Inoxyable

    We are NOT going to discuss how long it took me to figure out what stainless steel means. OK, we are. But I swear it isn't my fault! It just don't make sense!
    It took until about a month ago. I was hunting for pots and pans and saw one with the polyglot label, the kind on everything nowadays with either English and French, English and Spanish, or all three. This one said stainless steel and acier inoxydable, although I would have sworn it was inoxyable. (Yes, I'm so proudly ignorant, I put my incorrect memories in the subject line. And THAT'S when I figured out what they mean by "stainless." (Inoxydable means, roughly, unrustable.)
    So see? It isn't my fault. They don't mean stainless steel; they mean unstainable steel. And I suspect the reason I never figured out the meaning is that I've seen plenty of stained stainless steel in my time, so the obvious interpretation would be that it's stainless at the time they sold it to you, and that I think is what I always took it to mean.
    Then again, I like to think that I've figured this out many times over my 52 years, and it's just not important enough to remember that stainless means inoxydable. Yeah, that's it! I'm not dumb; it's just unimportant!:)