What’s words worth?

Welcome to Aerospace Manufacturing’s final issue of the year. Where did the time go, eh? Our November issue features exclusive coverage on Airbus and Boeing, a section covering MRO, that most disruptive of technologies – additive manufacturing, and the rise of Mississippi as a global location for manufacturing.

It must be something to do with the way our brains work, but I can still remember my mum teaching me to speak and spell ‘Mississippi’ backwards as well as forwards. I can’t quite remember why, but it probably has something to do with why I ended up working in journalism.

We’ve been discussing in the office lately how easy it is to mispronounce engineering-related words – like ‘metallurgy’ for example – words that create much hilarity at the expense of the layperson uttering it, especially if it sounds nothing like it looks. My pet hate is hearing the word ‘patent’, as in the form of intellectual property, pronounced the same way as you’d say ‘patently’ to signify something that is clearly without doubt.

And it seems that there is some doubt with certain technical words we encounter in our working lives. As a means of communicating, our literacy and linguistic abilities are threatened by smart phone texting and social networking. Text speak, net lingo - call it what you will, they involve the shortenings, contractions, acronyms and non-conventional spellings that invade our lives.

We’re all communicating far less ‘verbally’ than we used to. Has the ‘txt’ become mightier than the word? It got me thinking about the many terms we regularly come across in our industry. COTS, MRO, OEM, SME, STOVL and UAV, there’s no escaping them in one form or another.

Hopefully this issue clarifies some of their definitions – those that are missing have joined the established list of meanings that no longer need explaining longhand, such as DIY, ASAP and Zzz!

Mike Richardson, editor

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