Originally Posted by
Andrew R Stewart
There are many items in our world that are referred as one term but technically are something else. The other example that I think of is "sealed bearings" as opposed to "preassembled cartridge bearings". Another is the tires that most of ride being called clincher instead of wired on. I suspect that 99% of readers never handled a real clincher. Andy.
You don't know the half of it. Everyone calls the alcohol they drink "alcohol" but there are somewhere around 100,000 compounds that have the functional group that makes an "alcohol". Sucrose is what most people call "sugar" but carbohydrates can be refered to as "sugar".
The most galling to me, however, is the term "salt". "Salt" that you use on your table is only one "salt". A salt is an ionic compound that results from the reaction between an acid and a base. Baking soda (not the correct name) is a salt. Baking powder is a mixture of a couple of different salts. The wall board you have in your house is made from a salt. If you have cement products in your house, that's a salt. There are, again, hundreds of thousands of "salts" in the world.
Gleitmo made by Fuchs is the material used by Sram (and possibly others) as the original chain lubricant.