A Starlink Satellite Exploded

(twitter.com)

39 points | by wmf 8 hours ago

2 comments

  • leephillips 3 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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.
        • pfannkuchen 35 minutes 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.
        • wilg 2 hours 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 hours 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.
            • unmole 2 hours ago
              Uninformed whining about the aesthetics of terms of art is obnoxious.
              • leephillips 2 hours ago
                Probably more irrelevant than obnoxious. Is there a term of art under discussion here?
  • dzhiurgis 5 hours ago
    Content says:

    The satellite is largely intact