Wiktionary

Quercus solaris

Joined 4 September 2013

Links Clips

#* {{quote-journal |en |year= |last= |first= |last2= |first2= |last3= |first3= |authorlink= |title= |journal= |volume= |issue= |pages= |url= |pmid= |pmcid= |doi= |passage=}}


#* {{quote-book |en |year= |last= |first= |last2= |first2= |last3= |first3= |authorlink= |title= |edition= |series= |volume= |publisher= |pages= |isbn= |url= |doi= |passage=}}


A reminder: consciously reassess the countability parameter when backfilling missing senses of nouns; ~ tilde ± {{lb|en|uncountable|countable}}


# {{senseid|en|internet}} {{lb|en|internet}}
→{{l|en|foo|id=internet}}
→{{l|en|foo<id:internet>|foo}} — this markup does not work
→{{l|en|foo#English:_internet}} — this markup works fine, but some users prefer the first above; thus, from now on, I plan to use that instead (thus achieving preemptive placation)
→[[foo#English:_internet|foo]] — for id-specific links when l or m are not used
→[[foo<id:internet>|foo]] — this markup does not work
→#: {{cot|en|foo|id1=internet|bar|id2=internet}} — this markup works correctly
→#: {{cot|en|foo<id:internet>|bar<id:internet>}} — this markup works correctly and is arguably cleaner than the alternative (above) because revision of a list of such items does not require manual renumbering (and is less likely to be corrupted by anyone's sloppy failure to carry out the manual renumbering when they revise an entry [e.g., add to a list])
→{{ws|en|[[foo#English:_internet|foo]]}} — this markup works correctly
→{{ws|en|foo<id:internet>}} — this markup does not work correctly but would be nice if it did because it would be slightly cleaner than the alternative above


{{q|blah}} — not to be confused with #: {{lb|en|blah}}; postpositive; optimal versus ''(blah)''; q→qualifier. Relatedly: Use {{tl|gl}} for glosses that define; but synonyms are synonyms, not glosses, so do not use parens for them at all (rather, either commas or bullets).


{{etymid|en|foobar}} (link to that id instead of to [[foo#Etymology_3|foo]] (definitely) and perhaps also instead of to [[foo#Noun_3|foo]] [for the same reason, a species of link rot]; regarding the latter "perhaps" notion, also recall that linking to senseid is powerful [so remember to consider doing that instead; it is the optimal solution (and one can ensure that no etymid and senseid within the same page have the selfsame value), although I don't do it always/in every case when linking to existing targets, because retroactively improving the target requires a detour away from what one is doing in the given moment])


{{wikipedia|2=ALIAS|mul=SECONDTARGET|mullabel=SECONDTARGETALIAS}}


#: {{syn|en|}}

#: {{nearsyn|en|}}

#: {{ant|en|}}

#: {{hyper|en|}}

#: {{hypo|en|}}

#: {{mer|en|}}

#: {{hol|en|}}

#: {{troponyms|en|}}

#: {{cot|en|}}

UPDATE—Don't do this; just use H3 H4 etc with prefatory "sense" labels.
Was: #: ''Derived terms:'' {{l|en|}} [dual etym/semantic connection; sensewise only when the semantic connection is sense-dependent (but "hypo" often applies in such cases) (e.g., elision → code elision)]

UPDATE—Don't do this; just use H3 H4 etc with prefatory "sense" labels.
Was: #: ''Related terms:'' {{l|en|}} [dual etym/semantic connection; sensewise only when the semantic connection is sense-dependent (cognitively adjacent to why many people have perennially forgotten Wikt's precise distinction between "related" and "see also" [it is easy to conflate when being hasty])]

#: {{hol|en|}}

#: {{mer|en|}}

#: {{troponyms|en|}}

UPDATE—Don't do this; just use H3 H4 etc with prefatory "sense" labels.
Was: #: ''See also:'' {{l|en|}} [only when the semantic connection is sense-dependent (but "cot" often suffices in such cases) (e.g., elision → contraction)]


====Synonyms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Antonyms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Hypernyms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Hyponyms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Meronyms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Holonyms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Troponyms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Coordinate terms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Derived terms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Related terms====
* {{l|en|}}
====Translations====
Etc
====See also====
* {{l|en|}}


More clips Salients

===Etymology===
, from {{confix|en|||}}.
From {{w|international scientific vocabulary}}, reflecting New Latin {{w|classical compound|combining forms}}: {{confix|en|}}.
From {{w|international scientific vocabulary}}, reflecting a New Latin {{w|classical compound|combining form}}, from ANCIENTlexeme; more at {{m|en|ANCIENTlexeme#Etymology|ANCIENTlexeme § Etymology}}.

===Pronunciation===
{{IPA|en|/ˈSTɹESSEDˌunstɹessed, -alt/}}

a———e———i———o———u
ā———ē———ī———ō———ū
eɪ——i———aɪ——oʊ——u
eɪ——iː———aɪ——oʊ——uː
————————————————ju
ă———ĕ———ĭ———ŏ———ŭ
æ———ɛ———ɪ———ɒ———ʊ
————————————————ʌ
————————————————ə
————————————————ɨ

zh———dzh———sh———tsh
ʒ————d͡ʒ————ʃ—————t͡ʃ

thin———this
theta——eth
θ——————ð
[thorn——eth]
[þ—————ð]

The awesome (and awful) nature of natural language: It's strange to ponder the contrast that (1) human minds master natural language so easily and yet (2) exhaustively documenting it in dictionaries and thesauruses is such a vast task. How does each of us effortlessly know so much that each of us by ourselves is almost hopelessly hard-pressed to write it all down?

The foregoing thought (awesome/awful) also makes me think of the science of natural language acquisition (i.e., humans' attempts to figure out how such acquisition works), where we face the paradox whereby children's vocabulary grows so fast during certain phases (of development) that it doesn't even make sense, from the viewpoint of acquiring lexemes by exposure, that some of these lexemes are acquired at all. The thought is mentioned in one of Pinker's books. My own hunch is that the paradox is resolved by the idea that human knowledge is more triangulated than the exposure notion suggests. Which is to say, some of what humans know is interpolated by triangulation between nodes, involving fuzzy pattern analysis performed upon the blizzard of neuron firings. I don't pretend to understand or explain that thought entirely; I just have a hunch that it's a component of the truth. Which is to say that I guess my brain triangulated a fuzzy notion of it.


That line of thought is about the contrasts of human knowledge versus communication thereof within any one human mind, but the foregoing thought (awesome/awful) also makes me think of the contrasts of human knowledge versus communication thereof in aggregate, across many human individuals. For any topic that you can name, there are some people who are knowledgeable experts, and there are more who are semi-knowledgeable laypersons, and yet many more who are sadly ignorant about it. But the extent to which the latter two groups can quickly and easily find a cogent yet complete summary/overview of (the important upshots of) the knowledge of the first-mentioned group—and ideally one without cost at the point of access, regardless of creation and maintenance costs at upstream points of the value stream (which of course must be paid somehow, but the question is which models for how)—is still lamentably primitive and incomplete in our era. Granted that you can find a sea of low-quality bits and pieces in our era, content-farmed and COI-filled and otherwise, but we still have far to go before we have a really excellent solution as defined herein.


Ontology begins at home.
And then never stops. (Lifelong learning.)
"As opposed to what?"
"Is that the same thing as [X]?"
"And things like that."
"And so on."
"Not to be confused with [X]."
"Also known as [Y]."
"A type of [Z]."

People who are masterful (in work, in life, in whatever) have cognitive mastery of—that is, familiar grasp with instantaneous application of—such framing and plumbing and wiring; they do not experience the world as just a basket of random black boxes, as others often do; rather, they inhabit systems, with some clue of the systems' structure.

Wiktionarian corollary: "We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it."


About edit

Why am I here? edit

First of all:

Yes, I am aware that this is a waste of my time from various valid viewpoints; but one must understand that I take bites from this apple the way you eat candy from your candy dish:

  • It's diverting (in a polysemically delicious way: temporarily and entertainingly digressive);
  • It's often trivially easy (which makes the fact that almost no one does it telling, in an ironic way);
  • Each visit starts with just a bite but of course "betcha can't eat just one";
  • I know I should stop, but the bites are tasty and (like many other people) I like me some comfort food, to take a diversion and blow off some stress;
  • Because procrastination (e.g., whether between sets or [sometimes alas] instead of them);
  • It's probably better for the world if someone fills this pathetic gaping vacuum, anyway;
  • Set examples of what can be achieved at Wiktionary, regardless of whether the world bothers to achieve it at Wiktionary;
  • During online meetings, I may sometimes multitask when listening to the presentation is only taking half of my cognitive bandwidth (I am far from alone in this);
  • On the other hand, after a long session of work that took all of my cognitive bandwidth (plus mopped the floor with it), it helps to decompress for a few moments with something constructive but also pretty easy. The cognitive equivalent of the cooldown walk after a long race. Regarding any counterargument about wasting time: hey, any physical trainer can tell you that skipping the tapering/cooldown is false economy.
  • Things like ChatGPT, as impressive as they are (regarding their nature, and the nature of their output, as far as it goes), are mere confabulatory mechanical ducks (and dangerous ones at that, buzzsaws with no guards and no PPE); what will be more helpful is when they are hitched to (wired up in sequence with) semantic/ontologic sanity tests, and Wiktionary and Wikipedia can help with that, if they are built well enough.
  • The above concerns Wiktionary's mainspace. Here's a bit of note about this userspace, in all seriousness (notwithstanding all the jokery elsewhere herein): This is my place to go swimming and stretch my legs all the way out, never pulling any punches or wasting half the water down the drain. Elsewhere I must (constantly), but not here in my little fishpond. Hopefully, dear reader, you'll gather that I'm speaking of swimming in a nonaquatic way. In this pond I explore all the way out to the outermost limits of my ability to abstract, in some places herein. In other spots I also just clown around, but there is usually a layer of abstraction that is tingling while I do so. The common theme that you may detect is factiveness — there is an external reality that I am mapping as hard as the mapmaking will take me (that is, mapping my ass off, if you will, and some of you will more than others). Mind your map–territory relations, dear reader; your safety (and mine, and that of all) may depend on whether humans can do so to a sufficient extent (even just halfway might be enough).
  • For internal use only:
    • Reminders: jotted at 2022-03 (SZ); 2024-02-05 (shittiness calibration)
      • There are leaves, and there are trees, and then there are forests; there are byways and then there are highways (and landmarks). A person is not a motorist-trip, although one can be said to be many such trips, in a manner of speaking.*

Then:

On another level of why: Just take a look around, and see how low the fruit is hanging. It's everywhere you look, if you know what you are looking at. If one can amuse oneself with crosswords or sudoku or tetris or puzzles, with no betterment of the outside world thereby, then one can also amuse oneself here, and simultaneously help build a better set of free resources for the rest of the world. Plus, I just enjoy chipping away at ignorance, and I enjoy continually refining my own and others' command of things like ontology, semantic relations (which amount to the same thing), and critical thinking. For various reasons, I do nonetheless go back and forth on whether to simply stop bothering to contribute to Wiktionary at all, but so far I keep landing on continuing, because a fact about most paywalled reference works, as regards most contexts, is that almost nobody uses them despite pretending that they do, which leaves Wiktionary and Wikipedia as the best places where correct information needs to be/exist, to be found when most people go goo-goo-googling their way through life (both their work life and their personal life; emphasis on the goo-goo, in terms of epistemologic prowess). I should clarify here, though, that people who aren't foolish (and exactly how narrow of a cohort is that, one might well ask) will and should consult good-quality noncrowdsourced reference works first and then consult Wiktionary and Wikipedia in addition to them; and besides the various quite nice ones that are available for free, depending on one's location (e.g., e.g., e.g., e.g., e.g.), anyone who is not destitute should also pony up for access to the ones that cost a bit of money but not much, and anyone who can pay to send their kids to expensive schools but can't fork over a bit more for the rest (that cost somewhat more) is not as clever as they might think.

