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Showing posts from July, 2017

Identity Crisis - What's Yours Called ?

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Transaction, Translation,Transformer, Translucent, Transfix, Transpose, Transverse... ... You get the   idea of where I'm going here. A lovely way to while away a Sunday morning - looking up words to find their meanings and origins. The more alert of us reading this will spot the similarities immediately in these words - the prefix Trans. This prefix occurs in the English language, usually in loanwords from Latin (transcend, transfix) with the meanings "across", "beyond", "through", "changing thoroughly", "transverse". It's also used in combination with elements of any origin : trans-Siberian, transvalue, transempirical  In Chemistry, according to Wikipedia, it "denotes a geometric isonomer having a pair of identical atoms on the opposite sides of two atoms linked by a double bond".  I shall investigate this further when the need arises to use it in this context.  In Astronomy, the trans prefix denotes so