Collection of Lame Jokes

[phinds]

Why do "Flammable" and "Inflammable" mean the same thing?

They started out from different languages.

derivation:

We get inflammable from the Latin verb inflammare, which combines flammare ("to catch fire") with a Latin prefix in- (more commonly seen as en- in English, as in enfold) meaning "to cause to be." This in- shows up occasionally in English words, such as indent and indebted, and it showed up in inflammable in the early 1600s.

 

[symbolipoint]

They started out from different languages.

derivation:

We get inflammable from the Latin verb inflammare, which combines flammare ("to catch fire") with a Latin prefix in- (more commonly seen as en- in English, as in enfold) meaning "to cause to be." This in- shows up occasionally in English words, such as indent and indebted, and it showed up in inflammable in the early 1600s.

That tells us something about how some vocabulary could and should be changed. "Enflame" is a good one.