The claimed fact that irradiation is no worse than cooking is misleading, because irradiation happens in addition to cooking, not instead of it. So the vitamin loss from cooking+irradiation will be worse than just cooking unless irradiation does no damage whatever to vitamins.
Let us assume that cooking (without irradiation) destroys 20% of vitamin B1 in a given food, and irradiation destroys 20% also. Logically irradiating and then cooking would destroy 20% + (80*20%)=36% of that vitamin; in that case it is logically valid but misleading to say that the irradiation did no more damage than the cooking did since the actual outcome is worse with irradiation that without it.
This is a question about forming adverbs and adjectives from other words using certain suffixes.
For example, I often hear something like ‘the Democrat congress will pass bill xyz on thursday.’ Until maybe 10 years or so ago, maybe even less than that, it would ALWAYS be 'Democratic Congress, not ‘Democrat Congress’.
What is the rule that is used here to decide whether or not I add ‘ic’ the noun Democrat to create the adjective.
This has bugged me for years but didn’t know anyone smart enough to ask.
In a grammatically correct paragraph, “this” or “that” will refer to the thing directly previous in the paragraph. For example, suppose I say:
“We played in the street all day, my sister and I, and came home after dark, tired and dirty. We were happy, but our parents were desperately poor. For this reason, we moved to the big city the next year, and there was no more playing in the street.”
Here, “this reason” refers to “our parents were desperately poor,” which is the “reason” directly previous. Likewise, the author says:
“Proponents of irradiation point out that irradiation is no worse in this respect than cooking. However, this fact is either beside the point…”
Here, “this fact” refers to “irradiation is no worse in this respect [destroying vitamin B1] than cooking,” because that’s the fact directly previous.
The rule ought to be to follow the official name of the party, unless you are being colloquial. The name of the party is “Democratic Party”, with “Democratic” already in adjectival form, so it should be “Democratic Congress” – as a shorthand for “Congress with a majority of members belonging to the Democratic Party”.
I suspect that the reason why “Democrat” is being used instead is that “Democratic” (denoting the party) is being equated with “democratic” (denoting government by the citizens), and people using “Democrat” feel that the Democratic Party is not the only democratic party. Well, of course, the Republican Party is not the only republican party either, so it’s just being silly (IMHO).