SED 17: Washing Out The Meaning

This morning I washed my hair with anti-dandruff shampoo. The bottle said "antidandruff medicated shampoo". Ooooh, medicated! Does that mean it's different from other anti-dandruff shampoos?

To the dictionary, Robin!

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:

  Medicate \Med"i*cate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Medicated}; p. pr. &
     vb. n. {Medicating}.] [L. medicatus, p. p. of medicare,
     medicari. See {Medicable}.]
     1. To tincture or impregnate with anything medicinal; to
        drug. ``Medicated waters.'' --Arbuthnot.
  
     2. To treat with medicine.

So, to say it's "medicated" means.... it's a treatment. For dandruff. Which is what "anti-dandruff" means.
Holy tautology, Batman, it's a tautology!

I loathe advertising-speak. So long as they are not outright lying, they can be as deceptive as they want, tossing in feel-good content-free words with abandon, or rendering perfectly good words content-free by using them as a tautology.

I prefer spades to be called spades, not agricultural real-metal-bladed natural-wooden-handled spades.

SED 17B: LUCET!!!!

Yeah, I made another lucet. This one is huge. It is also the prettiest by far. Made of 4.8mm copper wire (approx 3/16 of an inch); the handle is wrapped with brown leather. The handle is twice as long as it needs to be, because I basically didn't figure out how much wire I needed, I just cut a length and started working on it. I made five bends (very thick wire, hard to bend) and then I hammered and I hammered and I hammered. Then I de-tarnished it with citric acid, and gave it "put in the wash" treatment. It came up nice and shiny. Then I wrapped the handle with leather thonging, gluing it down with black (sticks-to-metal) hot glue. And burnt myself once (oops). Then I wrapped more leather thonging around the bit of the fork between the straight prongs, and where it bent inwards towards the handle, so there's a triangular "hole" at the base of the fork.

Measurements:
- distance between prongs, 4cm
- length of prongs, 5cm
- length of handle, 14.5cm
- length of entire lucet, 23cm

Despite this being so large, it works much better than Lucet #3 which I made yesterday. The fact that the wire comes together in a V to make the handle means that the handle is easy to grasp with the last three fingers of the hand, leaving the index finger and thumb free to turn the fork. My hands actually feel less fatigued than they did yesterday.

It's amazing all the things one doesn't realize which go into a good working tool.