Posted by: Karl McFaul in Øresund, picture, photos, industry, europe, ess, denmark, Copenhagen, conference, colin carlile on
Feb 23, 2010
The ESS Industry Day took place at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark on the 19th of February 2010. More than 400 representatives from European business and industry took part and gained information about how to get involved in the construction of the ESS (Photos by Wojciech Zajac and Johan Långberg).
Ten years ago I came across a book called "Envisioning Information" by Edward Tufte. It's a lovely book and in there I discovered the ingenious train graphs from Indonesia which visually display train timetables. These train graphs, perhaps surprisingly, can be used to demonstrate how neutron time of flight spectrometers function.
However I found it rather difficult to pronounce the title without tripping over my tongue, and I suspect I am not alone. But, not long afterwards I heard the first use of the word "envision" to mean "envisage." It really grated with me I admit. And now at the two conferences I have been to this week I find this usage becoming more and more the norm with our North American colleagues. Why has this happened when a perfectly good word already exists ? Is it an example of political utterances where extra (and redundant) syllables are added to words, perhaps to make them sound more dazzling ? It's a mystery.
