I well remember in Algeria ordering a head lamp, and that is what I got, a head lamp, minus the bulb. It had all started when another electrician had taken the mick saying bulbs grow in the ground.
It does not take much thought to realise we had lamps well before electric lighting the wick, mantel, was just part of the lamp, however Luminaire, Chandelier, Lamp all refer to the whole unit, and if the light emitting part is not bulbous then really should not be called a bulb, but we want a word and although we have tubes, a folded fluorescent tube replaces a bulb so we call even a MR16 a bulb even if it is not really bulbous.
And many of the electrical names are because some time in the past it did describe the thing that did that job, transformer is still called a transformer when it is an isolation transformer not an isolation reactance but when I wanted to generate a centre tap with 110 volt it was called a reactance not an auto transformer, and I must admit I have never worked out why some words have been selected.
I will admit I don't like some of the changes, I was taught a cable radiating out from a overload device was a radial, but if it radiated out from a junction rather than an overload device and the load carrying capacity was reduced it was a spur, so a supply from a FCU was a radial, so if you said you should not spur from a spur, that did not include a supply from a FCU as that was a radial not a spur, however BS7671 called it a fused spur, not sure if it changed, or if I had been miss informed.
We today have a problem with the driver, to my mind a driver was a current regulated power supply, but seems any DC power supply is now called a driver.
In some cases the original meaning has not been lost, decimate is clearly to do with 10, hence the deci so we know it did mean to get rid of one in ten, and histrionic it was kill 1 in 10 to make Roman solders fight harder if they lost a battle, but today it has come to mean get rid of nearly everything, in the same way we know a MR16 refers to multifaceted reflector 16/8th inch across, harping back to cathode ray tubes used in old TV type stuff, with the 16/8th inch, however the manufacturers seem to reserve it for 12 volt, and however much we know it's wrong, should we not also bend and accept it is used to mean 12 volt?
The one I hate is low voltage, I know in USA 12 volt is called low voltage, but everywhere else in the world it is extra low voltage. But put a reduced low voltage bulb or an extra low voltage bulb in a low voltage supply the result is the same, it fails. We all know we should check the voltage, but I have fitted a 110 volt ES bulb in a 230 volt lamp, I had simply forgot I had got any 110 volt bulbs. Look at
this advert for a bulb and no where does it say 230 volt or low voltage, is that wrong?
And yes a ring circuit is where we can isolate parts of the ring to work on them, and the cable in a ring circuit can take the full operating current, but a ring final is very different, why we call it a ring final I don't know, as we have FCU connected to a ring final so it is not the final circuit we can have further circuits after the ring final, however Part P does not seem to regard them as circuits even if the BS7671 does.
But in the same way as the
Screwfix advert assumes we all are UK home owners and we will not have any lights at other than 230 volt, and there is no need to say 230 volt or 110 volt, or even 120 volt, do we really on a DIY forum need to say ring final? Very few DIY people will every meet a ring circuit, so does it really matter if we miss out the word final? After all that is not anywhere near as bad as selling bulbs without stating the voltage.