Then:

On the next level of why: I enjoy causing Wiktionary to eclipse noncrowdsourced dictionaries in its lexicographic coverage's comprehensiveness and also, in many specific cases, quality (although there remain countless holes in its quality, to date). Exactly why I enjoy that is a complex topic. Maybe someday I'll work up a full analysis and explication of it. It has to do with the fact that although there are many fine dictionaries in the world (there truly are, and I value them, and pay for subscriptions to quite a few), there are not yet any truly comprehensively good ones, in the sense of almost exhaustively good ones. I enjoy advancing the front, the leading edge, in that regard. I enjoy poking holes in the shroud of ignorance that envelops us in the form of yet-unrealized dictionary entries or portions thereof that are missing in action, to date, and whose missingness is explained by nothing more than that no competent person ever yet merely got around to cutting that particular hole—until I did. There is a potential that one day Wiktionary may arrive at the state of being the best dictionary in existence. Not the only dictionary that humanity needs—no, we'll always want more than one, and we'll always want a nice variety, and we'll always want the OED and the AHD and the MWU, and medical dictionaries and chemical dictionaries and pharmaceutical dictionaries and engineering dictionaries. But we might eventually find Wiktionary to be the best, in a way where it enters every descriptively valid lexeme, even the ones that no other enters, and it somewhat consistently tends to have an exhaustive list of senses and usage notes for each lexeme. It could happen. And if it does, I'll have helped make it so. And even if that day is many years away (or never arrives), or even if Wiktionary ends up being only the source of many suggestions that show other dictionaries which gaps in their content they need to fill (in case Wiktionary itself is prevented from reaching its potential[re what meant, try to link examples here going forward]), in the meantime I enjoy the fact that every day, thousands of people googling particular words often end up at Wiktionary fulfilling the desire for a decent or half-decent entry thereon—in some cases, the only entry thereon to be found in any major dictionary, and in other cases, a better (less omissive) entry than the homologous entries in other dictionaries. And in some of those instances, as a person arrives at one of those Wiktionary entries, its existence or its quality (or both) came from me. I like that. In the interim, until such a day when Wiktionary may be the best (if that day ever arrives), even today it is true that Wiktionary has become a necessary complement to the other major ones, filling the holes that they have left unfilled to date, and is getting continually better at fulfilling that purpose, every time I or one of my many Wiktionarian colleagues makes yet another improvement to it. And every time that happens, we punch another hole into human ignorance, which is enjoyable.

Also:

Now With 80% More Who-Gives-A-Fuck-Anyway™! (Powered by Premium Prioritization For Lower-Pearl Feeding of Swine*)

This tip/lifehack cuts both ways: It's fine to engage in hog husbandry, as long as you keep shit out of the feed.

  • Corollaries:
    • And by shit I mean stuff.
    • You don't have to not feed or not husband/shepherd; rather, you just have to do it right.
    • Analogue: Anyone with half a head can tell you: By far, the best way to treat hardware disease is to prevent it.
      • Corollary: You gotta keep shit outta there. Corollary: Ralph said that the doctor said that his nose wouldn't bleed if he'd keep his finger outta there.
      • Corollary: Swine and cattle need feeding—and they love it too; and it's fun to feed them. (Regarding cows' barnyard cousins, the hogs, they often talk about wasting one's time and annoying the pig, but the opposite is also true: a pig loves to eat and a swineherd likes to feed him. The difference between love and annoyance lies merely in what's on the menu today.) And it's OK for the feed mixer/blender to keep vitamin powder canisters in the feedroom, but the measuring cup is an important intermediary between the shelf and the bin. What the animal knows or experiences is tastiness and healthiness. She knows not of other stuff, and doesn't want to, or need to.
      • Corollary: When the system fails and there's a nail in there, why doesn't she realize it before she swallows?
        • It's because reasons. She doesn't eat quite like we eat. And that's only natural, and she is quite lovable (that is, we love her anyway), although it inherently predisposes her kind to GI distress. (Even in a world without wire and nails there are sticks and stones and thorns.)
          • Corollary: Who is each person who helps her, either preventively or Tx-wise? Are they a farmer, a rancher, a herder, a vet tech, or a vet?
          • Corollary of the fact that she doesn't eat quite like we eat: the fact that she doesn't eat quite like we eat doesn't mean that she's not good at eating; after all, on some dimensions, she'll kick your ass at eating; for example, she'll eat more just for breakfast than you'll eat all day (and kicking someone's ass is also eating someone for breakfast, or eating their lunch). It also does not mean that the feeding of her is inherently unprofitable, even though our world is inherently unstickandstonable. Multiple dimensions of quality exist for the nature of the eating and feeding.
            • Corollary: For mere herders who were hired to reduce the incidence of hardware disease, what are the scope and parameters of that process? They are determined by its constraints. A good engineer can tell you the difference between a problem and a constraint. It's serene.
              • Counterpoint: Tabby knows a degree of cheat: he's (ever) clever with a lever. You don't have to not lift, you just have to do it right. It's just a coinstantiation of what they say: Salix ventorum.

—
*Refined pearl diversion saves your time and placates the pig. Hog husbandry varies. YMMV.

What is my nature? edit

Wiktionary:Babel
en This user is a native speaker of English.
de-1 Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse.
nl-1 Deze gebruiker heeft elementaire kennis van het Nederlands.
fr-1 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau élémentaire de français.
es-1 Este usuario puede contribuir con un nivel básico de español.
it-1 Questo utente può contribuire con un livello semplice di italiano.
pt-1 Este usuário pode contribuir com um nível básico de português.
Search user languages or scripts

As for me, I contain multitudes, but as for the subsets of me that constitute User:Quercus solaris, I can say that I used to think of User:Quercus solaris as a Wikipedian who sometimes edits Wiktionary, whereas lately it seems like User:Quercus solaris is a Wiktionarian who sometimes edits Wikipedia. I suppose it hardly matters, especially given that I've no doubt that it will wax and wane again eventually, anyway. And after all, some Quercuses are more solaris than others. By historical accident I was joined to the subset of those humans with interests in the concern that the basic level of mental ontology that undergirds vocabulary and in fact (even more generally) word finding itself in educated human sentience is yet insufficiently represented or captured across both Wikipedia and Wiktionary and frankly thus also across top hits in STFW instances. Fixing that gap holds substantial promise for improving aggregate QoL and standard of living among humans in various ways (direct and indirect). You're welcome, although in truth I do it more for me than for you, to ward off the concomitants of the current state of hyperendemic ignorance and epistemic impairment. Sometimes finding a way of coexisting is coinstantiated with finding a reason to stay alive.*

Other interesting facts that I can share about myself in this context are that I am a human who lives on the planet Earth, and that I appreciate the Sun, that is, our sun, especially sunshine, although I also appreciate rain, as there are times and places for both, and one cannot live by either alone. Other facts about me are irrelevant to the building of an optimized dictionary and an optimized encyclopedia, as phenomena such as verifiability and blueness of skies are epistemologically independent of (and epistemologically supersede) both personality and personal authority. Moreover, the facts that the misvaluing of personality and the misvaluing of authority are types of neuropsychological incompetence, and that that fact also makes them logically coordinate to, albeit not synonymous with, criminal insanity, are sources of motivation for the building of an optimized dictionary and an optimized encyclopedia. If the work is done well, it will be an honor to, and an honor of, those who did it; and you can be one of them (any of you), which puts some sensible limits on the relevance and importance of me.

Botanical metaphors, like all metaphors (some more than others), do have limits; I like Quercus solaris, but I also like Salix ventorum, especially given that I've no doubt that it will wax and wane again eventually, anyway. Any given selfsame hardy tree both loves the sun and respects the wind, no matter its name, and smells as sweet regardless.

—

*;

Shortlisted toward oughta edit

Main: oughta

Context

  • Instantiating a can't-even-swing-a-cat subclass.
  • In a world of more than a billion English speakers (E1L and ESL/EFL), these are some of the many many words that are attested in many publications (scores, hundreds, thousands) but yet not one single person has ever yet bothered to enter them in any nonpersonal dictionary (that is, neither in any reference work dictionary nor in any of the major COTS spellcheck dictionaries in extremely widely used apps (MS Office, major browsers, and similar);
  • Regarding "yet": that is, as of the moment that I encountered them as they stood in the way of getting my work done.
  • I don't even have time to enter each one as I encounter it, because there are so frickin many of them; I don't any longer want to solely add them to the sea/ocean of oughta alone (pending entry later), because when that was all I did then I did not have them marked as shortlisted for entry later (during downtime) (that is, I would lose track of them in the sea/ocean of oughta, and would have to find them again by repeated re-skimming); thus, list them here first, as mere chaotic triage (which BTW is apparently all the more that most people's entire cognitive/conscious experience is, judging from the evidence), which allows for the shortlisting function as well.
    • Corollary: If it is here, then yes, it is already attested (in technical content if not lay chatter), which is why it is here.
    • Another corollary: People who want to build a competent COTS spellcheck dictionary for English (as opposed to incompetent ones, such as those that ship with MS Office and major browser apps) would do pretty well if they took the population of en-Wiktionary entries that have H2 English, subtracted things such as this, this, and this, and dumped to a .DIC file. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be much better than any spellcheck dictionary that Big Tech has supplied so far.
  • Is it odd that the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language in existence — the English Wiktionary·ʷᵖ — has more than half a million headwords (way more than even the OED or MWU have·ʷᵖ), and yet one can still easily find another workaday, well-attested word to add to it almost every single time one cracks a book, newspaper, or magazine (digital or print)? It strikes me as counterintuitive. And yet here we are.

List population

At sea with no one at the helm edit

General notes

List population

  • As late as 2024,·2024-03-18 almost no dictionaries enter histotype except Wiktionary. I won't list the many that failed to enter it and the single other one that I found that did enter it, except that I will point out that not even the NCI Dictionaries did.

Fun with litotes edit

  • This section isn't not redacted.
    • See the overpetulance detection circuit, which isn't unrelated.
      • See? I'm not not a good sport, and I ain't doing a half bad job of it — not at all I ain't.

