A New Toy!

[rain_gryphon]

As heartily as I detest the modern concept of "cruise ships", and despite the schadenfreude that I feel to see them wreck their own boat against another of their fleet, my inner Grammar Nazi most heartily approves of their PR agent:

Carnival is referring to [the boat-wreck] as an allision as opposed to a collision (seeing as one of the ships was not actually moving at the time)

I wasn't even aware of the word, although (as with many things) it seems obvious once it's pointed out. Now, of course, I find myself newly and joyfully armed with an extendible array of terms to describe multi-vehicle pileups :D

Comments

[thewayne]

I read about "the incident" and laughed heartily, glad that no one was injured. I didn't know that one of the ships was stationary, that was news to me.

But I think I'll still call it a collision.

“Flotsam and jetsam”

[nodrog]

- have two specific meanings according to British Maritime Law.  If your ship founders and cargo flo(a)ts ashore, you have a legal claim to it.  If you deliberately threw it overboard, (jet)tisoned it, then hey, you threw it away - finders keepers!

Re: “Flotsam and jetsam”

[rain_gryphon]

Yeah, "Alice in Wonderland" sent me off to the OED at the very young age, when she wonders which bits are flotsam, and which jetsam. It delights me to live in an age where answers are just a few keypokes away, and don't even require me to get up from my desk. Getting information used to be much more complicated.

Edit: And, I believe, only if the cargo beaches by itself as a Act of God do you have a whole claim to it. If someone helps recover it from the water, they have a claim to part of the value. There was a case in the news a few years back where a shipper tried to deny a salvage claim on the grounds that the cargo containers would inevitably have beached had they been left alone. I think they lost and had to pay salvage, although I'm not sure.

“Elision”

[nodrog]

Whereas if they’d impacted and jammed together -

the process of joining together or merging things, especially abstract ideas.
"unease at the elision of so many vital questions"

Re: “Elision”

[rain_gryphon]

That's interesting, and new to me. I'm used to seeing elision in the sense of "eliding the vowel".

[allaboutweather.livejournal.com]

So an allusion is hallucinating something that doesn't move? :p