Oh, I am sorry to hear. English Knight 1, that you have had a have had an injured hand / finger, and that has upset your typing & writing. Hence I am reckoning that you meant "meaningful".
In my case, I am in my mid-50s, but I have had some persistent problems with my right wrist (from time to time) because of too much writing and typing in graduate school; while at work as an engineer; and while teaching scores of different courses in electronics engineering and in mathematics.Toss in a good bit if tennis playing (years ago) and bicycle riding, and my wrist has just been getting worn out.
An orthopedic surgeon, a wrist specialist, has told me that the treatment for my wrist would iinvolve complicated surgery, but I have decided to put that off indefinitely and just to take some medication for it.

I am not teaching now, so I don't have students' papers to grade, diagrams to draw on the chalkboard for my students, and documents to type for handing out in class. This saves a lot of wear and tear.

"But fighting for great precision of words is such a meaning thing."

1. Are you trying to say "meaningful",
2. or are you trying to be ironic and intend "demeaning" or "mean-spirited"?

I disagree whole-heartedly with the second.
D.A.W.

To: English Knight 1
You clearly have no idea who any of these writers were: Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, and James White, and probably not Sir Winston Churchill or Bertrand Russell, either.
I will give you a clue: Churchill and Russell were both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and back when that meant something.

During the past 20 years or so, the Nobel committee that chooses the winners has gotten into the habit of selecting OBSCURE writers who wrote in obsure dialects about obscure subjects, and that has lead to immense criticism of the committee from six different continents and resignations from the committee itself in protest.

It has been a long time since that committee has made a practice of honoring the well-known and influential writers from Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Latin America, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States: e.g. Kipling, Shaw, Churchill, Russell, Eliot, Mistral (two of them), Satre, Thomas Mann, Hesse, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Hemmingway, Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Isaac Singer.

This is true: to be influential, a writer has to be widely read.

Obviously, I have not read much writing in French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or Japanese because I don't read those languages, but we can assume that the big writers in those languages were influential where those languages are used. Also, there are some Russian writers who have been very influential in translations worldwide.

Most of my reading has been of works that were originally written in English or translated from French - especially the works of Jules Verne.
D.A.W.

I recently heard a news report on a major TV network in the U.S. about a group of hoodlums here who had been committing arson with bottles of gasoline and burning wicks. The reporter called them "MOLOTOV COCKTAILS", loud and clear. The reporter did not use the words "gasoline", "bottle", "incendiary", or even "fire", I hasten to add, lest anyone jump to any false conclusions.

So much for the notion, raised here earlier, that most Americans do not know what a Molotov Cocktail is. It is a common expression and quite widely understood.

D.A.W.

This about the origin of the name "Molotov Cocktail" is not even something worth arguing about or discussing. There was a HUGE amount of blood spilled all the way from Finland on the north to Romania and Bulgaria on the south, and also in the Far East between the Japanese and the Chinese during 1937 - 45. Just put some things into perspective. Things are much different in 2012 when British hoodlums were playing with bottles of petrol and commiting crimes of arson with their Molotov Cocktails.

1. There was more than one Russo-Finnish War, but they were very close together.

2. For all practical purposes, the wars between Finland and Russia were part of World War II. Furthermore, Finland was an ally of Nazi Germany beginning in 1941. At the same time that the German Army invaded the Sovier Union, so did the Finnish Army.

3. All of this overlapped with the war between Japan and China that began in 1937. That war is also universally considered to be part of World War II.

4. Some of you Europeans have the odd notion that World War II began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Well, it had already begun with the invasion of China by Japan and with the invasion of Finland by the USSR.

Japan had already taken over Manchuria from China, and it had installed a puppet kingdom in Manchuria, supposedly ruled by the last emperor of Japan, but he and his underlings really did whatever the Japanese commanded them to do. Then in 1937, the Japanese Army used Manchuria as its base in the Asian mainland to invade and overrun the northeastern quadrant of the Republic of China. The Japanese Army overran Peking, too. World War means world war. It would be an exercise in hair-splitting to say that the Japanese invasion was part of it, but the Russian invasion of Finland was not. The fact that Nazi Germany overran Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 was part of the Big War, too, and Germany's taking over of Austria in 1938 was a factor.

It it published, but not so widely known, that in 1941, Sweden cooperated with Nazi German (an admitted mistake by the Swedish overnment) by allowing a large number of German troops to cross northern Sweden from occupied Norway to Finland, an ally of Finland. Then the German troops joined the Finnish Army in invading northern Russia at the same time that the Wehrmacht was overunning eastern Poland and then plunging into the Ukraine.