Topics worth a word edit

These are topics for which English, as of the time of their entry in this list, does not have an established term but for which it probably ought to, considering the socioeconomic importance of the topic. They are thus topics that are worth a word, in more than one sense: worth having a term for, and worth having a word about (i.e., worth discussing).

  • sustainwashing = sustain + washing [Update: It turns out that the word already existed when I added it here, but it is new enough that I hadn't heard anyone use it yet. Google ghits are incipient but may be predicted to increase.] = the sustainability analogue of greenwashing (or subset thereof, in ecologic subsenses). The problem can often be real, even though there must always be some practical limit to how close to ideal/perfect any real-world process can get. But the distinction is gross deception (or not), including gross self-deception (or not).
  • humanewashing = humane + washing [Update: It turns out that the word already existed when I added it here, but it is new enough that I hadn't heard anyone use it yet. Google already shows 10k ghits, corresponding to many real attestations.] = the humaneness (animal welfare) analogue of greenwashing. The problem can often be real, even though there must always be some practical limit to how close to ideal/perfect any real-world process can get. But the distinction is gross deception (or not), including gross self-deception (or not).

Sense mapping edit

  • One of the great advantages, and chief pleasures, of a hyperlinked dictionary is that the pervasive polysemy and homonymy (especially acronymic homonymy) of natural language can be bridged to a convenient degree: there is often no good reason (besides haste in editing) not to link to particular word senses rather than to the top of an entry—most especially a long-ass entry, but in fact almost any entry. Thus, cut to the chase with link landing.
  • Such link targeting precision has two classes of applications, both interesting: (1) as both a substantial pedagogic aid and a substantial convenience to the human users (net: better user experience on Wiktionary), and (2) perhaps as a sort of de facto semantic map for the benefit of machines who are NLPing their asses off, trying to speak human languages (or at least to pull a mechanical duck or idiot savant in specious simulation of that trick). For the human users, one of the components of the aid and convenience is that the hover-popups over the link are much more useful when the link is sufficiently targeted. Under that condition, they are often capable of providing on-hover short glosses of word meanings without the user even leaving the present page view. That's a whole other level of usefulness to a human user beyond the mere implication of "here's a link to what that means, if you feel like packing a lunch for the trek after the landing (as it were, cognitively)." But even without that consideration (as for example on mobile), to click a link and actually land where the semantics should take you, instead of in the lobby at the front desk with a thicc-ass fine-print directory and a long walk down the hall in front of you, as it were, is such an obvious improvement over your basic basic-ass wikilink.
  • The main tools available to us for this purpose are (1) the anchor-link syntax of wikilinking generally (like [[this#Pronoun|this]]), which is delicious and which has seamless interwiki operability with Wikipedia (i.e., as a target to send to from there), but which is limited to subheading level of targeting precision (rather than sense-wise level); (2) template:senseid, which is delicious, albeit of limited interwiki integration with Wikipedia and I just learned that it works both intrawiki and interwiki, as long as you use the "English:_" interfix; and (3) template:anchor, which has seamless interwiki operability with Wikipedia and any degree of targeting precision, although one better perhaps explain oneself when invoking it (for example, "<!--interwiki link target-->"), lest other editors feel some misplaced need to challenge its use. Fortunately, a link to Wiktionary from Wikipedia usually is precise enough just by use of the anchor to a subheading (#), so the latter consideration can be neatly side-stepped.
  • One acknowledgeable disadvantage of this level of construction of the dictionary's wikitext is that the wikitext is somewhat less inviting to newbie editors (i.e., new to wikitext markup), but (1) that speedbump is clearly solvable if a good Wiktionary:VisualEditor should be made available (as it is for Wikipedia), and (2) besides, aren't we all, by now, quite tired of the argument that content development should be hamstrung by the limitations of any given app or content management system? Did any inventors of the typewriter leave off the "H" key and then say to their clients, "Well, if you were good (and worthy of using my "fine" invention), you would simply internalize the flaw, and decide to just avoid using any words with the letter h in them"? No. That's a bass-ackwards attitude. So link away, with precision targeting. Right down the chimney from 10 klicks away, as it were.
  • Another acknowledgeable aspect of this level of construction of the dictionary's wikitext is that it represents a vast mountain of potential work to do (or a vast plain of fruit to harvest) and thus will not get done (i.e., become finished) anytime soon. That's fine. I submit that we should nonetheless improve incrementally in this direction (anyway/regardless) and allow the bits that have been achieved so far to serve as exemplars of the goal, role models for emulation in further incremental improvements of the same type. It is conceivable that AI may become good enough to start helping (to harvest the vast orchards), but I'm not holding my breath regarding how soon that might happen. There's a lot of obtuseness and a lot of not-my-problem-ism around to get in the way of that (among both the AIs and the humans who seek to improve and apply them), and those factors don't promise to disperse anytime soon.

Valid insights but sacrificed to terseness edit

Context edit

TL;DR: The TL;DR version of this context is that some people think that Wiktionary itself needs to be entirely and exclusively the TL;DR version of metalanguage, whereas others see additional use cases besides that one. The skins idea would solve the discrepancy. In the meantime, this vessel exists for the nonlive content, should it ever be of interest to anyone anywhere later and should it ever become live later.

Explanation edit

This distinction (i.e., valid insights but sacrificed to terseness), and the question of setting its cutoff threshold, raises the possibility of building a unified Wiktionary with content that is XML tagged for multiple output skins, with XSL/XSLT filtering for each skin:

  • One skin, a general dictionary for beginners (such as K-12 and ESL/EFL);
  • Another skin, a college dictionary;
  • Another skin, an unabridged dictionary;
  • Various other skins, various language-for-specific-purposes dictionaries;

… with each skin displaying a different filtered subset of the unified content dataset.

A common theme of a college dictionary's use case (i.e., of its chief user persona's needs) is "just give me the CliffsNotes version and spare me from encountering anything else." Wiktionary has never yet been sure whether it aims to be like a college dictionary or like an unabridged. It depends on which Wiktionarian's opinion overrules which other's opinion (and some would pick a third option, an advanced learner's). Most of them agree that a goal in any case is comprehensiveness of entry existence, if not entry development. Thus, in the respect of entering any descriptively valid lexeme—as opposed to avoiding entering countless rare lexemes, which is what print dictionaries were forced by practical necessity to do (for page-count reasons); but in contrast, how much to say about any particular lexeme, that is, how much to write inside any particular entry, is (at Wiktionary) currently subject to each person's personal calibration about what they find to be too much information, which they perhaps assume is too much information for anyone else as well, and that assumption is (as I duly grant it) correct for at least 70% or 80% of instances and persons, which makes it an acceptable heuristic, but it is of course nonetheless still a procrustean bed. The idea of various skins would be the much better solution instead of that procrustean heuristic. But it is unlikely that I myself will ever be the one to make it happen, by cajoling everyone else into building it. In the meantime, I may choose to capture here some of the bits and pieces that the procrustean bed chopped off. Why? Various reasons: (1) because they're cognitively interesting, fun for some minds; (2) because maybe they'll get reexported back to live content someday, if an appropriate vessel is ever built to receive them; (3) in short, for the same reasons why good content management systems provide various ways to save potentially useful (i.e., reuseful, reusable) bits of content from the cutting room floor.

Corollaries edit

  • If you need to write in the course of your job and have it seem like you're an informed and careful writer (even if you're not), don't rely on Wiktionary alone, which is not allowed to advise you completely in that respect; see some other excellent resources such as (for example) American Heritage Dictionary (which has many great usage notes). But Wiktionary will especially help you at spellcheck and sense check for technical vocabulary, though, because it is much better at entering valid words that other dictionaries (reference work type and off-the-shelf spellcheck type) fail miserably at covering (the latter unaccountably, except via chronic incompetent blind spots in management at software companies). Wiktionary's coverage of spelling is excellent; its coverage of word senses is less so (still has plenty of gaps), but is continually improving.
  • The relevance or irrelevance of any of the entries here proceeds from the current state (that is, state of conditions) of which analytical level is operative; none of them are irrelevant on all ontologic channels, and minds that are capable of tuning to multiple ontologic channels simultaneously can see both the relevances and the irrelevances of any entry simultaneously, whereas ones that are not can see only the irrelevances and thus have the experience of perceiving apparent non sequiturs, for the same reason that most of the blind men groping any given elephant would (angrily) think that any mention or discussion of mammalian anatomy was "completely irrelevant" to the heated discussion of tree trunks and ropes that they are currently engaged in. The hysteresis is analogous also to state-dependent memory and context-dependent memory with regard to human cognition's ability to interact with the concepts (but again, people who cannot see how that is true will misapprehend that the mention of those things here constitutes a non sequitur).

