Could one of you english majors explain effect and affect to me?

[speeder]

If you stick to using "affect" as a verb and "effect" as a noun, you'll be right 99% of the time. That would put you ahead of 99% of the U.S. population.

[livi]

I read plenty of British Porsche magazines and I love their way of using the language. Beautiful although frequently hard to decipher the exact meaning. For example the word 'effect' is many times used in combinations like "..in effect.." or "to the effect that..". I have translated the former into 'actually/in reality' but the latter I am not sure about. What say the expert panel?

[svandamme]

i'm not english major, nor english native speaker, hell, i'm a high school dropout.
I don't really see why the effect/affect question would be so difficult, to affect you so much that, in effect, you post a thread about it.

[ruf-porsche]

How about flammable and inflammable.

[Porsche_monkey]

Flammable and non-flammable.

Dictionary.com:

Inflammable and flammable both mean “combustible.” Inflammable is the older by about 200 years. Flammable now has certain technical uses, particularly as a warning on vehicles carrying combustible materials, because of a belief that some might interpret the intensive prefix in- of inflammable as a negative prefix and thus think the word means “noncombustible.” Inflammable is the word more usually used in nontechnical and figurative contexts...

[ruf-porsche]

Originally Posted by Porsche_monkey

Flammable and non-flammable.

If it is non flammable, why do they have signs posted warning you that gasoline is inflammable?

[rnln]

according to MS dictionary inflammable is flammable. What I don't understand about the "in" rule is sometimes it's the reverse but sometimes it's the encouragement.

[svandamme]

Ruf-Porsche should have asked "inflammable or unflammable"

And the answer is :
The word flammable has it's origin in latin, inflammare, "to set fire to"
So the "in" does not have a reversal of what follows. It's not an english "in+...".

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by livi

"..in effect.."

= has the same effect as, might as well be, simulates...

Originally Posted by livi

"to the effect that..".

~~ less clear to me; got a sample sentence?
usually: in as much as, partially correlated with, yada yada...

above is for technical writing [biology/physiology], but likely same as regular speech

[Zeke]

In psychiatry, an affect is a mood, or, therefore a noun. A person can act "affected," which would seem to be an adverb and I think I could use the word as an adjective as well. I think "effect" is always a noun.