F.Luke
Double Eagle Member
Case in point.
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Stable has always been a context term for me.
When I started playing it was almost exclusively used in a way that it meant "overstable." People would need a disc in the air to fade and yell "GET STABLE!" at it. The Banshee came out and a guy described it to me with "This thing is STABLE." Someone would get a Metalhead Viper and say "It's SUPER stable." If a disc was actually stable, people would just say it was straight. :| Stable/straight/flippy was the way people talked in real conversations where I lived.
At some point somebody hung around the picnic table after league and a lot of Busch beer and grammar Nazi'ed us on overstable/stable/understable and we got to do drunken Disc Golf English testing on how every time we said stable we were using the term wrong. It didn't change how people talked, though.
I've moved a couple of times and mostly now play with younger players who don't use the old stable/straight/flippy terminology, but I still run into a lot of players that do. I've taught myself to use "overstable" when I mean overstable, but I still use straight and flippy so I actually almost never use the term "stable". If I do, I usually use the term "neutral stable" so that I don't confuse anyone.
But...here is the thing: To me it's a non-issue; I know "stable" is just a word that is used to describe more than one thing and the context will tell me what the person means. I don't remember ever listening to someone use the word and not know what they meant. I don't have a problem with it because...I'm a disc golfer, dude. I know how disc golfers talk. I know what a disc golfer means when he's rambling. Hell, I understand Casey 1988's posts about 60% of the time because he's a disc golfer. It's our thing. Going grammar Nazi on a disc golfer for yelling "GET STABLE" at a disc they want to fade is just not understanding who we are. We are people who wander around public parks, spend too much money on glorified Frisbee's, throw plastic at trees and misuse our own made-up Frisbee terminology. It's who we are.
Sorry for the rant.
I hear ya Three Putt. I too have been playing for some time and can generally suss out the intention. But, i've introduced a few people to the sport that are utterly confused when they get online and see posts/videos from around the country/world. I think it would be generally beneficial to develop a standard lingo. Having different words to describe one thing may be considered regional but using the same word to describe different things is simply confusing.
It's true.This made me think of the six flavors of quarks and color charges.
FWIW, I now think of stability as a resistance to turning over at a given amount of torque set against a reference value. As most discs with a tendency to fight turn (hss) also tend to fade hard (lss), it's convenient to lump discs that dump out hard as "overstable" and ones that are easy to flip as "understable" and therefore put "stable" in the midpoint, but it's not exactly the same thing.
It's true.
Is an S-Curve disc like a Cobra flippy because it is understable at high speeds or overstable because of the amount of fade it has when it slows down? Or is that "stable" if in the end they cancel themselves out and the discs lands more or less straight in front of you? I mean I can get a Cobra to land in a straight line between me and the basket, but I can't make it fly on a straight line. So to me a Cobra isn't stable, but calling it understable doesn't really describe it, either.
Sad retort is sad, friendo.
you get off your game sometimes
why do you think that is
consistency is a fickle mistress
So consistency is understable then?
You can say that a Firebird is more stable than a Teebird, and that makes sense.