Yeah, so relax. You knew what we were inferring.
Yes, but the terminology being used was wrong; not just in a semantic context, but literally inaccurate, referring to a particular set of mechanisms (work done on shear layers with or at the boundary of a fluid) that play only a small and often insignificant role in aerodynamic heating by reentry vehicles, versus work done on compression of a fluid via normal forces. They are two very distinct mechanism that should not be conflated even in popular non-technical representation of the phenomena.
Stranger
Well, that and I was telling a joke by using “infer” in a common but incorrect manner.
Personally, I generally use “friction” as an umbrella term to refer to any dissipative, entropy-increasing force, of which compressive heating would be one. And it’s certainly incorrect to say that “friction” is always, in a technical context, a shear force at a boundary between materials, since there’s also things like “dynamical friction”, which occurs without anything that would normally be called contact at all.