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Gasolene

Gasolene

(OP)
Yes I spelled it that way one time to lable a non-OSHA aprooved container in my shop.  My friend, Sanford, of course would not let me get away with it and promptly alerted me to the error of my ways.

My excuse is as such;  the container was near a kerosene container and since we pronounce gasoline with the same ending sound…

And then there is turpentine…

    So why don’t we say turpenteen to ryme with gasoline or gasolign to ryme with turpentign?  Or why is kerosene not spelled kerosine?

We are expected to be good spellers?  Hmmm!

Is there an etymologist on board?  I tried to look up the word etymology in the dictionary this morning and could not find it under ete…, eta…, or eti…  so when I got work and got onto Google, I immediately typed in etymology without even thinking.  The mind is a dangerous thing!

The following from the etymology dictionary…and Sanford claims to be interested in etymology and if not for him I would not even know what the word means.  It is not that buggy word which I think has an n in it directly after the e:

gasoline  
coined 1865 as gasolene, from gas (q.v.) + chemical suffix -ine/-ene. current spelling is 1871; shortened form gas first recorded Amer.Eng. 1905. Gas station first recorded 1932.

Leonard

RE: Gasolene

Children wonder about such things. Their minds are fresh and they believe in logic and order.

It is only when we (or most of us) give up the thought that the world, and that subset that we call language and spelling, is logical that we start spelling "correctly" and abandon thinking. If gasolene was correct then it doesn't have to be correct now. And you can probably find places where gasolene still is the correct spelling.

As the Germans say: What is true in Jena is a laugh in Heidelberg. Or was it the other way round?

RE: Gasolene

I don't know about gasoline, but kero has two possible accepted spellings: kerosine and kerosene, following the Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

RE: Gasolene

You could always ust use "petrol"!

RE: Gasolene

I did not know coal oil was kerosene until I was a teenager!
So there.  How about ---ga$oline---seems appropriate, hey?

Rod

RE: Gasolene

and then we have benzene and benzine, which are two entirely different substances?!

Bung
Life is non-linear...

RE: Gasolene

You may add to the list napthalene and naphthalin, meaning the same thing: "tar camphor".

Bung is right, the other name for benzene is benzol. One dictionary tells us that benzine is an archaic name used for the petroleum distillate; nowadays it is benzin.

RE: Gasolene

Sorry: I've a tendency to forget the first h in naphthalene.

RE: Gasolene

(OP)
uh oh -- bad speller bad speller!

Leonard

RE: Gasolene

Maybe you could just have used:

"flamable"

???.  

RE: Gasolene

And then there's "inflammable", which can mean two completely opposite things.

Hg

RE: Gasolene

(OP)
Or nonuninflammable, which is anybody's guess.

Horse Sense is something that horses have that keeps them from betting on people.  It also keeps them from voting for people.

Leonard

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