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Gromment or grommet?

Gromment or grommet?

Gromment or grommet?

(OP)
OK, I learned something new today. For the first time in apparently a loooong time,  just had to type the word I heretofore have always known as "gromment", meaning a sealing or reinforcement ring. But my Firefox Spell Checker seems to think this it is not a word and wants to spell it "grommet", without the "n". I was aware that they use grommet in the UK (because of people misspelling the character name in "Wallace and Gromit"), but until now, I had no idea that some people don't accept gromment as acceptable!

Yet a Google search on the "n" version pulls up thousands of uses, often by people who manufacture the devices, so it's obvious that I am not the only one using that version. When then does an "alternate" use become acceptable? Should I add it to my spell checker dictionary or will it make me out to look the fool?


"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe." -- Abraham Lincoln  
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RE: Gromment or grommet?

I've never heard of "gromment" before.  And my fiddle on Google suggests that "grommet" trumps "gromment" 100:1.  My smell checker doesn't like the smell of gromment either.

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Well you learn something new every day, well two things actually in this case. I have never heard of gromment being used, I have always used grommet, however according to my Collins concise dictionary grommet or even grummet is acceptable but gromment is not, but that maybe because I am a Limey who spends too much time watching animated TV.

So how many names do these little blighters have?
 

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Grommet is the word.  Jraef, it just goes to show how much we are creatures of habit.  Somewhere along the way, you picked up a spelling which was programmed into your brain as correct but was not.  I used to be a good speller, but living in Australia, I now switch back and forth between the Aussie and US spellings, so am never quite confident in my spelling anymore.

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Add me to the list of those never having heard of Gromment before.

Perhaps it's a (con)fusion of a Government Grommet.

cheers

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Words like this gently soak into one's brain.  I don't remember Peter and Jane ever having to change and/or grease their grommets (or gromments) in my formative years.  Sometimes different pronunciations or spellings pervade.  My (so called) wife still uses the non-word: "windowscreen".

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

SomptingGuy

What's wrong with window-screens?  I have them on every window in my house.  They are great for keeping bugs out of the house.

<ducks>

OK, I remember you mentioning that your wife used it for a car windshield.   

Patricia Lougheed

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RE: Gromment or grommet?

My wife persists in pronouncing avocado "advocado", and it is not in my best interest to correct her.

RE: Gromment or grommet?

(OP)
Looks as though grommet it is. It just sounds funny to me when I say it out loud. As these things go, I will likely now be required to say it dozens of times in the near future...

I agree it is not the sort of word one picks up in elementary school, but my father owned a manufacturing business and I started working there as soon as I could hold a welding torch. So that is likely where I learned the word; incorrectly as it turns out. Funny how that happens and carries on for so long through so much education.


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RE: Gromment or grommet?

@ hokie66

"advocado" - sounds like a lobbyist for the fruit and vegetable growers!

RE: Gromment or grommet?

"advocado" - a down and out usually found clutching a bottle of sickly yellow stuff.

A

RE: Gromment or grommet?

jraef,

Welcome to the world of humble people.

 

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Julian and zeusfaber,

Thanks for the laughs, but I am glad my wife doesn't read this stuff.  

RE: Gromment or grommet?

(OP)
My wife, who by the way has a Master's Degree in Speech and Communications, is from the Midwest and had never seen an avocado before moving to California. So she told me she thought for the longest time that the word was "a bocado", being of Spanish origin until she saw it in print. She said she searched in Spanish dictionaries for what a "bocado" was and found that it meant "mouthful", but thought it a strange name for a veggie / fruit.

She had also never seen an artichoke and had no idea what it was until she saw someone eating one in a restaurant. So again, she had only heard the name and though it was something French, like "Arte de Chouque" and since "chouque" in French translates to "shock", she thought maybe the name came from the shock one gets in finding that something so inedible looking was in fact delicious!

RE: Gromment or grommet?

"hokie66 (Structural) 1 Dec 08 13:15  
My wife persists in pronouncing avocado "advocado", and it is not in my best interest to correct"

She must be a true blue Aussie, right?  
 

RE: Gromment or grommet?


jraef,

Don't feel bad.  Every once in a while one gets past all the checks.  For most of my adult life I thought it was 'Rod Sterling'.  

You might mention to your wife that the name for avocados originally meant testicles.

"If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance!"

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Artisi,

More like fair dinkum.

Cass,

I might, but then again---

RE: Gromment or grommet?

My boss used to have an executive assistant who pronounced the word "diode" as "dy-oid" for all the years she worked for us.  I never did correct her...probably because everytime she walked into the shop I melted in a puddle on the floor with my tongue hanging out...she was the MOST GORGEOUS WOMAN I have ever seen face to face.

And as you probably have guessed, melted in a puddle on the floor with your tongue hanging out is not really conducive to constructive conversation.

debodine

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Can't find your gromment?  have some "sherbert" and relax.  My wife would be happy to tell you about the pretty yellow "For-Cynthias" that used to line our driveway.
 

RE: Gromment or grommet?

I call this "Marconian Cheese"

RE: Gromment or grommet?

I can't really criticize my wife's pronuciation too much as long as I persist in calling the dog a dawg.

RE: Gromment or grommet?

For ten years my wife has being saying "allowdness" and I have been correcting her to "permission".
OK, so English is about the fifth or sixth language she has learnt.

I'm tempted to think this is why she doesn't read the manuals on anything but, since this is the EU, every manual is in about a dozen languages and at least three of them she knows better than English.

