Man, y’all need to get back to work.
3 Likes
To that end, at least in the United States, the arcane term for self-propelled rail cars is Doodlebugs.
The older career rail workers, those that remember cabooses, and likely deride the FREDs that replaced them, love using rail jargon. They love explaining things too, if you ask.
For instance I had a friend whose family worked in rail yard. He love “concatenation”. To him it had two meanings. One was the the actual process of adding rail cars to a train. The other was the sound of each car, bumping into the next along the train, even though that sound isn’t always caused by cars being added. Thump, thump, thump! It is one of the coolest things to listen to, especially when it can be heard across cars down a long line.
While I love that you noted that the specific term was being misused, it’s meaning was understood. Language changes, and while I want to rail against the changes, I also hate being pedantic. People miss use myth and legend, theory and hypotheses, and often call cells batteries. I hear the disembodied voice of E.B. White in my head telling be to let it go. I try, except when it concerns “theory”, as most of the time when people say that that they have a theory, they actually have a hypothesis or an uneducated guess.
3 Likes
While we’re off on a tangent: 車 (pronounced -sha when part of a compound word) is the kanji for wheeled vehicles; by itself (pronounced karuma) it generally means ‘car’, but it can also mean ‘cart’, ‘carriage’, or even ‘wheel’ .
電車 — densha — is an electric train; 列車 — ressha — is a generic train, where 列 means ‘line’, ‘row’, ‘queue’, ‘string’ or… wait for it… ‘train’ in the sense of a line of things.
Edit: Meanwhile, an electric automobile is a 電気自動車 — denki jitosha.
See, other languages can be just as mixed up as English.
4 Likes
In Chinese they would usually call a train a 火车 (huoche, fire vehicle), but it could also be 列车 (lieche, with 列 having a similar meaning). Electric train maintains the fire etymology and is 电动火车 (diandonghuoche, something like electrically driven fire vehicle). 电动车 (electrically driven vehicle) looks like it should be an electric car, but it generally means electric bike; 电子车 (electronic vehicle) is more commonly used for cars. 汽车 (qiche, air/steam vehicle) means car, but I’m not sure why.
4 Likes
And I note that 车 is the simplified form of 車.
2 Likes
Yes, and 电 is the simplified form of 電. I’m not very good at reading traditional characters (since I haven’t had much contact with them), but it’s interesting to see the rules they used for developing a simplified form.
3 Likes
Buy why?!?
2 Likes
I’m not really arguing - it isn’t important, even to people like me who like to dredge up this stuff. I’m just arguing for the sake of it because, in a post-reality world, whatever else is there to do?
Exactly so.
I remember, vaguely, an old verse that I now can’t locate, I dream of steam publishing, from the days when steam presses were being used for books as well as newsprint. The writer notes that Lippincott repeated sounds like a train (on the old flanged rails): “Lippincott, Lippincott, Lippincott they’d clink” and then ends up with “and down the line a shunted goods train clanks: Gollancz, Gollancz, Gollancz, Gollancz, Gollancz.” That’s the sound you mention.
But steam engines were horrible, for the number of people they killed with the smoke from their exhausts and the truly terrible job of stoking and driving them, even when power doors and coal feed came in. My grandfather hated them and hoped electrification would come before he retired. And they killed him; lung cancer from exposure to smoke. It killed a lot of railway workers who, like him, had nothing to do with engines.
4 Likes
It would be interesting to hear the onomatopoeic words for train movement in different languages; a lot of onomatopoeia seems quite unintuitive to foreigners.
My dad loves steam trains – he knows a lot of the historical routes in the UK, and can point out where a track used to run, what it was for and where it went (even if the track isn’t there anymore and it’s just a path). He’s good at finding holiday locations when we all go together, but you can bet it won’t be more than 15km from a preserved railway.
1 Like
Well, as long as they were married, I guess it’s OK.
6 Likes
3 Likes
I suppose a railcart doesn’t count either.
3 Likes
Gee, Operation Derailgate sure hit the mark 
1 Like
I like to say America got its come TrumpPence.
1 Like
Harsh. The OFs they’ve deleted from COUPLE OF have got to go somewhere.
I prefer to cling to the idea that the USAnians exported it under some sort of “fair trade” deal that gave them recourse to ISDS if we turned it back at the border or imposed tariffs. We’d never have actually imported such an abomination!
3 Likes
Winding people up on the Internet is my day job. At least till my wife is fully mobile from her hip replacement again.
3 Likes
Incidentally: my Mum is on her third artificial hip.
Implanted tech adds a whole new twist to product safety recalls.
I hereby nominate “the 'uge recession”
1 Like
