There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
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Because "gas" is an informal and quicker way of saying gasoline that was adopted by the general public for convenience sake.
Language doesn't exist to be technically correct, it exists to facilitate practical conversation. The more you look at it from this perspective the more things will start to make sense.
This got me wondering on the etymology of “gasoline“. Wikipedia has a section on it.
That's actually super interesting! I thought it would have been technical, but it looks like it just comes from someone's name!
Huh yeah You made me interested enough to click on the Wikipedia article, and such drama behind it too apparently:
The term gasoline originated from the trademark terms Cazeline and Gazeline, which were stylized spellings and pronunciations of Cassell, the surname of British businessman John Cassell, who, on 27 November 1862, placed the following fuel-oil advertisement in The Times of London:
The Patent Cazeline Oil [...]
That 19th-century advert is the earliest occurrence of Cassell's trademark word, Cazelline, to identify automobile fuel. In the course of business, he learned that the Dublin shopkeeper Samuel Boyd was selling a counterfeit version of the fuel cazeline, and, in writing, Cassell asked Boyd to cease and desist selling fuel using his trademark. Boyd did not reply, and Cassell changed the spelling of the trademark name of his fuel cazelline by changing the initial letter C to the letter G, thus coining the word gazeline.
By 1863, North American English usage had re-spelled the word gazeline into the word gasolene, by 1864, the gasoline spelling was the common usage. In place of the word gasoline, most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), use the term "petrol", and North Americans more often use "gas" in common parlance, hence the prevalence of the usage "gas bar" or "gas station" in Canada and the United States.
Coined from Medieval Latin, the word petroleum (L. petra, rock + oleum, oil) initially denoted types of mineral oil derived from rocks and stones. In Britain, Petrol was a refined mineral oil product marketed as a solvent from the 1870s by the British wholesaler Carless Refining and Marketing Ltd.
When Petrol found a later use as a motor fuel, Frederick Simms, an associate of Gottlieb Daimler, suggested to John Leonard, owner of Carless, that they trademark the word and uppercase spelling Petrol.
The trademark application was refused because petrol had already become an established general term for motor fuel. Due to the firm's age, Carless retained the legal rights to the term and to the uppercase spelling of "Petrol" as the name of a petrochemical product.
Bet
It's called petrol and benzin elsewhere in the world. Gas/gasoline is just a name for automobile fuel.
Btw, on the periodic table at room temperature and typical atmospheric conditions, gases are "fumes", sure, but all of the first 72 elements are gaseous at 5000°C.
I know that there are "no stupid questions," but this is an EXTREMELY not stupid question. On the contrary, it's fascinating and non-intuitive.
gasses on the periodic table of elements are fumes
Are they?
why do we call the stuff we put into our vehicles "gas,"
It's named after John Cassell, unless you believe Samuel Boyd's claim that it came from the french gasogène.
“Is H2O a gas or a liquid?” - Dr Octogon
Ultimately the stuff that burns is a gas.
