He probably misuses "propeller" which is strangely restrictive to "rotative blade propulsion" in English whereas "to propel" is generic in its meaning.
Inflammable made me so angry as a child/teen when I found out. I read it in our encyclopedia set but we didn't have a dictionary, and this was pre-internet.
It was in the context of hydrogen and I could have sworn it was flammable. But here is this encyclopedia telling me it's INflammable. It's... not flammable? Looked it up in the school library.
Thank you, that memory came up from the depths of time. Probably haven't thought about that in 30 years. Funny how we sometimes just didn't know stuff, and couldn't find out back then.
It's just a parsing error. "in-" is also a prefix to create verbs from a name or another verb like inhume, inflame, induce, incite, inject, infiltrate. Inflammable is (inflame)-able and not in-(flammable)
There are many counter-examples to your examples, such as “direct” and “indirect”, “humane” and “inhumane”.
The words used should be clear in their meaning. “Inflammable” is ambiguous, and it makes a great deal of difference which meaning is intended.
Flammable is unambiguous, as is non-inflammable. I’m forced to use these. Personally, I’m more in favour of flammable (able to catch fire) and inflammable (not able to catch fire).
There's an inconsistency but no ambiguity, only ignorance. Inflammable only ever means one thing regardless of how ridiculous english might be.
The historically correct term would be non-inflammable. The modern variant is non-flammable.
Similarly, inflammable is the historic term and flammable is the modern variant.
The confusion arises when people are exposed to the word flammable and then attempt to apply the usual rules to construct a word they've never actually used before.
This isn't the usual sort of inconsistency introduced by our fusing multiple incompatible languages. It's from the original Latin and I'm unclear what led to it. For example consider inflammable versus inhumane. It seems Latin itself used the prefix to mean different things - here on(fire) versus not(human). But confusingly it's ex to indicate location, despite ex also being the antonym of in. So ex equo means you are on horseback, not off it as I would have guessed.
> There are many counter-examples to your examples, such as “direct” and “indirect”, “humane” and “inhumane”.
They are not counter-example. You use the other "in-" prefix that take an adjective and give the opposite adjective, not the one that create a verb from a noun.