Main list population edit

  • Duly explaining prescriptions even without endorsing them: Here is a cross-reference to a glancing blow that is quite relevant to this section as well.
  • Not at crystal
    • Usage notes / Although glass is noncrystalline, there is a long history of natural language calling it crystal, and the short answer as to why is that this natural language usage predates modern materials science: glass and crystals seem similar macroscopically, and thus both prescientifically and nonscientifically they have been, and remain, conflated. This makes the "glass" sense of the word crystal a misnomer, which does not mean that it is "incorrect" — rather, it just means that it is well known to suggest a meaning that is different from its (firmly established) idiomatic meaning.
      • Per my current best understanding of Wiktionarian consensus, Wiktionary is not the place to provide this particular (short, clear) piece of remedial help to laypersons. I disagree, but that's OK; it simply lives here instead of in WT mainspace.
  • At picaresque
    • Do not confuse picaresque (concerning adventure or roguishness) with picturesque (beautiful and art-worthy).
  • At physiochemical
  • At allogenic
    • Do not confuse allogenic ("of nonself intraspecies origin") with allergenic ("generating allergy"); the two concepts are often related (because allergic reactions can potentially be caused by any antigen and usually/especially by nonself antigens), but the similar sound of the two words is due only to partial cognation of the word roots.
      • [This one is great because it tersely explains why the two are nonetheless often connected/coinstantiated (despite not being equal/conflated).]
  • At allergenic
  • At idiocratic
  • At phytoncide
    • Do not confuse a phytoncide (a substance made by a plant to discourage insects, animals, or bacteria from eating it) with a phytocide (an herbicide to kill plants).
  • At diphosphate
  • At causally
    • Hasty readers can easily misread causal as casual (or vice versa) and causally as casually (or vice versa). Writers can consider using causative and causatively instead, as they often will work interchangeably and may reduce hasty misreadings.
  • At exurbanite
  • At mesial
    • Compare the adjectives mesial, medial, and median, which overlap in meaning but are usually idiomatically non-interchangeable. Each is used in certain contexts, and shades of differentiable meaning are sometimes ascribed. Most uses of mesial are in dentistry, but not all (for example, as with the mesial aspect of the brain's temporal lobe).
  • At both malaligned and maligned
    • Do not confuse malaligned ("misaligned") with maligned ("reviled").
      • [Before anyone whines that the usage note is unnecessary because no one would confuse those two words, no, shut your gob, because the thing that even prompted me to write the usage guidance at all was hearing someone misuse the wrong word in a context where they definitely clearly meant the other.]
      • [This instance instantiates the class of natural language's practical limits on haplology. That class is interesting, and the fact that acronymy exponentiates homonymy is another instance of it. Semiotically speaking, the theme reduces to triviality/truism when you sum it up with the fact that one can't elide alphanumeric symbols (of any type) without impairing sense differentiation to some degree, whether more or less; the practical question is judging the instances where that degree is small enough for the elision to be deemed acceptable "enough". And when you frame it that way, you realize that it is but yet another instance of the concept of lossiness in data compression. Which is also true of the theme mentioned elsewhere herein regarding "predictable for the same reason that polysemy and thus polysemic ambiguity are pervasive in natural language: a limited set of symbols mapping to a vast set of potential semantic concepts and differentiations will inevitably produce such effects, as a logically natural instance coinstantiating both the pigeonhole principle and the map–territory difference."]
  • At both acariasis and ascariasis
  • At shut down
    • Phrasal verbs with the particles down and up tend to connote a process that takes a span of time and contains multiple steps, whereas those with the particles off and on tend to connote an event that happens instantly, in a point of time. This nuance of cognitive schema is merely connotative, not denotative or rigorous, and therefore the phrasal verbs shut down and power down are broadly synonymous with shut off, power off, and turn off, as well as stop and kill. However, the fact that turning a computer on or off requires booting and unwinding, which are multistep processes (albeit black boxes to the user in modern operating systems), influenced the origins of power management commands such as shut down rather than turn off or switch off. Similarly, power plants and ship engines are fired up and shut down, and not so much turned on and switched off, in idiomatic usage. Nonetheless, any process (no matter how complex) can be triggered with a single command, which is why an executive officer or legislature can simply kill a multi-billion-dollar government program, or a laptop user can simply switch off their computer, even if the program takes a while to wind down.
  • At ostomy
    • The conversion of the combining form -ostomy to yield the standalone noun ostomy began in the mid-20th century as medical jargon that was treated as too much a casualism for formal writing, but by the early 21st century it was well established even in formal register, and various respected dictionaries now enter it. Before this transition of acceptability, medical English already had a word for artificial bodily openings created surgically: stoma, directly from the New Latin, based on the ancient Greek. But today such an opening is just as likely to be called an ostomy as a stoma.
  • At accident
    • Risk management and risk mitigation experts (such as actuaries, systems engineers, and others) generally do not approve of calling motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) "accidents", because they advisedly reserve that term for things not directly caused by human recklessness or negligence. Because it is predictably obvious (and directly causal) that distracted driving (e.g., texting, IMing/DMing, videogaming, or intoxication while driving) produces MVCs, those MVCs are not "accidents". Nonetheless, among the general public, MVCs are quite often called "accidents" rather than "crashes" or "collisions", not only by idiomatic inertia but also because connotatively, it steers clear of broaching the topic of blame assignment, whereas a phrase like "he crashed" connotes blame.
  • At gaslight
    • The polysemy of the term in current usage (referring to dishonesty both for malevolent reasons and for misguidedly well-intentioned reasons, as well as even looser use referring merely to biased efforts at persuasion) has contributed to a degradation in its usefulness in counteracting the malevolent behavior denoted by the original (stricter) sense. For more details, see also Wikipedia > Gaslighting > Excessive misuse of the term "gaslighting".
  • At impenitent
    • Someone who is impenitent (unremorseful, not ashamed) may be impertinent about it (rude, insolent).
      • [A semantic connection shared by words that also look similar, which has validity (not unrelated), but its relevance is not quite proximal enough for a terse entry.]
  • At psychopathological
  • At psychopathology
    • The word psychopathology in its sense referring to a psychiatric condition (as opposed to its sense for the field of study and its application) is hypernymic to, not synonymous with, the word psychopathy, even though that differentiation is idiomatic rather than etymonic. The derived adjective, psychopathologic, etymonically strongly seems to suggest the meaning of "relating to psychopathy" (psychopathic)—that is, nonexpert readers will predictably sometimes or often mistake it for meaning that—but it does not. The ambiguity here is directly related to the polysemy of the words pathology and pathologic themselves (explained at pathology § Usage notes).
  • At pathology
    • Some house style guides for medical publications avoid the "illness" sense of pathology (“disease, state of ill health”) and replace it with pathosis. The rationale is that the -ology form should be reserved for the "study of disease" sense and for the medical specialty that provides microscopy and other laboratory services (e.g., cytology, histology) to clinicians. This rationale drives similar usage preferences about etiology ("cause" sense versus "study of causes" sense), methodology ("methods" sense versus "study of methods" sense), and other -ology words. ¶ Not all such natural usage can be purged gracefully, but the goal is to reserve the -ology form to its "study" sense when practical. Not all publications bother with this prescription, because most physicians don't do so in their own speech (and the context makes clear the sense intended). ¶ Another limitation is that pathology (“illness”) has an adjectival form (pathologic), but the corresponding adjectival form of pathosis (pathotic) is idiomatically missing from English (defective declension), so pathologic is obligate for both senses ("diseased" and "related to the study of disease"); this likely helps keep the "illness" sense of pathology in natural use (as the readily retrieved noun counterpart to pathologic in the "diseased" sense).
  • At neuropathy
    • Related terms ¶ neurosis [{{q|morphologically parallel but semantically divergent}}<!--(for reasons that are interesting and can be explained in 2 sentences but are perhaps nonetheless too much information for the Wiktionary context for now)] ¶ Usage notes ¶ Although the words neuropathy (neuro- + -pathy) and neurosis (neuro- + -osis) are morphologically parallel, the difference between the nerves as physical structures and as the psyche is reflected in the idiomatic differentiation whereby those two words signify quite differentiable concepts, even though the nerves and brain are inevitably somehow related to the mind via the mysteries of the mind–body problem and the neural correlates of consciousness. The great difficulty of fully solving that problem and fully understanding those correlates is reflected by the usage difference, as is the fact that the collocations central neuropathy and CNS neuropathy mean something quite different from psychopathology or neuropsychiatric conditions.
      • [This one was excellent for the person who asked about it and for anyone else to whom the same obvious question may occur, even though some other people have included it in the class of usage notes that "add nothing useful".]
  • At outhouse
  • At cast steel
    • There has been some confusion in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries caused by the fact that the term cast steel referred to crucible steel, and other steel poured from vessels while molten, before it later increasingly came to refer to steel castings specifically (that is, net or near-net castings of steel, which were developed many decades after the earlier sense was already established). Eventually the newer sense of the term came to dominate to the extent that the earlier sense is now classifiable as archaic, although even today, the action of a continuous caster retains a connection of steel mills to the action of casting. A 1949 monograph on the history of steel casting in the foundry sensecited reference enforces the distinction in senses, as technical literature often does for terms that have narrower technical senses coexisting with their broader general senses.
      • [This usage note may be gone (having been deleted, thus cast out of the vessel holding it) by the time you read this here, so I'm doing the backup here now.]
  • At nonfish
    • The English word meat in its main modern sense, referring to the flesh of animals used as food, has tended over the centuries to be idiomatically restricted to, and thus to implicitly denote, nonfish animals, such that disjunctive mentions of meat versus fish, or not meat but rather fish, are common (see meat § Usage notes). Nonetheless, natural language is flexible enough in its variable semantic ontology that the word meat can be extended to comprise fish flesh when a collocation specifies it, such as all meats including fish or meats of both fish and nonfish origin. The desire to restrict the word meat to its nonfish-only sense is a factor that sometimes helps to drive the use of a hypernym, such as protein or proteins, instead, and such hypernymous use can be still more useful once all protein-rich foods, even nonanimal foods (such as nuts or dairy foods or plant-based meat substitutes) are included in a discussion. But this natural ontologic flexibility is similar to that seen with the natural coexistence of the schema of finger versus thumb and that of all fingers including the thumb (with the hypernymous option being all digits including the thumb), as well as the natural coexistence of the schema of car versus truck (in which light trucks are not cars) and that of all cars including light trucks (with hypernym options being all automobiles or all light motor vehicles). Such variable ontology, which human minds handle effortlessly, is of interest to natural language processing by machines because it must be modeled and successfully handled if machines are someday to speak and read human languages reliably with human-like fluency.
      • [The kind of analysis exemplified here is necessary to people who want to competently study usage prescription, linguistics, NLP (natural language processing), or any overlapping combination thereof, but Wiktionary either may or may not turn out to be one of the places where it is allowed to be exemplified, depending on whether Wiktionary ends up being quasi-owned and, if so, by whom, in any given era.]
  • At not enough room to swing a cat
    • By extension from the idea of confined space, the idiom that one can't swing a cat without hitting an X conveys that the relevant context is lousy with X. Thus, the statement that you can't swing a cat without hitting a fool around here conveys that fools are (superfluously) plentiful around here.
      • [Presumably this one is at risk of disappearing, too, by the same allergic reaction, despite explaining an important facet of the phrase's use.]
  • At officious
    • Readers guessing the meaning of the word officious from context have sometimes guessed that it referred to the excessive bureaucratic formality of officialdom, but its connection to office, official, and the Latin officium (“service”) is with the kindly and solicitous aspect thereof rather than with the bureaucratic chill. Thus officious is not to be confused with punctilious.
  • At master copy
    • Most senses of the terms master copy and mastercopy have the semantic notion of "the copy that is the master version", but the fine arts sense of the terms instead has the semantic notion of "a copy of the master version". This sense difference puts the pair into the class of contranyms, albeit it a little-used example of that class.
  • At *pruritis [misspelling of pruritus]
    • The word pruritus does not contain the suffix -itis (which denotes inflammation), but owing to the similar sound (with a reduced vowel in either case), many writers misspell pruritus, even in the medical literature.
  • At integrous
    • In common usage, the noun integrity is much more common than its adjectival form, integrous.[reference cited in original] Most speakers and writers opt for an etymologically unrelated synonym — such as honest, decent, or virtuous — when trying to express the adjectival complement of integrity in its moral and ethical sense. Even when the structural or analytical sense of integrity is meant, constructions such as "has integrity" or "retaining integrity" are more commonly heard than the adjective integrous, indicating a species of lexical gap in which an apt word is not nonexistent but is rare enough that for most speakers it usually does not arise in the word-finding aspects of cognition during speech or writing. Another adjective related to integrity is integral, but that adjective usually focuses on a part (conveying that the part is built in) rather than applying to the whole (conveying that the whole has integrity). To convey that one is of or marked by integrity, other adjectives may be used including upright and upstanding.
  • At eulogy
    • Because the words eulogy and elegy sound and look similar and both concern speeches or poems associated with someone's death and funeral, they are easily confused. A simple key to remembering the difference is that an elegy is chiefly about lamenting whereas a eulogy is chiefly about praising (and eu- = "good").
  • At *preclivity (misspelling of proclivity)
    • The word proclivity starts with a syllable that is cognate with the English prefix pro-, not with pre-; however, quite possibly by speciously tempting cognitive analogy with both the idea of temporal precedence and (relatedly) the synonym predisposition, sometimes people tend toward starting the word proclivity with pre-.

