"Pressurize" ?????

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Kidicious
I thought it was pressured.

well yeah, I think it is. Pressured is already a transitive verb to apply pressure, pressurized should refer only to adding gas to a chamber to equalize pressures.

Dauphin suggests using pressurises as an INTRANSITIVE verb. Which still sounds odd to me, but at least makes some sense.

I note that most example I can find the usage is as a transitive verb. Its as if "pressure" was a noun only. As it apparently is, in French.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Dauphin
It's a logically applicable extension for increasing pressure.

... not it's not. Pressure is the verb for that.

[b etor]

Originally posted by Zkribbler


You must learn to use the letter "Z." Z's are cool!

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Skribbler

You must learn to use the letter "Z." Z's are cool!

Quiet, Skribbler!

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


... not it's not. Pressure is the verb for that.

Hmmm, so 'pressurise' does not ever mean to increase pressure, nor does 'depressurise' ever mean to decrease pressure?

[snoopy369]

Pressure means to apply pressure. Pressurize means to cause an increase in pressure indirectly.

It's the direct versus the indirect form of the verb, basically. I'm not enough of a grammar nut to remember if 'indirect' specifically means 'intransitive' or not, though.

In the first example of LotM, the crowd can't 'pressurize' the government, they 'pressure' the government. It's possible they're trying to imply that the crowd is not directly pressuring the government for anything but is simply packing the area to force *something* to change, but reading further that's not accurate (and I'd never use it that way, anyway).

I think that you can't directly translate 'increase pressure' to 'pressurize', because 'pressurize' is nondirectional and indirect; you can increase pressure in a direction but you can't pressurize in a direction.

In any event it's typically used only to imply gas compression, any other usage is probably going to confuse the issue more than it would help.

[SlowwHand]

You ever seen a pressure cooker in action? Good cooking utensils, but scary as Hell. Dangerous.
Crock pots are good, and safe.

[KrazyHorse]

In any event it's typically used only to imply gas compression

You can pressurise materials other than gases...

[DAVOUT]

« Bad naming of things increases the misery of the world » Albert Camus
Particularly on TV and in advertisements there are daily examples of words improperly used, such as aestheticism instead of aesthetics. This means that the existence of the word is known but the sense is ignored or supposed to be the same for both words, all that without any effort to check. The ability to express precisely what they intend to say will progressively decline, loosing access to creativity and communication. At the last stage those people are reduced to violence as their only possibility to socially exist.
In this respect, happy slapping is possibly a creative use of violence (committed not in consideration of the victim, but for the effect it will produce on future spectators), in the same way as tagging was a creative form of drawing on unusual surfaces (act also resented as violent by the owners of the surfaces).
The worst is likely to come.