Heiny.henr@Parc-Maxc.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (08/30/83)
From: Chris Heiny <Heiny.henr@Parc-Maxc.ARPA> "light-to-electric transducer"? Why not 'Photon powered current generator', or 'device which generates electricity from incident light'? Shades of the Department of Defense and their "Portable hand held communications inscriber" (known as a pencil in the real world). When a word is too cumbersome for ready use (and often if it is not), a shortened derivative will be used by the common speaker, much as 'aeroplane' went to 'airplane' and is now just 'plane', or 'piano' comes from 'pianoforte'. A light-to-electric transducer is bound to suffer the same fate, perhaps coming to be called an ellted, which is no more meaningful than 'solar cell'. Chris