3 ms·
I thought "potent" was a term referring to the strength of a particular composition of a particular drug. I thought "powerful" was the term that you could use t
by denton-scratch 5y ago
I thought "potent" was a term referring to the strength of a particular composition of a particular drug. I thought "powerful" was the term that you could use to compare one drug to another, irrespective of dose.
Have I got it back-to-front?
- viraptor 5y agoThey're pretty close. If you're a descriptivist, then they're both interchangeable in practice.
- denton-scratch 5y agoI'm not a descriptivist! I think that everyone should speak English the way I speak it! (I'm right, and everybody else is wrong) It's awful, being a prescriptivist. Everything you read howls at you "Ignoramus journalist!", and everyone you meet seems to be foreign. Every dictionary seems to have been compiled by an "algorithm", based on some irrelevant corpus; and the meanings of words I thought I knew keep shifting. I guess defending Norlins against a hurricane tidal surge must have felt a bit like this. Maybe I should just chill a bit more.
- viraptor 5y agoIt is awful, you're rarely right as a prescriptivist because descriptivists decide what "right" is :)
- colechristensen 5y agoI don’t think either word has a particularly strong definition behind it in this context. Happens a lot in science, some words have very strong very specific meanings in scientific contexts… others not much at all.