Gramer Girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty.

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about flammable versus inflamable, an immediate middle

about the different points of view you can use in your writing, and a featured listener.

On to the quick and dirty tip.

When we're describing something that burns easily, we say it's flammable.

But inflamable means the same thing and was the original word.

So why do we have both?

It turns out that many people mistakenly thought that inflamable meant resistant to burning,

which it doesn't.

The in prefix usually has a negative meaning, as in indelible, which means can't be deleted,

and indefinite, which means not defined.

But the in prefix has another use too.

It can act as an intensifier.

That's what it's doing in words such as intoxicate and indent.

It's just intensifying, intoxicate, and intensifying, dent.

And that's what it's doing in inflamable.

It's just intensifying the meaning of the flammable part.

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage, the National Fire Protection

Association felt that people thinking inflamable things wouldn't burn was enough of a

safety problem that they started using the word flammable instead.

And that's why flammable is so popular today.

In the 1920s, almost nobody used the word flammable, but by the 1970s, it had overtaken

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