A Starlink satellite exploded

43 pointsposted 2 months ago
by wmf
(twitter.com)

12 Comments

dzhiurgis

2 months ago

Content says:

The satellite is largely intact

hulitu

2 months ago

> A Starlink satellite exploded

But testing it was successful. /s

leephillips

2 months ago

That’s some weird use of language in the tweet. It uses “demise” and “root cause” as verbs (demise can be a verb, but it doesn’t mean what the tweet author thinks it means). Is this some new form of corporate-speak that I haven’t encountered before?

wilg

2 months ago

Demise is a term of art in the space industry: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Futur...

Root cause is commonly used as a verb https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/root_cause

leephillips

2 months ago

There is nothing about using “demise” as a verb in your first link. I see “root cause” as a verb in the Urban Dictionary, but neither that nor your link (both crowd-sourced) are evidence that it’s a common usage. But it’s clearly not unheard of. How unspeakably vulgar.

wilg

2 months ago

I agree there is nothing about using it as a verb, and you seem to have a prescriptivist view of language which is tiresome.

leephillips

2 months ago

Not so much. What I have are opinions, some of them aesthetic opinions. What is tiresome is hearing, yet again, someone’s opinions being disqualified by being lazily classified as “presciptivist”, as if that decides the matter.

wilg

a month ago

Other people are allowed to have opinions too, and mine is that I don't care about prescriptivist arguments.

unmole

2 months ago

Uninformed whining about the aesthetics of terms of art is obnoxious.

leephillips

2 months ago

Probably more irrelevant than obnoxious. Is there a term of art under discussion here?

K0balt

2 months ago

It would be interesting to root cause your opinions on the vulgarity of terms of art, in an effort to demise the inner turmoil that it apparently creates for you.

pfannkuchen

2 months ago

Root cause as a verb is common in every engineering group I’ve ever worked in. That doesn’t strike me as odd at all, though I haven’t heard it outside of a professional engineering setting. No opinion on demise as a verb.