A Psychologist is somebody who has a degree in psychology, the study of thinking, learning and behavior. He may have a doctorate, in which case the letters Ph.D. will be found following his name. If he specialized in clinical psychology, he may treat people in a professional practice.
A Psychiatrist is a medical doctor who specializes in treating brain disorders that cause impaired thinking or feeling. She can prescribe medications and other types of treatment in appropriate cases, and can be identified by the M.D. or D.O. tag.
A Psychotherapist is a person who practices therapy involving talking with a client or clients. He may be a Psychologist or a Psychiatrist, but many Psychotherapists have instead degrees in social work, education, divinity, nursing or other disciplines.
A Psychoanalyst is a therapist trained in the techniques first proposed by Doctor Sigmund Freud and later modified and expanded upon by later practitioners. Freud was a medical doctor (specialized in neurology), but many of his students were not. Psychoanalysis is traditionally a method of talk therapy, although most analysts have medical degrees and may use medications if necessary. Only a small minority of mental health practitioners are psychoanalysts.
Stationery is paper and pens and writing stuff. It’s true that it doesn’t tend to wander around while unsupervised, but there’s no need to advertise the fact by posting a sign that says “Stationary”.
Castle is a verb in chess; the noun you’re thinking of is rook.
The violin’s next bigger brother is pronounced “vee-OH-la”. A “VIE-oh-la” is a pretty little flower. And the French word meaning “Look!” is “voilà”.
Island universe is an early-20th-Century term meaning “galaxy” in the sense Podkayne uses the term in the OP. While strictly not a misnomer, it’s extremely obsolete. I mention this because some of the earliest popular writing about extragalactic astronomy uses the old term, which is correct in that one isolated and old context.
“Cement” as an adjective may mean “made of cement-based concrete” – “A cement sidewalk” is making the clear distinction from “a flagstone sidewalk” or “a brick sidewalk” and has the same synecdotal usage as “corn muffins”; the principal active ingredient is used to reference the final cured mixture. I agree wholeheartedly that the use as noun to stand for “cement-based concrete” is, however, execrable.
Obviously, a window on the opposide side of a ship from a starboardhole!
I thought any fool knew that embroidery involves a hoop, needles, and thread. I guess a whole generation has grown up without handicrafts since the '70s… :rolleyes:
The most important thing to remember about engraving:
It is not etching. Etching is not done with sharp tools, but with acid.
Now, how about marquetry vs. parquetry?
(This is a tricky one, because they involve exactly the same techniques and materials., and are often found on the same piece of work.)
Because when referring to numbers as such, we usually think of them as mass nouns - three is less than four - whereas three apples are fewer than four apples.
That’s interesting, I never knew that. But looking up I can’t find any support of what yopu say.
Scuttle = an opening with a lid in a ship’s deck or side.
or 1. A small opening or hatch with a movable lid in the deck or hull of a ship or in the roof, wall, or floor of a building. 2. The lid or hatch of such an opening.
Porthole = a small exterior window in a ship or aircraft, historical an opening for firing a cannon through.
or 1. Nautical. A small, usually circular window in a ship’s side.
2. An opening in a fortified wall; an embrasure.
and no search I could do on Maratime dictionaries bought up anything different.
Another big use which people see often is online games. The information for online games travels over the Internet, but it doesn not (in most cases) involve the Web.
Another physics one: Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are both big ideas in physics which were developed in the twentieth century, but they are not the same thing. Quantum mechanics deals with phenomena involving very small angular momentum, typically atoms or other things on that scale. Other quantum topics include the Uncertainty Principle, superimposed states (i.e., Schrödinger’s Cat), and quantum tunneling (getting from one side of a barrier to another even without being able to be in the barrier itself).
Relativity deals with the relationship between space and time, and is further divided into Special Relativity and General Relativity. Special Relativity deals with what happens near the speed of light, and topics from SR include time dilation, length contraction, and the famous equation E = mc[sup]2[/sup]. General Relativity is more complicated, and is the modern theory of gravity. Topics from GR include black holes, gravitational radiation, curvature of space, and a big chunk of cosmology. You can remember which is which by their first letters: S = speed, G = gravity.
