Abstract
IN Mr. Basset's book, to which he refers in NATURE of November 10 (p. 30), he speaks of the advantage of having “a concise and pointed mode of expression, which saves a great deal of circumlocution and verbosity.” He thinks that this object is best gained by coining a new word from the Greek, for instance, autotomic, whereas I hold that the same object is better gained by adopting a word of English derivation, self-cutting. Mr. Basset now says that he considers this word “inelegant,” and, in the absence of any standard of elegance, I can only reply that this is a matter of individual taste. Perhaps it would be better still to call a curve that has double points a “nodal curve,” and one that has none a “nodeless curve.” The word binodal is already in use.
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S., T. Misuse of Words and Phrases. Nature 71, 54 (1904). https://doi.org/10.1038/071054d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/071054d0
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