--- Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net> wrote: > On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 11:56:31 -0500, Casey Rousseau <casey at the-bat.net> > wrote: > > >> >But I *really* wonder where these don't! (Around here it's spelled > >> >"kerosene". > >> > > >> > > >> Yeah, didn't get that either... > > C'est la même chose ... > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene > > I knew it had multiple spellings - it's the rhyming that I didn't get. What in America is called "kerosene" -- a flammable liquid -- is in the United Kingdom called "paraffin" or "paraffin oil". In the United States, "paraffin" is the name of a solid substance, a wax that melts at a low temperature, used among other purposes for sealing home-processed foods from contact with air. >From the Oxford English Dictionary Online: Paraffin: 1. A colourless (or white), tasteless, inodorous, crystalline, fatty substance, solid at ordinary temperatures [...] 2. Short for paraffin oil: see 4. 4. attrib. and Comb., as paraffin candle, heater, lamp, -refiner, stove, tin; paraffin oil, any one of several oils obtained by distillation of coal, petroleum, and other substances [...] Kerosene: a. A mixture of liquid hydrocarbons, a commercial product of the distillation of petroleum; obtained also from coal and bituminous shale, and extensively used as a lamp-oil. Now important as a fuel for some kinds of internal-combustion engines, esp. jet engines. First manufactured by Abraham Gesner, shortly after 1846 (1865 Gesner Coal, Petrol. etc. 9), and frequently called kerosene oil. Also commonly known as petroleum, which properly denotes the crude mineral oil from which kerosene is obtained. Kerosene, -ine is now the usual name for paraffin in much of the U.S. (see quot. 19611) and in Australia and New Zealand; in Britain its currency is largely restricted to technical contexts. The spelling kerosine was adopted in 1925 by the Amer. Soc. for Testing Materials and (in Britain) by the Institute of Petroleum; the -ene form remains the usual one in general usage and still occurs in technical contexts. -------- Any questions, students? -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com