Thursday, July 14, 2011

Lexicon -- Vice/Vise

I was looking over my blog's statistics, and I clicked on "Search Keywords". I came across this -- "crimp ferrules with vice". [!?]

Please keep this straight, people:

'Vice' is what the cops go after you for indulging/trafficking in.

A 'vise' is the clamping/work-holding apparatus that's typically bolted to a workbench.

I think it's a not unimportant distinction. I'd rather that the authorities, in their relentless efforts to seek out and bring to justice evil-doers and miscreants, not stumble upon my blog's statistics, and find cause to suspect my blog of being a hotbed of sin and debauchery.

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By way of making myself perfectly clear here, permit me to append a couple of illustrations:

Here's VICE:














And here's a VISE:















Get it? Is English not a wonder?

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Addendum -- MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2014

It's been brought to my attention that 'vise' is the American spelling of the subject word here. That presents me with a small dilemma.

While I try not to be a knee-jerk anti-American sort, I do consider most American spellings to be graceless tinkering. However, in this case I'm inclined to go along with the Yanks -- it makes more sense to me to differentiate the spellings as I've outlined above. Let 'vise' stand for the work-holding apparatus, and 'vice' stand for the 'up-to-no-good' aspect of the homonym.

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