Word of the Day: Zeppelin

About a month ago, I’m driving away from my house and I turn into this very wide street in the neighborhood.  I’m up on the hill looking downhill and across and over the trees I see this object.  Far out there was a zeppelin floating across the sky.  I stopped and took a picture.

Here’s a zoomed in view.

That’s a cool picture if I say so myself.  When I got home later I showed my wife and she was impressed. 

I called Matthew over and I said, “Come look at the picture of the zeppelin I got.”

He said, “A what?”

“A zeppelin.”

“What’s a zeppelin?”

“You don’t know what a zeppelin is?”

“No, what is it?

“It’s a really large balloon.”  So I showed him the picture.

“Oh, that’s a blimp,” he said.

“A blimp?  It’s called a zeppelin.”

“No it’s not.  It’s a blimp.”

And we argued over that for a while.  So what is it called, a blimp or a zeppelin?

From Webster’s Dictionary:

zeppelin

noun

zep·​pe·​lin ˈze-p(ə-)lən

: a rigid airship consisting of a cylindrical trussed and covered frame supported by internal gas cells

broadly : AIRSHIP

 

blimp

noun

ˈblimp

1

: an airship that maintains its form by pressure from contained gas

2

capitalized : COLONEL BLIMP

 

Hmm, a zeppelin seems to have an internal structure while a blimp is just formed by the internal gas pressure.  I followed it up with a search and got this distinction from Mental Floss.

 

Both blimps and zeppelins work by being lighter than air—they're filled with a gas that's lighter than oxygen, so they go up like hot-air balloons. But balloons can't be steered. Realizing this, German Count (Graf) Ferdinand von Zeppelin decided he wanted to devise a "dirigible [or steerable] balloon" in the 1890s for use in military reconnaissance work. Eventually, these dirigible balloons took the generic name zeppelin and were used as bombers or scout craft through World War I. This was just one of their many uses, however. The airships doubled as a major mode of transportation between the wars, routinely making transatlantic flights, and the enormous Graf Zeppelin even circumnavigated the globe in 1929.

 

So, yes, that is the difference.  A zeppelin has an internal structure so it can be steered.  So what is that in the Staten Island sky?  It had to be a zeppelin because it wasn’t just floating.  It was moving east to west.

These teenagers think they know it all.  But a grey-haired sexagenarian—now there’s a word of the day for you and no it has nothing to do with sex—can outthink them any day. 

One last thing.  This all brought back a memory from my childhood of watching TV comedy reruns in the afternoon after school.  This brought back a memory from the TV show F-Troop.  

 

Classic!