Dining table discussions... (in Off-topic)

So we were at the good old dining table, the centre of all epic discussions, then it begins. It started off as simple story:

'I asked my mate, who is an electrician, how many times he has been electrocuted...'

To which I replied,

"You were talking to him so he hasn't been electrocuted"

This escalated into a heavy discussion; Heated to say the least.

Now the main body of the heated discussion, and I ask your opinions too, was:

If you were killed by an electric shock but then revived...

Have you been electrocuted?
Or did you get a nasty shock?

I'm going to go with, if you were declared dead, but then were revived, you were electrocuted.

It doesn't matter, you are having what is known as a semantic argument.

Simple definition semantics, of which Wikipedia can solve!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocution

If you were shocked by electricity to the extent that your heart stopped, you were electrocuted. If your heart didnt stop, then you were simply shocked. If the shock was good enough (or bad enough) to merit 'nasty,' I'll leave that up to you.

;)

Also can be defined as semantic discord.

Ah. Thats great! I was thinking at the table... in essence we were both right and it was down to the interpretations of the wording.

However I then went on to say that you couldn't have died because they were revived. IE, they never died. Just because your heart stops beating.. doesn't mean you are dead. So if you have to die to be electrocuted you can't be revived... since you are dead? Does that make sense??

No. However I've not had much brandy tonight.

No. But that's parsing the definition of "dead".

when i was a wee little lad, i was standing on our concrete patio in about 1/4 inch of water or so trying to get a cord plugged into the outlet on a drop light. my hands were wet and so i was having a hard time getting the plug in correctly and was shifting my grip trying to find the best way to hold it. while all of this sounds pretty dangerous already, the drop light did not have a light bulb in it and while adjusting grip one finger happened to go into the socket which also just happened to be turned on.

i woke up some time later lying on my back on the concrete with a pretty good goose egg on the back of my head. luckily i had somehow separated from the drop light at some point during my descent. by the exact definition of the word i guess i wasn't electrocuted but i darn sure felt like it! ; )

^ i was barefoot as well!

Ah yes, dude, that reminds me of the injury that most often kills an electrical worker: the fall after being shocked.

Lol, I stop in and this is what's going on? I also find it interesting that no one has posted links (or maybe I missed it, i forget to un collapse the top all the time anymore) to an actual definition of the word electrocuted. Cause it in no place that I can find mentions surviving an electrical shock.

Electrocuted = dead

:)

See my above post for the answer to the original question.

These kind of things support my belief that only certain people can see what I post on the forums, and only sometimes.

Huh, I simply can't believe there hasn't been a single solitary post made after my last one... that's just weird.

Why is this on the front page when nobody has posted since Joel did on the 12th?

For that matter, why is Joel's pic of a pirate wearing giant earrings? and no pants...

I'm a butt pirate and I've taken leave of my pants to make my work quicker!

BTW, I used to have a hole in my left earlobe big enough to fit my thumb and forefinger in. I used to use giant 1 lb. nails as earrings :p

Death and being dead can be a number of things but bottom line complete lack of Brain Activity means you are done.

So if Electrocuted equals dead then you have to have a complete lack of brain activity. You can hit this after the 3-5 minute span of time it takes to deplete all oxygen in the blood going to the brain.

Just to point it out there have been people Electrocuted and have come back after the 5 minute span of time. So the answer is that yes it can happen but it is rare and hard to prove.

Most will classify it as a NDE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_death_experience

but then you have stuff like this which pushes the bar of what is dead:

http://www.firstaidcorps.org/tag/electrocution/