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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Helpful vs. Not helpful


Take a look at the comments made on yesterday's post and you'll see a study in contrasts. Light to the point of brilliance is Dixxx with his creative, informative, and helpful input....Dark and sombre by comparison is Stretch's lacklustre effort. Still....... I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth but Dixxx please (and this goes for everyone else too), when referring to tungsten call it by its rightful name: "WOLFRAM" Call me a square if you'd like but I prefer to think of myself as a purist. This is one household where the tungsten trend will never catch on. Gunther von Wolfram 1st isolated Wolframite in the mid 1800's and the industrialization of the West went into a new gear. Miners would sit on piles of the ore at their tea break and this would soil their pants something terrible..."dung stains" they called it and later the Dutch "tung-sten" (see Fowler's Word Origins p.887 for the full etymological history) Now we're saddled with a name that was once just a joke and frankly speaking, Gunther v. Wolfram deserves better. This really pisses me off, though in this case Dixxx, I'll accept a plea of ignorance. I know your heart was in the right place. I haven't the time to figure out the false fun-fact but I'm sure someone else will come up with the answer

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