Ding..."And theeeer'es the bell, fighters return to your corners! Whew, this thread has been awesome! OK girls, my turn.
The reason that extension cord use is being increasingly written into instruction manuals and labeling on consumer grade equipment is for legal protection of the manufacturer or brander. People are bound to do stupid things, and in this country they tend to want to sue companies afterwards. Hence, shampoo bottles discouraging eating of the contents and bicycles with stickers all over them saying not for night use. There is no electrical reason why an extension cord can not be used with any appliance, and of course it is necessary to use one of the proper gauge.
Part of this flame war appears to have been one poster's use of the word electrocution. By definition, that word means to have been killed by electric current. Who ever said that common use is to refer to any electric shock is wrong. My students do that all the time, and I always correct them. Shocked is shocked. Dead is dead. Apparently, this individual also chose to use the word "pedant" improperly as well. Ah well, so much for 6th Grade English class. He goes on to say that he doesn't walk around with a dictionary in his throat. Perhaps he should. Defending that which is wrong, not only does not make it right, it's also painfully illogical.
Furthermore, if you get shocked by a drill and fall off a ladder, the cause of death is the broken neck or head trauma, not the electric drill. A coroner or M.E. would find the cause of death to be the actual cause of death, not the circumstances under which the poor sap died.
Generally, AC kills by power dissipation. In other words, your body, which has a resistance impedes the flow of current, resulting in a voltage drop. this causes the body to dissipate heat. In essence, you're getting cooked. Done to a turn, in fact. If you take a hot dog, and stick the stripped end of the hot side of a standard 16/3 pigtail power cord into one end, while inserting the stripped end of the neutral lead into the other you will be able to cook your dog to crispy deliciousness in about 3 to 5 minutes. If you touch the weiner during this process, you will not be electrocuted nor will you be shocked. You may however, burn your fingers.
Alright, it's necessary here, to state that it is actually the friction caused by the changing of polarity of the water molecules in your body, but you get the gist.
Here in the United States, we have a place called Florida. Florida has a device they affectionately dub "Ol' Sparky". The electrodes of said device, are connected (H) to your head, (N) to your left leg, a parallel (H) around your upper torso to your spine and (N) to your right arm. Current is then applied in bursts of 60 seconds, 30 seconds and again at 60 seconds. The reason for turning it on and off like that is to keep the body from catching fire, while insuring that the poor mook is "most sincerely dead." In the early days, several individuals did indeed burst into flames.
I saw one post in here which used Ohms law to show Vdrop/foot of copper wire. Good math, and indeed correct for DC. AC however has significantly lower losses in copper wire. In order to do the equivalent calculation for AC, one would need to calculate for Z (impedance). In any but the most extreme cases, copper wire offers almost no noticeable impedance. Can you imagine what the energy loss and ensuant heat dissapation would be, in long wire runs, from substations in rural areas, were this not so?
I'd like to keep going with this, as I saw so much I wanted to comment on. Unfortunately, this rant has already gone into extra innings. Remember that everything I said was intended only to add to the existing dialogue and not to, in any way, offend.
That being said, let the flames commence.