And Clifford, is your last comment a general safety warning, or a reference to the similar “heavy boots” story?

-cvj

Oh no!!! My next physics exam is going to be full of amps. Should I scribble them out and replace them with coulombs per second? Or should I just wear heavy rubber gloves?

Finally, I think you are not giving your five year old friends the credit they deserve. They can understand the difference between “flow” and “energy”, and hence “current” and “voltage”. I betcha!

Cheers,

-cvj

Nope, I’m not going to beat the beJesus out of you — that was actually very clear, and made a lot more sense than the analogies that people have been using to explain things. The analogies are a useful shortcut, though, if you don’t want to get into the specific details. Anyway, thanks. Notice, though, that it took you several paragraphs. If a reporter brought it in as part of a funny news story about a guy’s suit, the average editor would red-pencil the whole thing. The reporter would have to either avoid technical terms altogether (which would mean paraphrasing the fire officials who were using the terms incorrectly), or find a two-sentence way of explaining the terms. Things would be very different if a reporter were working on a story about some new kind of battery, and that was the point of the story, and the reporter had a couple of days to work on it.

About a year ago I was writing something about tests that a person might undergo as part of a diagnostic process (I can’t remember what it was), and one of the possible tests was an MRI. I just had a few lines, but I wanted to make it as accurate as possible, and besides, I’d never understood how MRIs work, and I was curious. So I did some research and even though I ended up understanding MRI technology a bit better (I still find it somewhat mystifying), it didn’t help me at all with what I had to write, because of the space constraints I had — all I could really say was that an MRI is a 3-D imaging test that uses a strong magnet. The main topic of the document was not MRI, and I just couldn’t spend much space on it; you might say that it would still be a good thing for the reader to learn more about MRI, but I would have to reply that saying much more about it would be a distraction from the main topic I’m trying to inform them about. Journalists write under similar space and topic constraints, and a lot more time pressure.

I basically agree with you about science education, but I tried to imagine how to introduce these topics to the very bright 5-year-old son of a friend of mine, and I decided that at that level of cognitive development I would have to work through demonstration and analogy — which doesn’t negate what you’ve said about education, just underscores the importance of knowing your audience.

One last observation: even before all of this, if someone had asked me I would probably have said that “give off Voltage” didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t have explained why, except to say (maybe) that voltage is a property of the object itself. It’s possible to know how words are used without understanding the concepts underlying them.

Now, I am going to use various electrical devices to bake a pie and do some laundry.

I rarely correct people’s grammar any more, for a few reasons.

1. A lot of errors are not the result of ignorance, or even sloppiness, but just the inevitable imperfection of human behavior. I’ve noticed a few grammatical errors in posts on this blog, for example, but I can tell from the general quality of the writing here that they are the kinds of errors any good writer makes from time to time, and that even good editors occasionally let slip through (I have found typos in the New Yorker, which is famed for the excellence of its editing). I will not swear that there are no grammatical errors or spelling errors in this comment.

2. People are taught all sorts of bad grammar in elementary school, so that they insist that it’s incorrect to start a sentence with “but” or “and,” or end a sentence with a preposition — neither of which is a hard-and-fast rule — and absolutely will not budge, even if you show them a passage in a good grammar reference that supports your argument (the Chicago Manual of Style has a particularly withering critique of these “rules”). Yet these same people create howlingingly funny dangling modifiers and repeatedly confuse subjective and objective pronouns. It is virtually impossible to convince people that they’re, especially if they’re just doing what their 3rd grade teacher taught them. I spend a lot of time talking to doctors who are reviewing manuscripts I’ve written, and they’re always trying to “correct” my grammar. Since I need to be polite, I can’t argue with them — it is very aggravating.

3. Usage conventions vary: it would be wrong for me to spell “program” with an extra “me” tacked onto the end, or use “s” instead of “c” or “z” in words like “practice” and “patronize,” or spell “favor” with a “u,” but perfectly correct for Clifford to do so, since he uses British spelling; it would therefore be rude and ignorant of me to “correct” him or vice versa. Punctuation conventions also vary in British and American usage.

4. Usage changes. I still remember the first time I heard the word “proactive.” It was the fall of 1985, and I remember my immediate “that’s not a word” reaction. But alas, ugly and redundant as it is, “proactive” has entered the language, and these days I barely flinch when I hear it. And that’s pretty much the way it has to be: language changes, meanings change, ideas about what is and is not “good style” change, and what is or is not “good style” depends on what you’re writing and who the audience is. I happen to be a fan of long, intricate, architecturally complex 19th-century sentences, but when I’m writing a technical document I try to keep my sentences as straight-forward as possible, because the point is not beauty, but clarity (which can be beautiful in itself).

By now you may have concluded that I’m hopelessly relativist and wishy-washy, but that would be incorrect. Rules of grammar and style exist for a good reason: to make written communication possible, and ideally pleasurable. Without some agreement on how a written English sentence is put together, writing and reading become confusing, difficult, and ultimately impossible. The challenge is to write well and read intelligently while keeping in mind that language is open-ended and constantly changing. The thing that bothers me about how writing is taught is not that people aren’t learning the rules right, but that people aren’t learning why the rules matter, and why they should care about them — which brings me to a point similar to the one that Clifford has been trying to make about the way that science should be taught.

2.citrineThe peak of a tall mountain has a large gravitational potential relative to the bottom.

3.Arun powerwasher jet would be a high voltage, low current flow,

and your kitchen faucet would be a low voltage, low current flow.

Sorry I couldn’t repsond sooner to answer Clifford. I am answering quickly here as I have to go, yet I want to be clear here. I’ll come back tomorrow.

In terms of the “field” Inverse Square law. The “electrical potential” in gravitational collapse, as a cosmological process.

Photon, informaton “released” and held to event?

“Measure” in terms of distance from that event “in time” till now?

On the other hand, writing up my dissertation in those pre TeX days really sucked.