Re: h**t

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 10:17 AM 8/4/99 -0600, Jim Green mentioned:
> the four letter word "heat"

And at 04:14 PM 8/4/99 -0500, Bea or Rick Tarara wrote:
> >       Didn't this list spend a lot of time
> > railing against the word 'heat' being used as a noun??  Weren't we all in
> > agreement that 'heat' means 'energy transfer'?
>
> I think you greatly exaggerate the degree of agreement within the list!
> ;-)

Uhhh, what am I missing?  Heat may be spelled with four letters, but it is
not an expletive or an obscenity.

I spent six years doing thermodynamics for a living in an Ivy League
physics laboratory.  The folks there used "heat" as a noun, as a verb, and
as several other parts of speech.  We spoke of heat, heating, specific
heat, latent heat, heat engines, heat exchangers, heat leaks, heat sinks,
heat switches, the heat equation, and more besides.  I don't recall anybody
spending even a single millisecond being confused about what the word meant
in any of these contexts.

I'm sure that it is *possible* to misunderstand this concept.  The set of
all possible bad ideas is much larger than the set of good ideas.  But the
light shines, and the darkness will never overpower it.

I would be surprised and disappointed if the folks on this list couldn't
rapidly come to a consensus on this.