Since I depend on captioning, I get to see plenty of strange and often hilarious things from news broadcasts. Voice-to-text is not perfect. And even human captioning fails when the on-scene reporting is a sheer barrage of words.
I do give major props to reporters who are describing at-the-moment unfolding catastrophes: multi-vehicle pile ups, fast-water rescues, dramatic police chases, and the like. Repeating the same information over and over is brain-numbing, to the audience and to the reporters.
But c’mon. Phoenix was just issued a tornado warning. People in the studio were describing weather conditions as the news helicopter was flying in the area.
The reporter described the cloud formations as “anabolic terror.”
I turned to Mr VOW and said, “Please rell me that was a captioning flub!”
During the middle of one of our many, many, horrible summer days, the morning weathercaster was trying to explain how we could expect intolerable humudity along with the heat, and stumbled into “inhumidity.” A perfectly cromulent word!
I’ve heard this sort of thing is why the general public thinks the area where planes park at the airport is called the “tarmac”, when it’s more properly called the apron or ramp (although “ramp” is apparently mostly a North American term). At least according to what I read on another site, during one of the hijacking/hostage incidents in the 1970s, TV reporters referred to the pavement the plane was parked on as “the tarmac”, and as a result the term entered the language to refer to all places where planes park. Really tarmac is just a paving material. But like I said it’s just something I read on another site so I have no idea if it’s actually true.
My county is Ouachita, pronounced wash-it-all. Or in the local vernacular ‘Oh-shitty’
Every weather guy has said Quachita, with a ‘Q’ at least a few times.
The other county my land is on is Nevada, pronounced Nee-vay-da. Which is wrong, I’ve been told.
I’ve been in commercial aviation ( A/C maint. ) for 35 years and counting in a variety of locations in the US. My co-workers much the same, including ex-military. We all groan when we hear that term, because in all that time, and anywhere, nobody, but NOBODY, but N-O-B-O-D-Y has ever referred to the ramp/apron/hardstand as the “tarmac”.
The only time I hear the term uttered is in the media, or by laymen. When I first heard the term I thought it was some pasta dish.
I spent many years in surveying (office only, no fieldwork). I specialized in research. A lot of the old field notes had abbreviations for every single point on a cross-section. I was told early on that “E. O.” stood for “Edge of Oil.” That meant the edge of the pavement, and could be traced back to OLD roads that were simply oil sprayed over gravel.
When we lived in Kentucky, I had new stuff to learn! Cross-sections would show “E. M.,” and I was told that stood for “Edge of Metal.” Years later, working for a private firm in California, a senior engineer told me “E. M.” really stood for “Edge of Macadam,” and it also was known as “Edge of Metal” because many roads were constructed from the leftover slag from metal refining.
I always figured “tarmac” came from “tar” and “macadam,” the components of asphalt. And tarmac is essentially all the paving EXCEPT the runway, which must be constructed from Portland cement concrete.
~VOW
Anabolic is a word (if you’re an athlete, you really don’t wanna have catabolic steroids), but that’s some interesting usage… apparently the moron thought that “part of the metabolism which builds up stuff (including muscles)” means “strong, intense” :smack:
“The tarmac” is/was the English/UK term for the place where airplanes park. Technically, it’s refers to a Macadamised road bed, sealed with Tar. Macadam was a civil engineer with a Scottish name, who developed a system of using a heavy roller on a mixture of sand, gravel and water (in the correct proportions), creating a solid compacted volume.
Metal, as in road metal, is a term that means gravel. Most road metal is made by breaking rocks (what convicts used to do), the word doesn’t have anything to do with metal refining.
A metal road, ie a gravel road, may be rolled, and may even be rolled with water, but is not normally properly macadamised, because it’s an expensive process, and unless it’s been sealed (with tar), it doesn’t stand up to modern traffic anyway.
Sealed roads are mostly approximately tarmac, because you need a solid road bed to properly support the tar, but don’t have to be: sometimes on a low-traffic road people just put some tar down on a dirt or gravel base. Even for a good road bed, it’s mostly not really macadamised, because they don’t use the sand and water in the original proportions.