Does this English word contain a vowel?

[Amaranthus]

Ooh look, the Oxford Dictionary copied your description..

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/200

 

I shall sue.

[chem1st]

As Phanerothyme says, it's very easy to learn enough to get by in English. It's ridiculously difficult to learn proper spelling, though; and "though" is a case in point. Why doesn't it rhyme with cough, bough, ought, or rough?

 

What would Homer Simpson say!

[x-GiGgLeS-x]

Y used to be a vowel in the olden days

[rubydazzler]

Which is why flammable and inflammable have opposite meanings …

Are you sure?

[Guest sibon]

What would Homer Simpson say!

 

Probably something like this, even though it is vowel rich:

 

"Young men's minds are always changeable, but when an old man is concerned in a matter, he looks both before and after."

 

Did I hear someone say "Wrong Homer?"

[Phanerothyme]

Are you sure?

I'm quite sure that's exactly what I meant to post.

[HeadingNorth]

From dictionary.com:

 

Inflammable and flammable both mean “combustible.” Inflammable is the older by about 200 years. Flammable now has certain technical uses, particularly as a warning on vehicles carrying combustible materials, because of a belief that some might interpret the intensive prefix in- of inflammable as a negative prefix and thus think the word means “noncombustible.”

 

From myself: the word inflammable comes from "capable of being inflamed," not from a negative of "flammable."

 

Compare "inhabitable," which originally meant "not habitable" as from about 1400, but was also, from about 1600, used to mean "capable of being inhabited" and thus is now the opposite of itself.

[Oldtrout]

Not really, as you can get by on less than a thousand words, they don't even need to be in the right order, and you can listen and watch people speak it everywhere in the world and learn very quickly from them.

 

English is one of the fastest languages to acquire simply through immersion, as it is very forgiving in terms of syntax and grammar, and mistakes have less impact on overall meaning than many other languages.

 

It's also the best language for thinking and writing, as it is capable of much greater precision than other languages, both through a massively greater vocabulary and an extraordinary flexibility of construction.

 

English hasn't got many different words for snow though. Oh, sorry wrong thread!

[rubydazzler]

I'm quite sure that's exactly what I meant to post.

OK, I always thought they had exactly the same meaning, of materials being combustible, not opposite meanings. Unless you're being cryptic for the purpose of illustrating some arcane point?

 

Although off topic anyway.

 

 

ETA: now I'm fully awake I see HN has been thorough in explanation ....

[lauren84]

No, no, no... of course not, I am offended good sir.

 

 

 

 

 

Yep you did, word for word from Oxford Dictionary online -

 

Highlight the passage, right click and go down to the search option.

 

And yes I really should learn to read the whole thread before commenting