Population composed by others edit

Not written by me but rather by other Wiktionarians (who BTW did a nice job); but vulnerable to deletion per the same aversions (so put backup here)

  • At sensible
    • "Sensible" describes the reasonable way in which a person may think about things or do things:
      It wouldn't be sensible to start all over again now.
    • It is not comparable to its cognates in certain languages (see below at Translations section).
    • "Sensitive" describes an emotional way in which a person may react to things:
      He has always been a sensitive child.
      I didn’t realize she was so sensitive about her work.
  • At finitude
    • Finitude is rather formal and used in philosophy, while finiteness is used in mathematics; however, infinitude is used in mathematics more than infiniteness. Less formal is to reword to use limited: “(the fact that) life is limited” rather than “the finitude of life”.

Glancing blows edit

  • The Collins English Thesaurus Essential sets a nice example with putting the top-ranked key/cardinal synonym or antonym first and in boldface, then continuing on with the others. It's natural, intuitive, the most useful approach, and so on.
    • Not infrequently I get flashing glimpses of how it's pointless for me to bother improving Wiktionary. In some ways, on some channels, it is true. And yet: not in every way or on every channel. Such is life in parametrization land; the gestalt effect is much like tuning into airwave TV or radio (something most of us used to do in the old days, and some people still do today). One's regularly scheduled program is in progress when some static flits across the scene. But I'm used to that effect, so it's OK; some static is statickier•·• · + than others, and my Cornish friend just scoffs and asks whether you call that a troublesome doubt.
      • PS: I suppose it's all of a piece with me, after all: as I sit here dialing a relation from cot to nearsyn,🕝 I recall that I've been tuning all my life. Some tweakers are tweaker than others.
      • PPS: It's worth capturing here that one of the channels on which Wiktionary's development is quite worthwhile is that Wiktionary achieves a certain accomplishment with dispensing of certain kinds of map-territory questions preemptively in a very efficient way, once the entries relevant to that particular question are sufficiently refined. I lack time at the moment to work up a better description of it, but it sums up with an icon: So far, in my experience, I've seen one other dictionary (precisely, one other dictionary-thesaurus combination) that achieves the same accomplishment in essentially the same way — it is one explicitly based on an export from WordNet3 — but it is (naturally, understandably) limited in the extent of its comprehensiveness — that is, its degree toward having near-completeness, as opposed to having substantially less than near-completeness, which is where it currently resides on that spectrum. Which makes sense, because completeness in this dimension is vast. Long story short, the more developed Wiktionary gets, the more it fills that gap in the world and also increasingly sets an example that will probably eventually force the world's other dictionaries to sharpen up their game a bit in this regard. One other thought that I will jot here about it for now is that there is a theme underlying it: any really sharp general dictionary has a certain degree of thesaurus component, because the sharpness involves showing exactly how word X is semantically related (or not) to word Y and word Z; which is to say, by corollary, that any really sharp general dictionary is in fact, precisely speaking, a dictionary-thesaurus, and even more precisely speaking, a dictionary-thesaurus; but there's an important qualification: one must understand what an optimal thesaurus is, or should be. An optimal thesaurus is not an undifferentiated laundry list of semantic relations, a random miscellany and grab-basket thereof, especially not one that lumps synonyms, parasynonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and coordinate terms under the single vaguely misused rubric of "synonyms". Rather, an optimal one is a map, or more precisely, a circuit board of logically arranged connections, with circuit paths that can be traced (including the tracings that lead back to ground, and we'll let old no-eyes explain later a bit more about what ground comprises, besides rocks and dirt).
  • Lunchtime skimming. Perhaps, in some ways, the most important article I've read within the past few months:
    • Musser 2024-03-19[1]
      • Passages most salient for me at the moment:
        • The portion about aligning the ctrl-flatent spacesctrl-f for translation (relates to how machines achieve the things that for us meatbags remain a case for a thorough mapping of semantic relations [yet more thorough than most humans have bothered to do yet]); the key of ctrl-fselective neglectctrl-f (compare my thought, from a while back, about negligibility meta-parameters); ctrl-f"anything that our brains would neglect as unimportant unless we were specifically watching for it"ctrl-f. The one note I have to scribble here for now is a crucial qualification of the idea that "intelligence is, if anything, the selective neglect of detail" — crucially, unusually intelligent people are not wholly ignorant of the existence of details but rather have channels for managing the degree to which they are conditionally and provisionally deweighted for conscious attention, and some clue/notion of their structural relation to the overall whole is maintained in the background. They are not black box mysteries floating randomly in a plum pudding but rather are held in backgrounded partial awareness as (to give a much more accurate metaphor, among various possible ones) leaves on limbs of trees (or glints on blades of grass, to invoke an example that Musser mentioned).
          • Perhaps this jotted note belongs more properly at Readings, and perhaps I'll move it there later. As usual, no time at the moment to follow up on what the mind is able to race through.
  • It is possible to be fault-tolerant to a fault.
  • A clockfacery recap
  • Let's talk for a moment about where Wiktionary is now (2024) versus X years ago.
    • Now versus 6 or 7 years ago:
    • Now versus 10 to 15 years ago:
    • Outlook
      • Now even more than ever, I encourage anyone who seeks the smart move (a pro tip) to use the other wonderful dictionaries that are readily available, at prices anywhere from gratis to clearly affordable, in digital or in print, as the first thing that they reach toward, and then to turn to Wiktionary and Wikipedia and web search in addition to those. By corollary, I reaffirm the theme (already stated elsewhere herein) that Wiktionary will retain for the foreseeable future the role of a sort of farm team for the other dictionaries, working up miscellaneous bits of lexicographic coverage that they can take well-grounded, well-justified inspiration from (or even simply crib from) — for the most part, all the terms that they have failed to enter yet, and should have entered by now, can be found in Wiktionary (barring only a subclass of lexicalized collocations that its CFI preclude), and Wiktionary sets a good example and primes the pump in this regard. (More specifically, they shouldn't fail to use it as a pump primer.) Furthermore, there are spots here and there where Wiktionary even outshines other dictionaries, because someone gave enough of a fuck to really do it up (right) in one spot or another.
        • Follow-up: I hadn't been aware of this aspect until today, but it seems that apparently (or so I have read) Collins already cracked that code (the pump-priming one), starting in 2012, a fact that probably isn't not an important portion of the explanation for why their big-ass flagship currently has 700k+ headwords (rather than, say, 500k) and generally kicks ass and takes names (which it clearly does, as noted recently earlier herein).
          • This line of thought is interesting for an especially intriguing reason: It throbs on the same set of circuits as the whole story of which models for the use of crowdsourcing, as applied to the extensible growth and revision of reference works, would be most useful and most adaptive (versus the alternatives that would be somewhat less adaptive, that is, somewhat more maladaptive). Recall that the earliest model, the earliest variant of the concept for Wikipedia, was Nupedia, which would use the crowdsourced input (a firehose of fodder) as feedstock for the grown-ups, who would duly apply grown-up curation to it before outputting the net result. As opposed to the crowdsourcing being the whole shebang, end of story. Well the curated model does in fact remain a smart idea, even now, but it has certain nontrivial and enduring challenges regarding who gets to be in charge of the curation (and have the ultimate vetoes within it), which explains both (1) why we ended up with Wikipedia instead of (something more like) Nupedia or Citizendium and also (2) why we humans can't have nice things. But my point that I want to scribble here (before I stop wasting time on this thread) is the theme of (1) more power to them (to Collins) if in fact they're successfully using Wiktionary as an appropriate input source for feedstock (there ought to be some competent grown-ups somewhere who are, and the more the merrier) and (2) they ought to be commended for making the model work, given that it never did manage to work (at least yet) regarding Wikipedia as opposed to any possible thing more like Nupedia or Citizendium. I think its reasons for failing to fledge in that instance are complex and have just as much to do with epistemic disagreements as with profitability potential. But that's a vast backstory that isn't worth broaching here though. Anyway, this whole train of thought at the moment is just a hasty daydream.
  • I hadn't quite properly appreciated until recent days quite how much Collins kicks nearly every other ass in the mthrfkin room and then wipes the floor with the crumpled rags that are left over. The big old 200k title is so juicy and delicious that I looked over at the great big 700k title and started feelin kinda itchy, in a nonpruritic way. The rest is handwave etc.
    • What can I say, a whole-assed job appeals to me. I like me some meat on them bones.
  • Circling back to schools of thought on order of senses, tonight I read that the Collins big old 200k title lays out explicitly an order of senses that is of the ranked-by-practical-factors type (e.g., heaviest weighting for most common and core meaning).
    • Goes to show that there is many a good idea and good example regarding the available options.
  • Having stumbled across The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus (2023) at the screaming bargain of USD 7.99, I bought it straight off the bat without hesitation, having learned my lesson about wordbook addiction (which is: fuck it, buy yet another anyway). The tagline on the cover is still (as with the 2022 [2005] edition) America's Best-Selling Thesaurus, placed in the position of a subtitle, albeit not that. Well we've got to tart it up a bit somehow if we want to cajole humans into buying a thesaurus, haven't we. I haven't had time to study its front matter yet, but I see that it no longer gives, as an epigraph to the work, the delicious quote from Mark Twain. The way he waxes syn-aesthetic about syns in that moment shows something that old no-eyes can taste too (handwave etc), which is why I was sorry to see that they'd axed the epigraph page for the new edition. Well we've got to slim it down a bit somehow if we want to keep the page count increase to only +40 and not a bit more, haven't we. Sigh. I get it, but IMHO they should have kept it, because even if it doesn't give the joint more class, it gives it more soul. They even could have shoehorned it onto a blank spot within the existing front matter layout, without adding a page. Not a news hole but an epigraph hole. Oh well. But this instance just goes to show why one needs to seize the day, and I'm glad I did last fall — I would have missed the bell ring from old Clemens if I hadn't. Since they scrubbed his words from their joint, I decided to add them to mine, below.
    • "A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when the right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry." — Mark Twain[2]
  • MWCD's convention is that senses are always listed in diachronic order (i.e., chronologic order of development). It states this fact in its front matter, just in case a few human users of that dictionary have enough brains to come across it ("the senses of any word having more than one are always presented in historical order"). As far as I am aware, Wiktionary doesn't have a strict rule about this list order; many of its entries list the senses in diachronic order, but others list them synchronically in the order of practical importance to a present-day user of the dictionary. A third factor is grouping two or three senses that are especially closely semantically related so that they are adjacent to each other in the list order. That factor, too, is about practical usefulness to the main target user. The special case of that factor is outright (exceptionless) autohyponymy, which fortunately also can be marked with subsense numbering (although it sometimes isn't so marked, depending on predispositions of whoever happens to have edited the entry yet). Both sorting orders (diachronic and synchronic) are useful in their own way; I lean toward the "synchrony for practical importance" approach for the case of Wiktionary's instantiation (as contrasted with other works elsewhere that are tailored to a different chief audience). Sometime I should scour through the WT namespace of WT to see whether any guidelines are offered for this aspect. This aspect is not mentioned at WT:LAYOUT#Definitions as of this writing. (Update a few weeks later: I should have looked a wee bit harder than I did, by also clicking through from the link there; it leads to the answer at Wiktionary:Style_guide#Definition_sequence, where we learn that Wiktionary wants the practical importance (e.g., most common, core meaning) top-ranked. Good on Wiktionary for that; I agree that that's the best choice for most users of Wiktionary.) Imagine if there were parameters that could simply be assigned so that the user could toggle the sorting (i.e., sort by either diachrony or synchronic importance) at the touch of a button. That's a great example of a feature that a digital dictionary should have but that humans are too busy making TikToks and porn and murder and robbery to bother working on implementing.
