It bugs me, too. Most ramps are concrete, not tar-macadam, but the newsies
think that saying tarmac makes them sound knowledgeable.

It bugs me not. English evolves through usage, and this usage is
reasonable. Tarmac (short for tarmacadam) is actually a trade name
for the substance; it (the word)is formed from "tar" and "macadam".
Macadam (the paving substance made of crushed stone and a binder,
usually tar) is named after its inventer, John L. McAdam, a Scottish
engineer.

Soon, places paved with tarmac started to be called "tarmac", and
since this began to especially be applied to areas around hangars,
those areas themselves were often called "tarmac" irrespective of what
they were paved with. (I don't know why (or even if) tarmac was the
pavement of choice). It's actually a good word - it fills a niche.

Are you equally bugged by people calling the place where planes are
parked "the ramp" when it's not sloped and doesn't connect a higher
place with a lower place (except in the sense of nothing being
perfectly flat)? Or calling clusters of well known thin vertical
hazards "antenna farms" when nothing is grown or harvested there?

Jose
--
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