Elevating your English

By -
I was once in a conversation in the UK that turned, believe it or not, on the differences between American and British English. One of my English friends remarked that it was so strange that we would refer to the apparatus in tall buildings as an “elevator“, when after all, it goes both up and down.

I looked at him with my head slightly cocked to one side. “And what do you call them over here?”

He thought for a second, and then responded, “Oh yeah…”

I think the reason for the bias toward the upside is that is what struck the first users of lifts as remarkable: getting something to plunge rapidly downward from a high floor of a building had always been fairly easy. It was lifting things up that hit people as the true achievement.

Comments

  1. Prateek4:12 AM

    They are also ascensores in Spanish, which also refers to "ascending".

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more