Not to mention the passengers & crew of a ship, aeroplane or other vehicle. 

I've never heard of "nominal" used in the way you describe, Chris.  Not that that means anything!  I can't see the logic of the new pseudo-scientific term.  I've always understood it in the sense defined by the Cambridge, with whose Publishing Manager it, er, manifestly hasn't registered, though Merriam-Webster is more on the ball.

I had to smile at the Beeb's gaffe.  That said, on the evidence of the linguistic abominations I regularly see perpetrated by its journalists (generally the younger ones!) on the news site, but which are never acknowledged (are their reports subject to sub-editing?), I'm not sure it should be drawing attention to its ignorance in such a way. 

Stircrazy wrote:

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I had to smile at the Beeb's gaffe.  That said, on the evidence of the linguistic abominations I regularly see perpetrated by its journalists (generally the younger ones!) on the news site, but which are never acknowledged (are their reports subject to sub-editing?), I'm not sure it should be drawing attention to its ignorance in such a way. 

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A prime example from the current home page:

Jailed cancer charity thief ordered to pay back rest of £95,000 she defrauded

How on earth do you defraud money as opposed to a person, a bank, HMRC or some other institution?    The journo responsible for it was obviously too damned lazy to type "obtained by fraud" instead - two words too many! 

christ wrote:

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I thought that a manifest was a list of cargo in a vehicle, although I could accept it as obvious, too.

New words, or new uses of old words, can catch anyone out - the BBC got caught by the Bond villain when he launched his rocket the other day. SpaceX (in common with other people wanting to sound scientific) have started to use the word "nominal" to mean "performing as expected", as in "all systems are nominal". The BBC assumed that this was a typo, and corrected them to "normal".

 

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 Do you think they're possible doing an amalgamation of 'normal' and 'optimal'? 

christ wrote:

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I'm not sure that the Bond Villain needs any logic behind his choice of terms: after all (among other things) his company called their spaceship the BFR (Short for Big F******* Rocket), and call the catching arms "MechaZilla". Making sense is not a priority.

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 Absolutely agree 

I was sort of wondering if they were doing it sub-consciously, like when you make a word slip, and end up with a hash of two words (I always say 'pronunciate' - the irony of me telling someone to 'pronunciate properly !'  - when my brain obviously can't figure out 'pronounce' and 'annunciate')

Lambda wrote:

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Nominal has been in use in engineering for over a century. It's usage originates from the definition of nominal meaning small relative to another value. In engineering if something is nominal than the value is small relative to the expected value, or in other words it is within accepted tolerances from the expected value. In space terms it means everything is operating within accepted tolerances (relatively small differences from the expected value).

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 Ha!  Thanks, Lambda. 

indiana wrote:

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Lambda wrote:

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Nominal has been in use in engineering for over a century. It's usage originates from the definition of nominal meaning small relative to another value. In engineering if something is nominal than the value is small relative to the expected value, or in other words it is within accepted tolerances from the expected value. In space terms it means everything is operating within accepted tolerances (relatively small differences from the expected value).

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 Ha!  Thanks, Lambda. 

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 ditto 

I also read that one of the dictionaries has nominated its word of the year as:

'enshi*tification'

Defined as the gradual deterioration of a popular service, particularly an online one, due to greed and/or incompetence

As in:

'The enshi*tification of Twitter.......'

Which I quite like