Some people at my work want to use the word “laudability” in a report to denote the amount of stuff that can be loaded into a truck. I had never heard of this use of the word, so looked in my dictionary (on my desk): squat. So I looked at www.dictionary.com: nada. So I googled on the terms “freight” + “laudability”, which came up with one reasonable match: a UN Economic Council document from the Inland Transport Committee. The use of the term here was simply “Loading and laudability of road bridges in relation to European standards.”
I asked the person who wants to included this “term” what it meant and he said that it meant the amount of cargo that can be stuffed into a given container. This can mean weight or volume limit, apparently, depending on the unit of measure of the goods. I asked where he first heard the term and he said “Asia, somewhere” (he used to work in China).
So, the question is, is this an actual, valid use of this term? Can someone find me a decent cite? Or is it just some bizarre industry jargon. My company likes to invent it’s own words and I hate to propogate these, so I’d really like to nip this in the bud if it’s not valid. Otherwise it will be nice to learn something new, as arcane as it might be.
Also, FWIW I also Googled “freight” + “laudability” + “transport” and got no results returned. I tried “laudability” + “transport” and got lots of results but with the common usage of the terms.
We had considered this and it is certainly a possibility. Interestingly, none of my dictionaries, hard copy or online, lists “loadability” as a word either, although you can find plenty of hits against on freight or transportation sites.
One of the sites I checked suggested “ladies of pleasure” as an alternative. :eek:
My theory: somebody unwittingly coined the word “loadability” (i.e. he assumed that this word existed already), but a spell-check queried it because, up to then, no such word in fact existed (or, at any rate, it hadn’t found its way into the spell-check wordlist). The spell-check offered “laudability” (which is a pre-existing word with an entirely unrelated meaning) instead and the writer, unfamiliar with the primary meaning of “laudability”, assumed that that was what he wanted. He used it as a synonym for “loadability” and this usage has spread somewhat, although it still appears to be a minority usage.
“Loadability” would be preferable. “Capacity” would, IMHO, be still more preferable.
“Loadability” does seem to be a common term in transportation and electrical engineering, also possibly civil engineering. My inference is that it refers to the amount of load something can stand, be it a bridge, a circuit, or a container. It may also be used at times to connotate ease of loading, for example when loading containers onto a ship.
I like your theory, UDS, it’s certainly plausible. And I will likely push the business user to accept “Capacity” as an alternative that is more easily understood.