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Comment by stiglitz | Hacker News Reader

This is a risky comment and probably too snarky. But this is a fundamental pattern in English and I wish at least native speakers would get it right.

NOUN: burnout shutdown failover

VERB: burn out shut down fail over

Just about any verb+adverb pair follows this pattern in English.

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I don't know about the others but to burn out as the correct verb and to burnout as the incorrect verb mean two different things. I'm pretty sure this exactly the same phenomenon that gives us things like "to Google" where Google is a noun.

> but to burn out as the correct verb and to burnout as the incorrect verb mean two different things

They don't, though.

sorry i haven't seen many race cars burn out like candles or burn out like overworked employees. i have seen many though perform burnouts where they warm up the tires to increase how sticky they are.

Yes, it’s correct to say that they “perform burnouts,” because “burnout” is being used there as a noun.

> i haven't seen many race cars burn out like candles

I think you're getting confused by ommitted implied words. When a race car burns out, it is burning out its tires not itself.

Not snarky at all... if the title properly used "burn out", I wouldn't have expected the article to be motorsports-related.

Okay Webster, you aren't talking about English, you're talking about its projection into text.

it's just pedantic and insubstantive

Not at all. The details of language convey information and if we don't continually apply common standards, that bandwidth is actually destroyed in the ambiguity.

I agree with your premise but I think it's generalizing, there are contexts where it is pedantic and insubstantive. Language evolves and not always the way the purists would have it.

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