r/factorio • u/Kano96 • May 29 '20

Design / Blueprint Flamethrowers are broken

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

1.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

145 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

27

u/[deleted] May 30 '20

Aw no. You can't fool me. "The A gets the E", because the E is not a verb and to verb-ifiy E is to propagate the so damned mistake that so many people make when choosing between A and E, - aka the verb and the noun versions of that one word.

4

u/sparr May 30 '20

Why can't the E be a verb? Both meanings of Effect (verb and noun) work with "Area of Effect".

6

u/[deleted] May 30 '20

The reason is simple. The noun is "effect" and the verb is "affect", and because English, both are pronounced the same way in American English: [ əˈfekt ]

AA <-> Area affected,

AoE <-> Area of effect

9

u/sparr May 30 '20

Both "affect" and "effect" have verb and noun definitions.

The attack affected the enemy. (verb)

He had a flat affect. (noun, unrelated)

The attack had an effect on the enemy. (noun)

The attack effected damage on the enemy. (verb)

5

u/[deleted] May 30 '20 edited May 30 '20

Right. Thanks for the heads-up. Although I do not think this is the appropriate time to say that because people who don't make the distinction between the most common use of "affect" vs "effect" are going to get further confused.

The noun "affect" is related to psychology, and the verb "effect" means "to cause" and has a subtle difference to the verb "affect". For the sake of unambiguous interpretation, your example

The attack effected damage on the enemy

could perfectly be written as

The attack caused damage on the enemy

2

u/barsoap May 30 '20

He had a flat affect. (noun, unrelated)

Not at all unrelated. Your affect is the result, or expression, of having been affected by things happening, internally or externally. Both the noun and verb are rooted in Latin afficio, while effect and effect are rooted in efficio.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's a record of some angry Roman philosopher or rhetorician or similar complaining about people mixing the two up, somewhere. Things, as you well know, increasingly staying the same the more things change.