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The use of "displacement" to label the axis of ordinates seems to have
popped up out of nowhere. At the very beginning of Chap. 3, they talk
about a position vs. time graph with the axes labeled "d" and "t."
However, they state that "d is used to represent its distance from the
origin." All their examples are consistent with d being a distance --
never negative. However (delta d) is described as a displacement as
previously mentioned, and it could be negative in the case of a downward
slope.
In 1997-1998, I reviewed and corrected a number of errors, mostly
careless numerical errors, in fun@learning.physics....
one finds that the author, Dr. Mark
Sutherland, labels the axis of ordinates "displacement" rather than
"position" on an x vs. t graph. In the text, he explicitly calls x
"displacement." I suggested that he call x position and delta x
"displacement," etc.
If
forced to think about it, I always thought of a position vector as a
displacement from the origin, but it seemed inconvenient to think of a
displacement as a change of displacement, although that is what it
really is.