The Wehrmacht had other allies in that invasion, ones from other countries that disliked the Soviet Union and the Russians: the Hungarian Army, the Romanian Army, the Bulgarian Army, and part of the Italian Army. For example, there was hatred between the Hungarians and the Russians that went back hundreds of years, and the ruler of Hungary in 1941 was quite happy to join the Nazis in invading the Ukraine and Russia.

By the way, the prefix "anti" is never hyphenated onto anything, no matter what some Europeans might think. Look at all of these:
antiaircraft, antibacterial, antibiotic, anticancer, anticlerical, anticommunist, antigravity, antimatter, antimissile missile, antiparticle, antipodes, antisubmarine warfare, antiscientific, antitank weapon, antivirus, and antiwar.

Good references point out to us that these could HYPOTHETICALLY be cascaded at will such as in antiantianticommunist.and antiantimissile missile.
Likewise for countercountercountercounterrevolutionary. .
Believe it or not, there is a logic to such things.

DAW

Note that for quite a long time, the three-letter symbol for the main airport in Los Angles has been "LAX". Symbols like these are international and well-known in the aviation business.
LAX began as an abbreviation for Los Angeles Transcontinental Airport, and this goes all the way back to when there was no such thing as an international airport.

"LAX" goes on the baggage tag for your stuff no matter where you catch your flight: Berlin, Toronto, Ching Mai, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg, Rio, etc.
Likewise, JFK means JFK International in New York, ORD means O'Hare International, SFO means San Francisco - Oakland, ATL means the main airport in Atlanta, and wiil leave it up to you folks overseas to fill in some of the rest.

With the introduction of very long-range airliners like the Boeing 747 and the Boeing 777, LAX became a great place to look at airliners that come from airlines in faraway places, and most of which arrived at LAX nonstop. Look for Air Canada, Air France, Alaskan, British Air, Braziilian, Cathay Pacific, Chilean, Colombian, Ecuadorean, Guatamalan, Hawaiian, Iberian, Italian, JAL, KAL, KLM, Lufthansa, Malaysian, New Zealand, Panamanian, Peruvian, Philippine, Polish (LOT), QANTAS, SAS, Singapore Air, Thai, Vargas ....

There might have been some that flew there that I am not sure if they are still in business anymore, such as Aloha, Canadian Pacific, Loftleider, Sabena (Belgian), Swissair, and TAP (The Airline of Portugal).

It seems that Mexico has had about three different national airlines, and I don't know which one is still in buisiness. Also, Hawaii has had about three different airlines, only one of which survives, but the remaining one doesn't just fly within the state, but it flies to and from California, Guam, Las Vegas, etc, too. I just read an article that said that it planned to start service to New Zealand, too.

D.A.W.

To EnglishKnight:
Wood, when you speak to a man " Hey, babe, what's the latest?", the expression would be ambiguity, nathless.

Your're missing something again, and not asking questions when you should asking.

1. To many in North America, the word "babe" can be used in very informal speech to address either a male of a female. Keep that in mind.
Also, have you ever heard the expression, "A babe in the woods", for example?
This "babe" can be a man, a woman, or a child.

2. Still in infomal speech, this has been with us for decades: for a man to address either a child or a woman (usually younger than himself) as "babe". Women have called a child "babe" since the time of Middle English, or earlier.

3. Still in infomal speech, this has been with us for not so many decades: for a woman to address a man, especially one whom she is atttacted to, as "babe". For example, she might say, "Babe, I am really turned on by your beard and moustache!" (How would you like to get this every week?) "Babe, I think your muscles are really hot!"

4. Some grown men have had the nickname "Babe" for quite some time, especially during the 1920s and 30s. I don't know how far back this usage might go back earlier than that. The same goes for some women who had the nickname "Babe", too.

As for my way of using precise words, this has been influenced by my mother and by the authors Carl Sagan, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, James White, a writer from Northern Ireland, and by the authors of several engineering textbooks that I have studied.

In the case of the latter, many times I can't remember their names, but I can remember the names of the universities, etc., where they worked, For example; Illinois, Purdue, Ohio State, Michigan, Arizona, Southern California, Washington State, and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Don't let me deceive you by omission. I was also stuck with some poorly-written and poorly chosen textbooks in both undergradaute school and graduate school. Then when I became an engineering professor myself, I went through a lot of effort to find textbooks that would be good for my students.
Sometimes there was the ensuing problem of trying to get the Department Head to agree with me! That could be a difficult one.