    • Clarification of that last point: not that there's no one to crew the efforts — rather, the point is that they are several orders of magnitude scarcer than they ought to be. The things that could easily enough be achieved at a Wiktionarylike place (such as Wiktionary) would be further realized already (i.e., further along down the spectrum of potential realization) if the crew weren't a skeleton crew.
    • Also: An asterisk on MWCD's "always" claim: it explains some pages later that there's one special class of exception. But you knew that, though, because there usually is.
  • The aspect ratio of the length of a highway to the average thickness of its pavement is a thing worth appreciating. It is what it is, but one does well to appreciate what it isn't.
    • There are analogues that one may be blind enough to consider surprising at first appreciation, but there are viewpoints from which truisms cannot surprise, albeit viewless ones. Pale blue dots and 18-kilometer GD&T surface finish tolerance zones on 12700-kilometer-diameter objects are examples. A specious perception of profundity can be subject to a certain kind of vicarious embarrassment, but one must be careful with such construals, for the same reason that one must be careful with a kitchen knife (or a ladder, or an electrical cord). The parametric difference between a nicely diced salad and an exsanguination emergency has a certain thinness that typical consciousnesses usually find unremarkable, which may be odd given the tendency for differences in their reactions to a pale blue dot and a bug on a windshield. At any rate, do not confuse the identity and existence of any given roadbuilding contractor with the difference as to whether any particular highway gets built, and do not confuse the pavement thickness with remarkableness.
  • As they say, a word to the wise is sufficient.
    • As they imply, this fact offers the opportunity for an interesting practical application: an operational test for latent skill issues.
  • An interesting trail tonight:
    • There are parametric dialings that suggest themselves, but one of the reasons why one refrains is when the genre doesn't call for it.
      • This is a theme with many coinstantiations in life. In fact it is a meta-theme, as it echoes all the way up to the top, or down to the bottom, depending on one's [redacted resonance].
        • Some of the instantiations are easy to keep in mind, whereas others are less so. I just reappreciated, though, that a throughline with (at least one class of) neurotypical consciousness is the extent to which one need not keep in mind (remember to enforce) the forms of any given genre (as it were) because one cannot escape them within the operating levels anyway. Everything just is what it is, and one couldn't even think of things else. There are physical analogues for this. The theme of analog versus digital is relevant. A needle in a record groove is one model. A reflex arc is another. The difference (or at least one class of difference) with another flavor of consciousness is not that such an arc isn't operative but rather that more than one of them is. Which is to say, parallel processing of some kind or other. This explains a lot. More could be done with this but I am falling asleep. Maybe later.
          • One little trace before zzz though: one of the refrainings tonight involved snipping some wires that were connected to this. The cardinal parameter was sunset, which is why the algorithm autoplay was so bellish. Speaking of connected bells, ask not — it tolls for oh never mind.
            • The next day: some genres don't even have a name yet, which is also true of some genera. (No doubt many, in fact.) And the remaining duration of any one's namelessness is anyone's guess. Fortunately their forms may be enforced (or ineluctably channeled) independently of their names or namelessness.
  • Flavors of Bierceness: degrees of devilry:
    • classes perhaps (tentative classification):
      • 🎛️ class 0: emic orthodoxy
        • 🎛️ class 1: etic honesty: when the truth hurts the feelings of an emic perspective: reals over feels instead of feels over reals
          • 🎛️ class 2: hyperbolic cynicism: hypercynical hyperbole: ostensibly the category above but really an exaggeration for effect*
            • 🎛️ class 3: persuasive definitions: definist fallacies: tendentious distortions
              • 🎛️ class 4: sheer nonsense; meaninglessness
                • (range justification: most classifications worth their salt go all the way down to zero and all the way up to eleven, even when most of the instances that they classify don't land at the extremes, and this one isn't an exception; which is to say, it falls into that cardinal class of classifications)
    • Initial analysis
      • Why I find it interesting at the moment: (1) newly codified in my conscious attention; (2) a parametric dialing challenge: 🎛️: What are the operational definitions for establishing the cutoff thresholds? To which class does any given instance truly (objectively) belong? How is one's own calibration maintained; how is one's own periodic recalibration monitored? Tentatively, I perceive subclasses: some cutoffs are more objective than others; some cuts are cutter than others. Also, meta-calibration: part of the mechanism for the calibration involves etic honesty about the etic honesty (parameters on parameters; meta-parameters): to accurately identify which subclass applies (to the extent that accuracy is possible†), one must detect and admit when one is being overpetulant. Easier said than done; but to my credit, I more than hold my own on that score (once I've come around on any given instance), compared with most of the competition, many of whom are durably or even permanently miscalibrated on any of countless instances.
        • *As for which effect: often enough for purposes of sarcastic humor; but what are some other effects, besides the other obvious one (i.e., polemicism, which is an essential component of the next category after this one)? And what exactly is the goal with such humor, given that it's funny cause it's true? I have some useful answers, but for now, they're for another bucket, not this bucket.
        • †As for the contours of that assessment: I have some useful answers, but for now, they're for another bucket, not this bucket.
    • Later: updated: a bit more analysis, pending further reading:
      • This Bierceness scale business ends up connecting with an aspect of what some of those general semanticists have been on about, which is the urge to resist the urge to use copulas too cavalierly. Doing so sets up false equivalences too glibly. It's not that I share their fervent enthusiasm on the topic (and some are more enthusiastic than others) — it's just that I notice that they apparently happen to be onto something. (Corollary: Some instances of being on about something are more onto something than others; and even a stopped clock is right twice a day, although in this case, to be fair, it's more than just that.) I'd like to write here the examples that I've been playing with lately, but I have to bite my tongue in this context because, like most Bierceness class 2 and class 3 instances, they're too spicy and they won't reflect well on me even though part of me feels so damn sure that they're accurate — but one must recall that this is precisely what the overpetulance detection circuit is for. In fact there are two durable insights adjacent to this locale — not only this one along the lines that you're being inaccurate even though it doesn't feel that way to you but also the one along the lines that [redacted for now]. Anyhow, an adequately adaptive solution to the problem about copula cavalierness isn't to be a weirdo who circumlocutes especially comically. (Oops, I did it again·^ — my apologies for letting a bit of Bierceness class 2 or class 3 sass go flying.) Instead, it's more subtle and resigned than that — a theme that plugs back into [redacted for now]. This is the sort of thought train that'll take months to fully process (because there's still a lot of reading left to do — miles to go before I sleep and whatnot [± what-all·]). But I needed to jot at least this much here now because I know myself (and the chances) by now — beads and crumbs and what-all. Plus MSHA-rated kit.
  • Wiktionary:Categorization
    • Maybe spend some time thinking more about this.
      • Specifically (out of all the many kinds of cats), topic cat and his parents.
        • They have more to do with physical things than with abstract concepts. The division is not a bright line, of course; nor is the division between things subject to coinstantiation and things not. Coinstantiation of a type that is durable across contexts lends itself to cat hierarchies (strictly taxonomic hypernymy; e.g., animal > mammal > cat) and cat copopulations (non–strictly-taxonomic hypernymy, that is, Venn overlap hypernymy; e.g., pet > mammal > cat). Our friend topic cat certainly knows about coinstantiation, even though admittedly his cousin box cat knows the most about it; box cat is the cat who feels it in his bones every moment of every day, whereas topic cat occasionally dabbles in it.
  • Venn overlap:
    • Quantum cryptography is cryptography that uses quantum superposition as part of the encryption method.
    • Post-quantum cryptography is cryptography that uses an encryption method that is sufficiently resistant to any cryptanalysis that uses quantum computing (which uses logic incorporating qubits).
    • Quantum cryptography is no doubt largely, although possibly not entirely, subsumed by post-quantum cryptography. That is, most and perhaps all quantum cryptography would be (a type of) post-quantum cryptography.
    • Post-quantum cryptography can be either nonquantum cryptography or quantum cryptography, and it is not at all required to be the latter. In fact the big rush in the current era (2010s-2020s) is to work out and adopt and disseminate nonquantum cryptography that is (a type of) post-quantum cryptography, for the simple reason that copies of old encrypted messages from today are already being saved and stored until tomorrow, when cracking them will become feasible. To whichever extent their informational content won't yet be moot and useless by the time of cracking, that's a problem even for today (not just for tomorrow), which is why people are itching to implement better methods ASAP.
    • What is the best way to convey contrast, using natural language words, for sets with Venn overlap? Well, it depends on the subclass of the overlap, but a recurring theme is this: a problem with phrases such as "not to be confused with" or "not the same thing as" is that many readers or listeners often misinterpret them up front (during initial encountering/learning, during a blank slate phase for the relevant concepts being learned), taking them to imply mutual exclusivity (not always, but often enough for it to be an anticipable expository challenge). An expository skill is to anticipate and defuse this anticipable problem. The concepts being transmitted are not confusing (in fact they are diagrammably simple), but conveying them can be challenging because of the constraints of the medium. The thing about natural language for expository purposes is that big collections of words, assembled for those purposes, are confusing (notwithstanding the fact that humans often enjoy, and are not confused by, big collections of words for other purposes, as for example novel-length storytime). Not even big collections of big words as much as, simply, big collections of any words. Admittedly, it takes even less to confuse some people, compared with others; but all humans face rate-limiting constraints in natural-language-encoded exposition.
      • None of this is hopelessly insoluble; rather, it is simply a challenge to be recognized and to be countered as well as diligence and conscientiousness allow. Perhaps it will not be surmounted, if "surmounted" is meant in a noncomparable and nongradable sense (which is the archetypal way of getting on top of something and reaching beyond it). In a comparable and gradable sense, the aim would be for the challenge to be surmounted as much as possible: partially overcome, to the greatest extent yet feasible.
    • The reason I started thinking about it today is that I am about to put navigational hatnotes at the top of the two Wikipedia articles, and it takes some time and care to determine what their optimal wording will be. It is certainly not "Not to be confused with X" alone, from a viewpoint of nonincompetent expository effort, because that statement is itself confusing, on the very next expository level beyond the first one (nonequivalence, nonidentity). Some answers just invite another immediate question. Admittedly, perhaps all answers invite further questions; but some invite more and stupider ones than others do.
  • Some cots are cotter than others.
    • Which is different from the fact that some cots are anter than others.
