> 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!
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