Question from edmanuelsong (June 29, 2010):
What’s the difference between “flammable” and “inflammable”?
My reply to edmanuelsong:
“Flammable” and “inflammable” are adjectives that mean exactly the same thing—“capable of being easily ignited and of burning quickly.” The older word is actually “inflammable,” which was derived from the Medieval Latin inflammabilis, which literally means “to set on fire.” A common misconception, of course, is that the prefix “in-” in “inflammable” means “the opposite or negative,” but it doesn’t; it means “inside” instead, so there’s really no contradiction between “inflammable” and “flammable.” Nevertheless, there’s a very real danger in people wrongly thinking that “inflammable” means “not flammable,” so in time it became conventional to drop the prefix “in-” in “inflammable” and just to say “flammable.” Also for safety’s sake, it became conventional to describe things that can’t be burned or ignited as “non-flammable” and not “inflammable.”
