English For Engineers

Or Is It More Likely...A Word For The Wise?


Have I ever mentioned that I have a love hate relationship with languages in general, but specifically with my own language—the ENGLISH language?

Dang it all…but what moron(s) or imbecile(s) made up these rules of spelling and grammar in the first place anyway?

“I” before “E”, except after “C”, or when it sound’s like Ayyyyyyy…Crap like that, you get the gist of my complaint.

How are you to keep up with it all, particularly when they keep changing the rules over time?

If English wasn’t bad enough, I was forced to take a year of Spanish back in high school and I hated every minute of it…concatenating verbs and such…

Why the heck should you make the VERB refer to the sex of the offender person performing the action in the first place?

Either THEY did THIS or THEY did THAT.

What ever was “did”, and who ever “did” it, it was still “done” in the end…weren’t wasn’t it?

In my book, tossing in a few “he’s” or “she’s” or “it’s” into the conversation should be good enough without having to modify the rest of the sentence along the way.

In college at Georgia Tech I managed to pretty much avoid English class because my engineering curriculum emphasized numbers over words, although the words that were used to describe the numbers and even the curriculum were sometimes beyond belief.

Things like Computational Fluid Dynamics, Magneto hydrodynamics, Thermodynamics…I have to admit that I was almost completely “dynamics out” by the end of my third year of college…and I haven’t even mentioned the ultimate dirty word…

C-A-L-C-U-L-U-S

Five quarters worth, at five quarter hours per quarter.

Then if that wasn’t enough, they hit you with something called “Differential Equations”, and if you didn’t get your Calculus studies right, you were absolutely DOOMED in “Diff Eq” as we liked to call it.

Then there were classes like Statics, Dynamics, Deformable Bodies, Heat Transfer, and Materials Science, all specifically designed to make you want to quit school and move back home to work at the local convenience store or “fillin’ station.” No matter what they called the class, when it was all said and done, after the second year it was all still…

C-A-L-C-U-L-U-S

You absolutely, positively, could not get away from the stuff.

I still have nightmares about Calculus and Calculus books.

Since that time, however, I have managed to make amends with the English language and the literature that is produced by its use.

Take this blog, for instance.

Instead of writing “Esto es mi blog, lo adora o lo sale”, I just pound out the words “This is my blog, love it or leave it” on my keyboard.

Seems simple enough today.

I’m finally pretty comfortable within my native verbiage, although I could be found dieing a slow death if it weren’t for spell-check in the old word processor.

I love to do Google searches to find the definitions of words that I missed by not going to graduate school or otherwise managed to bypass along the way in my technical education, and I’m intrigued with the idea that some languages don’t have direct translations for words or concepts (usually expressed by groups of words).

At the same time, words like LOVE in English have multiple translations in Latin and the other ancient and romantic languages.

Recently I’ve been publishing and emphasizing what I call “million dollar” words that expressed my opinion of various world events or our local “community theater companies” and "newspapers."

Instead of cursing at people, things, and organizations, my latest form of assault is to describe them with carefully chosen words…

Words which they don’t understand or know the meaning of.

You might have seen them here before…

Words like:


Feckless \FEK-lis\, adjective:
a. Ineffective; having no real worth or purpose.
b. Worthless; irresponsible; generally incompetent and ineffectual.


Obtuse \ob-tuse\, adjective:
a. lacking quickness of perception or intellect.
b. Characterized by a lack of intelligence or sensitivity: an obtuse remark.
c. Not distinctly felt: an obtuse pain.


Those are a couple of my current favorites.

That all said, I now come back to my original point—My "Word or Words of the Day."

This will be a semi-regular posting here on the blog for at least the short term and actually, instead of being “Word or Words of the Day,” it will more likely be “Word or Words of the WEEK.”

So now, if I may I have a Drum roll please....

This week’s "Word or Words of the Week"...................dddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

Non Sequitur \non SEQ u i tur\, noun:

a. An inference or conclusion that does not follow from the premises or evidence.
b. A statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it.


Here’s an excellent example of a Non Sequitur:

1. If A then B. (e.g. If I am in Tokyo, I am in Japan.)
2. Not A. (e.g. I am not in Tokyo.)
3. Therefore, not B. (e.g. Therefore, I am not in Japan.)

You see, even if the speaker is not in Tokyo, they could be anywhere else in Japan.

It is my assertion that many journalists and most politicians suffer from a bad case of Non Sequitur each and every day of their lives.

I also believe that many of our citizens that will be voting this week in the runoff elections suffer from this same form of mutated logic.

Barely anyone will vote in the runoffs, and when the 50% of the elligable voters that manage to drag themselves to the voting booth in November finally get there, they will already have let the wild eyed partisans and the idiots suffering from a bad case of "non sequitur" pick the candidates which are on the ballot.

I, personally, aspire to try to avoid that affliction.

Just in case you were wondering...