In his weekly
New York Times column "On Language" last Sunday, William Safire gives his specialist [sic] readers a chance to fulminate against the slings and arrows of outrageous usage. Serendipitous that it coincides chronologically with this thread - mere coincidence?
Herewith an example, on the misuse of "epicenter":
>>The geophysicist Joseph D. Sides adds, "Writers should be advised that
epi- no more intensifies the meaning of center than does
pen- intensify the meaning of ultimate." .... Sides defines epicenter as "the point on the surface of the earth vertically above the center of an earthquake, the quake's 'hypocenter.' " It is also, he says, "the point on the earth's surface vertically below the atmospheric detonation of a bomb, the 'hypercenter' of the explosion." He finds "misuse of the offending term attributable to spurious erudition on the part of the writers combined with scientific illiteracy on the part of copy editors." <<
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/magazine/06ONLANGUAGE.html*
Read on for "organic," "quantum," "exponential" and more.
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