"Let Me Get My Mul-TIM-iter!"

Thoughts on inferring the wrong rule

My dad and I were working on something in our basement recently—it might have been the water heater element, or something in the furnace, I don’t recall—and we wanted to double-check that the power was off (circuit was off, we knew it was the right circuit, but still.) So I went to go get my multimeter, the device with the dial and red and black pins that lets you test voltage and other electrical measurements.

“Let me go get the multimeter,” I said. My dad laughed and said, “What’s that? Do you mean, multi-meter?” This was funny to me. I’d never heard the word “multimeter” said out loud before. But I had derived a “rule” for compound words ending in “-meter”: You never pronounce “meter” like “meter.” It’s not speed-o-meter or tach-o-meter or “dynamo-meter,” right? It’s speedometer, tachometer, etc.

Measurements are different: you say centimeter, millimeter, etc. But I guess that reinforced the rule I had invented, or wrongly inferred. I took this handful of words and their pronunciations and inferred “If it’s a device, you say ‘meter’ wrong, if it’s a measurement, you say ‘meter’ like ‘meter.’”

It makes me wonder how many other “rules” that I file away are wrong. And the thing is, you may not even realize that you’re inferring a rule. When a thing seems obvious, the idea just keeps going and you may not realize you’ve spooled it out into something different.

Here’s an example from religion: a Catholic will think that the Corpus Christi procession follows so necessarily from the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist that there is no inference or assumption or innovation being made in doing the former. The Eastern Orthodox churches, which believe the same thing about the Eucharist as Catholics do, typically look askance at displaying or parading around the Eucharistic elements. They do not find those practices to be “so inherent in what the Eucharist is that they are the same thing,” or whatever argument a Catholic would deploy without even seeing it as an argument.