Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Decision Tree: Lighter than Air Vehicles

First, a word about how my decision trees work. They reflect how I use these words, and that's not always the same as the way dictionaries define them. Often a dictionary will say two words mean the same thing - if I've made a distinction, I'm not disagreeing with the dictionary, I'm just saying that's how I've decided to use the words in question. Language being a living thing and all of that. I mention this because whenever I do one of these, someone (usually my very clever mother) will comment about how I'm incorrect. Please feel free to post about things I ought to've included or how your personal decision tree would be a little different, but understand I'm not trying to map English usage, I'm only mapping my own twisted subdialect of it. End Public Service Announcement.

On with the tree:


So, yes, I know every piece of available information says that a Dirigible is any steerable lighter-than-air vehicle and that it's identical with Airship, but I'll only ever apply the term to Zeppelins and Blimps, never to those damnable thermal airships.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

For those interested I suggest checking out the wikipedia articles on Stratellite and Stratalite as well as Stratospheric airship. Seems like a Zepplin type thing designed for the upper atmosphere so that we no longer use cell towers. I wonder if I can get a job as a upper atmospheric zepplin repair tech?

Anonymous said...

I don't know what the majority of these are, so you won't get any definition squabbling from me, this time around. But I can't promise anything for future rounds.

David said...

items you forgot:

are we rocking? - jefferson airplane
in space? - jefferson starship

what about hovering objects?

hover-craft?