Both types of relativity can be studied separately from quantum mechanics, and vice versa. Special relativity can be and is combined with quantum mechanics without difficulty, and this combination is esssential for high-energy particle physics (but you can still do low-energy stuff without relativity). General relativity is presumed to combine in some way with quantum mechanics, but nobody knows how: The combination of the two (referred to as a quantum theory of gravity) is the Holy Grail of theoretical physics right now.
There is a difference between a *metrologist * and a meteorologist. The former is an expert in the science of measurements. The latter predicts the weather.
There is a difference between *weight * and mass. Weight is a force. Mass is, well, mass.
There is a difference between *heat * and temperature. A lit match has a higher temperature than an iceberg, but an iceberg has a lot more heat than a lit match.
With the exception of muzzleloaders, you don’t load “bullets” into a gun. A *cartridge * goes into a gun. (A bullet is one component of a cartridge.) Furthermore, an AK-47 (for example) does not have a “clip.” It has a magazine.
See the white stuff coming out of the stack of a steam engine? Well what you’re seeing is *not * steam – it’s a mist. Steam is invisible. In other words, if you can see it, it ain’t steam.
*Speed * is not the same as velocity. Velocity is speed + direction. If you do not specify a direction, then it is improper to use the term “velocity” - you should use the term “speed” instead.
An *engineer * is not a scientist. An engineer solves problems. A scientist discovers things.
*Uncertainty * is not the same as accuracy. In fact, they’re inverses of each other. A meter with an uncertainty of 1%, for example, has an accuracy of 99%.
“That’s one less thing to worry about” seems to be a perfectly cromulent expresssion. “One” is a number correct?
What about these statements:
There are less than three weeks in the season. [Weeks are countable, correct?]
I paid less in taxes this year than last year. [Isn’t money countable? You should be able to put a number on your taxes.]
Now I will agree that in certain instances fewer sounds better than less. In others the reverse is true. A third set of instances could go either way. I say the less/fewer distinction is the same sort of prescriptionist nonsense that told us to never split infinitives nor end a sentence in a preposition.
I would say “fewer” in this case; but you could also say “the season is less than three weeks long,” as measurements generally are “less” (less than three metres tall, etc.)
Same way. You pay less [money] in taxes. If some year you were assessed money under four different tax laws, and this year there were only three, then you could say you paid fewer taxes.
I don’t think it’s backwards. Remember, we would say “five is the number following four,” not “five are the number following four.” So when we refer to just the numbers, we say “four is less than five.” But if we were referring to actual things in an elliptical sense, we would use fewer: “You promised you were going to give me five coconuts; you have given me four, and four [coconuts] are fewer than five.”
I’m not sure where i would look for a cite for this practice, but it seems a fairly clear-cut matter of usage to me. I’ve never seen numbers as such written as plurals (“four are an even number”).
Weeks are countable, but when you are talking about how much of the season is left, you are talking about an uncountable thing (continuous time) using convenient units.
Money is countable to a slightly greater extent than sugar is countable - in that you could count out the individual grains if you really, really wanted - but you usually treat it as a continuous thing. Indeed, what’s in your bank account isn’t composed of countable things - there isn’t a bag of dollars and cents labelled “Property of Terminus Est”, but a number written down stipulating what your share is of the bank’s assets. And you can easily tell me the difference between “There are fewer than fifty dollars in the jar on the shelf” and “There is less than fifty dollars in the jar on the shelf”, surely?
(Similarly, I can truthfully say that I have seen fewer than a dozen Krugerrands in my life, but I sure can’t say I’ve seen less than 12 Krugerrands, if we’re talking about money and using Krugerrands as a unit.)
All of which isn’t to say that matt_mcl wasn’t answering the question perfectly well, just that I felt like interjecting my opinions
Just wanted to emphasize that as the distinction between mass and count nouns is a grammatical and semantic , not physical, problem, the fact that something actually can be divided into discrete bits is not necessarily relevant. Although you could discuss sugar in terms of discrete bits, you wouldn’t say “fifteen sugars”; you would say “fifteen grains of sugar” or the like.
Some nouns describe large, very discrete units but are unquestionably mass nouns, such as “silverware”, “furniture,” “clothing”, and so forth. A sofa and an end table aren’t two furnitures; they’re two pieces of furniture. Contrast the French deux meubles.
