On Fri, 25 May 2001, Reggie Bautista wrote:
>
> To argue against myself for a moment -- I love playing Devil's Advocate --
> it occurs to me that I'm not sure if a booster rocket is considered part of
> the "space" craft. Even if it is, the booster stays with the rest of the
> vehicle a substantial way up into space, whereas the catapult stayed fixed
> to the ground.
I think the space craft part was usually called a "capsule," and it's true
that the boosters wouldn't be part of the capsule. On the other hand,
they're certainly part of the "rocket ship." :-)
> As for "auto" mobiles, I'm not sure if the "auto" refers to being completely
> automatic in every way (which would disqualify vehicles with manual
> transmissions, or for that matter would disqualify all cars that have to be
> manually steered :-), or if "auto" refers to the fact that you travel
> "automatically" or in an "automated" fashion, i.e. don't have to walk to get
> there, a machine does it for you. "Auto mobile" would mean "moves by
> itself," which I guess a car could do without anyone in the vehicle if it
> had already been turned on and had been left in gear. But by that
> definition of "auto mobile", even an unpowered glider would qualify. If we
> broaden the translation of "auto mobile" a bit, we could say that "auto"
> means "without human intervention," but we still need to turn it on...
>
> Do we have any etymologists on the list? Or dictionary writers? It seems
> to me that a lot of what a word means is simply how we use it.
Aye-yup.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