    • No, what this focus is about is the theme, touched on elsewhere herein, that one can have various contrasting contrast sets (coordinate ones), and which one is the one that one would like to focus on, in the given moment and for the given purposes, is subject to parametric ranking (by those parameters).
      • This is not only the answer, but also the stone coldest of answers, to the question of whether a comprehensive set of cots will be given for any given word sense. The answer is usually no, for the simple reason that the reader doesn't need so much distraction (as that), in the given moment and for the given purposes, and that what the reader can better use (more fruitfully use) is the cottest of the cots — the one or several that their attention should be directed to first (and foremost·^). From there, there can be time and opportunity for more, especially upon click-through, if it occurs.
  • An interesting instance of holonymy–meronymy relation:
    • In one pair of senses (physical), the meronymic complement of subconstituency is subconstituent, but in another pair of senses (political), the meronymic complement of subconstituency is constituent, and that is the only correct answer as far as idiomaticness allows. It is obvious why: in the political sense, every constituent is fully a constituent, not halfway so; the property of constituentness (i.e., constituent status: being a constituent) is irreducible in this context (that is, atomic in this application, in the "unatomizable" sense of that adjective). In shorthand: say that there is a large and profitable corporation headquartered in my congressional district. Its C-suite's executives are constituents of my district's state and federal legislators, and relative to those executives you might call the shop-floor employees, or any other local average Joe (such as me), a mere subconstituent, if you were being mean. Etically it is interesting to note that because some subconstituencies are constituenter than others (whereas the parameters that determine the degree are money and social power-slash-influence), it is logically possible to have a sense of the word subconstituent denoting a "lesser" (i.e., less politically powerful) constituent, but it is ethically unacceptable to do so within an ethical framework that rejects the concept of second-class citizens. Thus within that framework, you are left with a de jure–versus–de facto difference that remains shielded behind a single term, which (instances) are not uncommon in human life. The reason why so many people hate instances of corporate personhood run amok, such as (in their assessment) Citizens United, is that those things threaten to enshrine the de facto power advantages of moneyed subconstituencies as de jure advantages. Within any subsystem where one wishes to reduce the de jure–versus–de facto gradient (i.e., lower the absolute value of the difference), it is antithetically unhelpful to have anyone putting their thumb on the scale in favor of the other direction. The whole point in any such subsystem is that there are already various thumbs on the scale that are pressing in the direction of the existing bias. The only legal remedy to lessen that existing imbalance is a vector pointing in the direction that countervails it. From that viewpoint, duh, it seems stupid to push in the opposite direction. Why do those who do so not agree? To claim that it is because they are stupid, in the "intellectually impaired" sense, is misguided. It has more to do with a cognitive bias by which they are convinced that underdogs are underdogs for a valid reason — that underdog status is well earned. The problem with this bias is a grain-of-truth fallacy: just because examples might be found where it is true or partly true (for example, most criminals deserve to be in jail — they truly put themselves into that position by choice, having chosen a pathway that obviously leads to that outcome) doesn't mean that one should overblow it into some overgeneralized principle, as if every instance of underdog status were earned and deserved. This line of thought is admittedly underdeveloped and logically must remain so because to unravel this sweater down to the last yarn (that is, to get to the bottom of this mud puddle) one would have to solve the open problem of how smart-and-ethical conservatism can be logically reconciled with smart-and-ethical progressivism in a way that obviates discord and nogginbashing. Humans have been playing at that one for a long time.
  • At stanch#Usage_notes (accessed 2023-10-18) — a nice example of how a descriptive dictionary can neutrally (and succinctly, and usefully) inform its readers about a prescriptive notion that they should be aware of (for their own good, regarding how readers or listeners are likely to react to their usage), even without advocating the prescriptive viewpoint. Various other examples can be seen at #Valid insights but sacrificed to terseness — for example, a class of them is that it is OK to tell people, concisely and in an NPOV way, not to confuse two words catachrestically. For those words that have been substituted for each other so often that it is not even accurate to call the usage wrong, it is OK (and not biased) to explain that fact concisely as well; see an example at straight-laced#Etymology (accessed 2023-10-18).
  • Whereas cot is sometimes syn (for example, in broad usage), and hyper or hypo is sometimes syn (for example, in broad usage), nearby regions of a salami are not being sliced apart for current purposes (that is, for the purposes in such an instance).
    • What about mer versus often-mer (for example, mer in many [or even most] instances), and hol versus often-hol (for example, hol in many [or even most] instances)?
      • What these themes have in common is coinstantiation. What two or more themes have in common is a meta-theme, if you will (and some will more than others).
        • The thing about "sometimes" versus "in some instances" is that instances can coexist, which is to say, they "often" coexist (as we often say), but what we really mean by that "often" is that they coexist in many instances [of such coexistence]. The reason I'm on about it is that it has to do with timelines: yours, mine, ours, and everyone's. If we say that a pickup truck is "sometimes" a car (in a broader sense of the latter word), we are not truly saying that it "sometimes" is that; rather, what we are saying is that in some instances of usage it is that. There is a continuous timeline on which any pickup truck both is and isn't a car (the whole time), as various persons' various occasions of usage come and go (but reality meanwhile keeps on truckin). (Box cat replies, now you're speakin my language.) Natural language is so thoroughly built on the mental model of individual experience (in which instances are coinstantiated with different/separate times [occasions]) that frankly it is often challenging (in many instances, on many occasions) to see past it and focus on the communal timeline. But my mind keeps nagging me to focus on the latter because it is the true salami of reality, notwithstanding individuals' diverse plans for slice line locations. Box cat is mostly just bored by this line of thought (it's old hat in his hatbox), but he's meowing for some salami, telling me that as long as I'm slicing some anyway, he'll take some please. I can hear him meowing in there; I can hear him from here. Does that saying anything about our shared timeline?
          • Old no-eyes isn't the one who will grumble about the fact that I just momentarily (on this occasion, in this instance) turned box cat's box into a hatbox, although of all the people who can see a problem with doing so, he'd lead the way (with his farseeing eyelessness). Later (on another occasion) the box will have reverted. Of all the people who can live with that sort of continuity error·ʷᵖ, box cat would lead the way (with his circumspect disposition). He's used to things being two things at once (and yes, cats are people too, at least sometimes or often, although perhaps some cats more than others).
            • PS: As long as (that is, while) his catbox is a hatbox, shall we consider him a hat? Well, he's comfortable being more than one thing at once, and we're comfortable having him be so (cozily comfortable in fact, as he's a quite comfortable hat). Surely there's no warmer fur hat than a live warmblooded one, as long as (that is, provided that) you can persuade it to stay on your head. Normally we don't negotiate with garments because they're not the sort of thing that has a mind of its own. They say that everything in life is negotiable, by which they mean that every transaction between humans can be haggled, but they hadn't figured on the notion that every phenomenon and event in every moment must be haggled. Everything in life is parametrizable. When and if he deigns to consent — when and if our cajoling succeeds — we'll toggle the values accordingly. Parameters on parameters.
  • Having stumbled across The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus (2022 [2005]) at the screaming bargain of USD 6.50, I bought it straight off the bat without hesitation, having learned my lesson about wordbook addiction (which is: fuck it, buy yet another anyway). The tagline on the cover is America's Best-Selling Thesaurus, placed in the position of a subtitle, albeit not that. Well we've got to tart it up a bit somehow if we want to cajole humans into buying a thesaurus, haven't we. I haven't had time to study its front matter yet, but I see that it gives, as an epigraph to the work, a delicious quote from Mark Twain. The way he waxes syn-aesthetic about syns in that moment shows something that old no-eyes can taste too (handwave etc). Anyway, one thing that's clear upon initial cursory inspection is that the structural bones of this thesaurus have the same DNA as the 1984 [1968] work, but they've dumbed down a few things, no doubt for salability's sake. Apparently they decided to switch the name by which they call "Ana", making it "rel" instead (that is, related, as in semantically related, not to be confused with Wiktionary's definition of related, which is etymonically related), and apparently they decided to switch the name by which they call "Con", making it "near ant" instead. Some ants are nearer and dearer than others, after all. Anyway, the book smells great, as does its cousin that I threw into the same shopping basket, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus (2020), which is thicker but is slightly less of a thesaurus (because half dictionary too). Some thesauruses are thesauruser than others. Certainly at USD 8.99 it qualifies as lumping into my nascent eight-fuckin-bucks category of human folly. I'll look forward to gnawing on these two. No doubt some unforgettable luncheons await.
  • In the department of blows that could easily have been less glancing, I recently stumbled across Devlin's Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms and, in a moment of silliness, decided not to buy it because I already have a shelfful of wordbooks and the first step to treatment is admitting that you have a problem; as they say, if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. Old no-eyes snickers: you call that a hole? He eats mineshafts for breakfast. I hadn't thought of him as Cornish, but don't they say something about a hole in the ground with a Cornishman at the bottom of it? He's corny all right, I'll give him that. Anyway, when I got home I realized, let's get real, this is User:Quercus solaris we're talking about — of all the people who won't bother to own Devlin's dictionary (or the Devil's), User:Quercus solaris wouldn't be one of them. So I unglanced that blow accordingly. I just read its short preface (because of course User:Quercus solaris would), and I encountered there his justification for being among those who don't bother with explicating shades of meaning: not only does it take up too many column inches for busy and tight-fisted businesspeople, but moreover, he shits on the very notion, and quotes Fowler to back him up on that point. Their point is that everyone needs to figure that shit out for themselves, and not use any word unless they have a proper handle on what it means. I agree wholeheartedly on the latter point, and I take the rest of their point, too, up to a point, but his remedy for "those readers who have no word sense" is to turn to [other] dictionaries for the needed remedial help [not to his], and I'm here to tell him from experience that even people who fancy themselves to have word sense (especially the ones who don't so much, really) can barely be persuaded to crack any/other dictionaries even on a good day (although even if they didn't, they'll often lie and say that they did) — and when it comes to any that they have to pay anything for (even a mere pittance), well, care to lay a wager? I'll take your money. Anyway, the rest of his front matter is interesting too, and I see that his "Latin Roots and Derivatives" list includes video and gives vision, although it misses view. So then between Devlin and Wiktionary you can get both, as two-stop shopping. I don't consider that to be the super-efficient help for busy tight-fisted businesspeople that his preface brags about. Sigh. Anyway, I'm glad I added him to the shelfful.
  • Earlier a bug had prompted me to ponder ant as a special case of cot, the diametric case among all parametric cases. Tonight I read Rose F. Egan and colleagues' front matter to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms (1984 [1968]) and was suitably impressed. If you want to sample the various flavors of ant (whereas some ants are more ant than others), it's worthwhile. Among various themes of coordinateness, "not-*" is more interesting than it may seem on the surface, as Egan et al showed. Some nots are more not-ish than others, but all are contrastive. The "Ana" and "Con" of Egan et al are themes of coordinateness. In turn they are coordinate with "Syn" and "Ant", as echoes: the same but fuzzier/dirtier and more diffuse.