D.A.W.

Acronyms from G.I. (soldier's) slang of World War II: (and beyond)

FUBAR = F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition.
This one is heard many times in the film SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.

FUBU = F***ed Up Beyond all Understanding.
Some people disagree with me about this one, but I read about it in an article that was specifically about American soldier's slang of World War II

Example usage. "These orders from headquarters are completely FUBU."
(Yes, they don't make sense, and they are stupid, too.)

A similar one came from soldiers of the Dominions of the British Empire who fought in World War I (Canadians, Aussies, New Zealanders, South Africans, Kenyans, etc.)
An Imperial F*** Up.
These were much worse than the ones that came from mere brigadiers, colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors, captains, etc. An Imperial F*** Up.was a bloody bad one that came from field marshalls, Cabinet members, and above.

I don't know if the soldiers of the Commonwealths during World War II used the term "Imperial" or something diffferent, because many of them considered their countries to be separated from the Empire by then. For example, in 1942 the Australian government decided to withdraw nearly all of its soldiers, airmen, and ships from Africa and Europe to being them back to fight the Japanese. Also, the supreme military commander for Australia was chosen to be the American, General MacArthur. Naturally, the U.K. was not too happy about all of this, but the Commonwealth of Australia had the authority to do it. The Australians and the Americans were close allies in that part of the world (incl. New Guinea), especially during 1942 - 44.

D.A.W.

Hello. There are several good Web sites that are available that will give your the actual meanings (in words) of hundreds of different acronyms (pronounceaable) and initialisms. For example, you enter SONAR, and the site responds with
SOund NAvigation and Ranging.

Out of scores of different acronyms, we have these as examples:
RADAR, LASER, SONAR, MASER, NATO, NASA, NORAD, LEM, PAR, RAM, RIP, SAC, SAD, SAM, and so forth.

Some of these have become common nouns in English (and some other languages), too, such as radar, sonar, laser, and maser.

Some acronyms have more than one meaning: RIP = Rest In Peace, and also RIP = Routing Information Protocol - in computer communication networks.

The acronym LEM = Lunar Excursion Module retained its pronunciation even after NASA change to the initialism LM = Lunar Module.

In his writings of science fiction during the 1940s and 50s, Isaac Asimov worked backwards from the name of the first electronic digital computer, UNIVAC, to get the specious meaning "one vacuum tube" (using the American terminology). UNIVAC actually had thousands of vacuum tubes. Then Asimov created another specious acronym MULTIVAC, meaning "multiple vacuum tubes" because MULTIVAC was supposed to be ever so much more powerful than UNIVAC was. Asimov wrote a long series of short stories about MULTIVAC, and his computer grew to be a worldwide set of huge interconnected computers. Holy cow! Asimov didn't know it, but his huge MULTIVAC grew to become an Internet and a World Wide Web a long time before anyone even dreamed of creating such a real thing.

Asimov died in April 1992 when the Internet was still very much of a fledgling thing in the United States and Canada, and practically nobody had a real Internet host in his own home. He would have been fascinated by what it turned into. In contrast, Sir Arthur C. Clarke lived about 15 years longer, and he was fascinated by the Internet, and he had Internet computers right in his own home on the island of Ceylon. His connections went via communications satellites, too.

In Asimov's S.F. stories, MULTIVAC did not stop growing when it covered the Earth with connections, but it also expanded to human colonies and research stations on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, the asteroids, and the satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. Next, MULTIVAC went intersteller to human colonies on planets around other stars, and all of its parts stayed in communication via links on "hyperwave radio" through hyperspace. Read a lot of the stories, and then the ultimate one comes in one of Asimov's masterpieces, a story called THE LAST QUESTION.
I will leave that one up to you to find out for yourself.
There is probably an article about it in www.Wikipedia.org , too.
D.A.W.

There is also a lot of difference between the language of casual conversation and the more formal and precise language that should be used in government documents - incl. agency's newsletters; general newspapers; news magazines; textbooks; television newscasts, etc.

I used the word "should" (in the subjunctive mood) because so many writers and speakers have forgotten all about the various levels of formality in the language.

"Hey, babe, what's the latest?" would be very informal speech, and not always understood very well.

D.A.W.