So why do they insist on supplying manuals with washing machines and dishwashers that are never read?
These are pieces of equipment about which she considers I cannot possibly be able to know anything about and I have no business interfering in their use.
 
So, everything gets washed at the maximum temperature possible and she will, in the interests of economy, load the things until she can't jam anything more in.

Every so often all my clothes arrive in my cupboard a uniform shade of pink. Every so often she'll run them both together which is more than the drains can handle and one or the other will pump out into the other.

The central heating is set to permanently on and she controls it by twiddling the thermostat until it clicks, r way past when it clicks.

My car went in for its service today and the loan car they provided was a brand new top of the range Audi A4 Diesel. We hadn't been in it for more than a minute before she'd taken over the heater controls and the radio but, after a drive in it, top of her Xmas list is sat nav, especially with voice instructions.
I had to explain (I don't think she believed me, she probably thought this was me preparing my excuses for not buying her one) that the TV picture we got that replaced the map on the display when I reversed, is nothing to do with the satnav. SO if i get her Satnav for Xmas and it doesn't come up with a TV picture it will be because I'm a cheap bum who couldn't be bothered to get the right one.

I could buy her an Audi, I suppose. Yeah, right.  

 

JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
 

RE: Gromment or grommet?

I won all the localised thermostat battles, but lost the "Windows open" war.  Not good times.

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Well done SomptingGuy, I lose both thermostat and window wars, so tell me how to win one or the other without going via the divorce courts or counselling.
By the way, I usually also lose the TV wars and war almost broke out last night when I interrupted her "Jane Austen's Emma" to watch the car chase from Bullit, not the whole film, mind, just the car chase.

 
 

JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
 

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Divorce courts loom.  Apparently I'm a "know-it-all".

When we bought the house, it had no central heating.  She maintained that the ad-hoc electric heating made the air "dry".  Maybe it ate the H2O molecules??  Her degree in chemistry was never mentioned in her arguments.

Then came the huge expense of gas-fired central heating.  A thermostat on every heater.  So I managed to work out what setting (0-5) was comfortable for each room, but I never managed to convince her that we were pouring heat out of the open windows.

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

Oh, I see.
SomptingGuy, I'm sorry to tell you you didn't win the war, you won a minor skirmish in what you thought was a UN peacekeeping operation against a totalitarian state armed with WMD who will not scruple to adopt a "scorched earth" policy as a last resort and who is otherwise amply skilled at guerilla warfare and where the terrain is to their advantage.
Oops!

I myself decided that capitulation was the least worst option. If it gets to hot I decided not to point out that it is because she wound up the thermostat so that the turkey will roast without the benefit of an oven and that the simplest solution is to wind it down again. I let her open the windows and sneak off to lower the thermostat when she isn't looking.

Sooner or later, theory says, she will close the window.

Actually, this is not foolproof as there is no proven (to her) causal link between windows and thermostats so she may close the windows or she may simply wind the thermostat up again.
This is thus a difficult campaign because it is easier to disguise the action of sneakily adjusting the thermostat down than it is to go round closing windows; if I get caught doing that then out come the doomsday weapons: the packed bag and the dash to the airport for the first flight to a warm country and b***ger the cost.  

 

JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
 

RE: Gromment or grommet?

... and as I've mentioned elsewhere, an engineering degree and 20+ years practising thermodynamics and heat transfer count for nothing.

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

As it happens, I'm now living in a tiny flat with electric storage heating.  So if I don't gamble right I end up with too much or too little heat in the things.  So I find myself swearing as I open windows to let the excess heat out.  Still, I quite like leaving the TV on standby for the extra heat it provides during the day.

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

(OP)
Good thermal management of your domicile requires the prodigious use of grommets. wink


"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe." -- Abraham Lincoln  
For the best use of Eng-Tips, please click here -> FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies  

RE: Gromment or grommet?

At least you two probably only had campaign season primarily in the winter months.

I get the cooler campaign season in the summer, and the heating campaign season in the winter.  Actually, there isn't really a break, the theater of operations just changes from the cooler thermostat in the hall to the heating thermostat in the kitchen.  Add to this my wife & sons fascination with the dreadfully inefficient gas fire and it's enough to driven me, even with my fairly basic understanding of thermodynamics, crazy.

My latest favourit was that my wife was complaining how cold it was one morning.  I said I didn't know why as I'd set the thermostat in the low 60's so that if it got really cold it would cut in.  Turns out she'd turned off the heating a couple of days before when she was warm.

KENAT,

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RE: Gromment or grommet?

Oh, and then we have the third battle front in the car.

She goes for the 'air full on' or 'air off' approach.  I try to find a steady setting that pleases everyone including angling or closing vents and adjusting both the hot/cold dial and the fan setting.

KENAT,

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RE: Gromment or grommet?

I tried the simple approach "Do you understand what a thermostat does?" once or twice.  If I ever place a small ad in a lonely hearts column, that'll be one requirement.

- Steve

RE: Gromment or grommet?

(OP)
Two added fronts in the t-stat war in my house now:

1) Menopause. "It's too hot in here." (68 deg. F)

2) The programmable setback.  "Why is the heater coming on this late? Shouldn't it be going back down by now?" (11:00 PM, but it is 20 deg. F outside)

RE: Gromment or grommet?

i had a chick i was messing with almost stop talking to me because she messed up you're and your.

LOL.


 

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