Inflamable

It all began in London, back in 1662. Enterprising sales-men were, as usual, using their usual methods of selling their wares, and of course, this meant inventing new words to try and impress their prospective clients. London, back in those days, was structually a very wooden city, with few stone buildings at all. This was, of course, not a very safe situation for a closely-packed city, and so the entrepreneurs of the town all tried to sell special types of wood, or paint, which (they claimed) would stop fire, if ever there was one, from burning into a building. One of the key jargon catch-phrases of the time was "inflamable" meaning, of course, "not able to be set fire to". This was all very logical, sensible, and so consequently, everyone believed them.

Unfortunatly, in 1666, the so called "Great fire of London" occurred, which, among other consequences, had the generally un-recorded side-effect of proving the claim of un-burn-ability to be false. Once the residents began to start re-building their houses, the budding entrepreneurs again attempted to sell their "inflamable" paint and building materials. Now, however, the general populus had become more cynical and so rejected the advances with the memorable phrase "We don't want it inflamable, we wants it so it won't burn!"

(This story isn't true! Honestly *sighs* silly person.)

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