4 ms·

If only they'd used english and required inflammable wood!

• marcosdumay 3y ago
  Many Latin-derived languages have that one problematic word. It's not only English. The opposite of it would be "non-inflammable", so it's not really ambiguous. It's just anti-systemic and confusing. "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.
  • jefftk 3y ago
    > "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it. On the contrary! "Flammable" has been used in English for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable) and at this point it's used intentionally to make it clear that we really do mean something can burn.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      And "inflammable" has been around for so long that it has spread to a big handful of languages. One of those being English. Flammable is the obvious construction you get from the Latin, but it's not exactly the word that spread into English. It seems to have been created there later.
  • numpad0 3y ago
    I think the ambiguity in inflammable lies in in- prefix rather than in the second part. If someone told me that incombustible and inflammable used to point at the same property at one point, I’d believe that.