    • Speaking of those, Egan et al explain that some synonymizers were more preoccupied by discriminations than others, whereas others (famously, Roget) explicitly couldn't be arsed with those. Regarding the ones who could: You know what they were on about? It was "as opposed to what?"
      • Speaking of those, I just read C.J. Smith's 1867 preface to his seminal dictionary of syn and ant. I find it interesting — concise, cogent, and impressive for its day. The Google Books scan of the 1868 version is cut off on one edge, but Open Library offers an unobstructed view of the 1895 reprint.
        • Chuck said (of himself, in the third person, which was the style at the time), "Principles or Degrees of Similarity, and Principles or Degrees of Opposition, have not been laid down, though they have been recognized in his own mind. He has rather endeavoured to place himself in the position, alternately, of two opposed thinkers, or debaters, so furnishing each with a short catena of Synonyms to express or aid the current of his thoughts, tendering at the same time to each such negatives as might be employed in the opposite argument." Oh Chuck, how right you are, and bless you. In a land of rampant sui-generis-ness, one starts merely by imagining — at least by asking — "as opposed to what?", if one knows enough to bother doing so.
          • A thought bubbling in recent hours (24-48): although it is true that the 180° opposite sort of way is, for being antonymous, the best way, my favorite way at the moment — the way that is currently most buttering my eggroll — may be another: the "not not ant" way, which is different from the other "not not ant" thing (not ant, jocularly, fixing a Donny Don't move). The thing about ants that are ants because they're not not ants is that they aren't monogamous: they have that relationship with others, too: Nonexclusive. Dirty cheaters, lol. Speaking of cons, Egan et al say that not just any candidate qualifies as an Ant, as some ants are anter than others; the rest are merely Cons. And Egan of all would know, as I've never met anyone who has savored the flavors of ants more than she has. (Which isn't saying too much, given who I've not met, but still, anyone would have to get up pretty early, no doubt.) Wiktionary doesn't use that same formal schema (Ants/Cons), and that's OK. In Wiktionary, ants that aren't quite antsy enough can live at also instead, and do quite well enough there (perhaps even run a dairy).
            • The night's nightly ring from Bell: it's funny that I had just mentioned things that aren't not the opposite of others (such as not doing what Donny Don't does), because Bell said, "Mr. Colville walked over while we were at it, and stood looking thoughtful. But in the end he said, 'You ain't making a bad job of that, not at all you ain't.' We sorted out his negatives and were highly pleased." The other bell rings for tonight are some feelings I get when reading this work by Egan and the rest (i.e., Gove, Goepp, Kay, Foss, Gilman, Egan, and Kelsey). It's an amazing achievement and a stupendous value. I can't believe I bought my used copy for eight fucking bucks. It's fucking stupid when one thinks about it. I think about what my own education told us about thesauruses, even all the way through to a university degree: essentially, "any of various dusty books of synonyms in the library that you and everyone else are welcome not to crack or fuck with, and who cares, the end." There's a disjunct somewhere in this. It's hard to put into adequate words off the top of one's head, and I just checked and there's no entry for disjunct in the MW Syn-Ant to help with that challenge, so I'll have to dig further later elsewhere for those (that is, adequate words). The other thing that strikes me is how with every line, one (as the reader) is typically like, yes, exactly, I agree (regarding the discriminations and the Syn-Ant-Ana-Con, barring a few that are more obscure than others). It reminds me of the giant knot of mystery that ideas about the poverty of the stimulus as regards semantics try to untangle (regardless of whether their conceptions of the untangling are right or not), speaking of education per se struggling to equal, and yet falling short of, what this book distills, recaps, and conveys (and can be bought for eight fucking bucks). I've had a thought or two about what that answer might entail (triangulation etc). The full title of the work is A Dictionary of Discriminated Synonyms With Antonyms and Analogous and Contrasted Words. It's exactly what it says on the fucking tin, and what it says on the tin is as densely packed as the tin itself is. What a treasure of canned fish. Now I'm hungry. Anyway, as usual I am supposed to be in bed by now — midnight oil and the candle at both ends, handwave etc.
  • caribou | snow shoveler
  • Tunick 2014 relays an observation that googling tells me is conventional wisdom among cattle people: Brown Swiss are docile but stubborn. Thus: They may resist your direction, but you might want to kiss their big dumb sweet stupid cute faces anyway. That reminds me to go watch as peewee mcnugget tries things for the first time in his little dumb baby goat life.
  • Reprise a train of thought: "[…] comeronyms are part of a whole and so is the tip of an iceberg, and a succession of progressively smaller versions of that tip (by successive salami slices as conic sections) are progressively meronymous. In a figurative way, kinds of things behave the same way, as they are progressively hyponymous by the same salami technique owing to the transitivity of hyponymy." Now bring in another felloe: In a figurative way, metonymic things behave the same way, as they are progressively metonymous by the same salami technique owing to the transitivity of metonymy.
    • No shit, one might reply. And yes, I am well aware: the value of the parameter for the amount of shit is low. But why does anyone fuck around with scrap metal and torches? Don't they know that metal things (buildings, vehicles, sculptures) have already been built? Very well. But for all that, I don't see any flying cars around, do you? And is the desirable number of sculptures maxed out yet? Garages are like arseholes: you've got yours, and I've got mine.
      • Usually in metonymy there are no more than one or two steps along the progression, archetypally. The numerical neighborhood of this particular parameter value reference range may suggest something about human cognition; which is to say, it might possibly say more about human cognition than about the reality that human cognition models. Some exceptions to it might be found — as is true with most reference ranges — and they would be interesting to sniff at for their own shared parameters (subparameters). I'll start dirtspading to see if any can be unearthed.
  • Which are your favorite flavors of the fallacy fallacy? Tentatively I will declare that my favorites are the straw man flavor (not the straw berry, although that one is a close second) and the true Scotsman (not the butter kind, although that kind is next best), because I've sampled those flavors a lot in other people's kitchen batches. Most precisely, there is also something else that goes on that is in fact different from the fallacy fallacy itself. Rather, people pride themselves on mistaking any analytically exploratory disabusal of any hypothesis (even the most reasonable, plausible, or likely hypothesis) for the burning of a straw man, and they pride themselves on mistaking any attempt at analytical assaying of the essence of any concept for the assertion of a true Scotsman. Perhaps by the same logic taken to its natural conclusion, there's no point in ever doing any GC-MS because no one can ever say what the minimal set is for differentiation of one thing from anything else, anyway. That analogy may not stand up to a true hiding, but at least (so far) I tried tripping it and it didn't topple yet. Anyway, in asking why these proud mistakes happen, one must remember what the true goal of pedants and smartasses is (speaking of the true nature of things): to find fault, even when there isn't any or there isn't enough. Some way must be found, and when no true way is apparent, a speciously plausible way is the next best kind of way.
  • Regarding known surface analysis versus assumed chronology/history: Is it enough to assume that an adverb is derived from the adjective "by default", in terms of historical development? Admittedly the answer is, "Close enough to say yes for practical purposes without going on a philologic odyssey for each one." Related corollary thought: For -ly adverbs (which is the most famous kind of adverbs, Englishly speaking), the adverb will show up in the suffix cat automatically. If one wants to ensure that the adverb shows up in the prefix cat too, then just use the manually added cat for that. This (categorizing) is an independent variable from the other (known surface analysis versus assumed chronology/history), but it's correlated via mediation and it bears a reminder.
  • I rang up Bell a bit tonight. It's funny (or perhaps odd) that he mentioned of Kett that "He was a bell-ringer, and understood the complicated art of bobs and grandsires" (1961:110-111), because I had just been thinking on the previous page spread (108-109) that Bell himself is a bell-ringer, ringing multiple bells in the belfry (e.g., Bell on mud, Bell on boots). Somehow I suspected that once we got to Suffolk this would be so. Math teachers can disabuse synchronicity till the cows come home, and I know they're right, but nonetheless, it doesn't feel like a coincidence that I'm ringing up Bell 1961 at this point in my life. We'll see what rings next.
  • The ant is back in my ear (or his agent, a subservient bug), bugging me about the fact that comeronyms are part of a whole and so is the tip of an iceberg, and a succession of progressively smaller versions of that tip (by successive salami slices as conic sections) are progressively meronymous. In a figurative way, kinds of things behave the same way, as they are progressively hyponymous by the same salami technique owing to the transitivity of hyponymy. If one wants to sandbox an example, a handy abstract noun to use as fodder might be shittiness, simply because humans have done such a phenomenal job of inventing so many different readily named kinds of it. (It's one of their many talents.) First slice off for us a list of various kinds of shittiness (which we could list in a hyponyms section at shittiness, but we won't [yet or maybe ever], because the inclusion criteria and potential population seem somewhat up in the air and unbounded). Our sample list for now (a fair stab at a candidate for a consensus contrast set) will be the seven deadly sins: thus, vanity, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, and anger. If you touch any one of them, you are touching their hypernym too, via the transitivity of coinstantiation. This is like how if you touch any of the conjoined felloes, you are touching the rim, and you are also touching the wheel. But I need to work on a still-better abstract salami, one whose major subsections are in turn divisible into smaller (thematically subsumable) slices. Perhaps flavors of dishonesty ranked by how criminal they are (from not at all down to very)? Hmm, I'll ponder it later, or at least let the bug crawl around on it for a while in the meantime. One query that old no-eyes keeps asking the bug is, "Yes, fine, but why won't you shut up about it, given that it keeps seeming trivial at the end of every time that I palpate it?" The kind of bug that is famous for being subservient to ants is that sort of aphid that serves as the dairy cattle (of a sort) to a certain kind of ant, but this little agent seems more like a cricket to me in that he won't shut up. Does that make him the cousin of an earworm? (In a nontaxonomic way?) Earworms are mysterious: of all the potential worms, how does any particular one become the one that won't leave for days on end? (And dim the light of an already faded prima donna?) They're trying to tell us something, sometimes, apparently, but they can't spit it straight out (so they have to keep on regurgitating and remasticating it, or at least reloading it). This little bug seems to be fiddling a tune as if to say that if you hold a torch up to this iceberg long enough you might melt a hole in it — it might drip some runoff that you weren't expecting but that checks out upon retrospective inspection, like I'll be damned, that facet was there that whole time and I never saw or felt it until now. Old no-eyes knows how that theme feels in his chest and sinuses. And why wouldn't he get help from a fiddling bug? Just because we tend to talk of groping handholds doesn't mean that he doesn't lead a rich multisensory life, in a syn-aesthetic way. There is a strange paradox at the heart of his partnership with beneficial insects (lol). (He just groaned and slapped me.) And can't the band play on? / Just listen, they play my song / Ash to ash, dust to dust, fade to black
  • It is conceivable that I will increase the degree to which I help move syn-and-ant laundry lists into the Thesaurus namespace, leaving behind (in their place) a (clean little) link to a Thesaurus entry or two (as syn-and-ant hubs). I have done some of that already, and it is a good thing. (Regarding hubs and spokes, as well as felloes, I'm a bit of a fancier perhaps.) Becoming someone who specializes in doing so (hub-and-spoking the syn-and-ant links) is not necessarily a goal or aspiration of mine, but what I can say even now is that to whatever degree I end up going down that road without especially trying to take myself down it (so much as strolling down it for fun), doing so will be acceptable. And it probably won't attract any complaints from Wiktionarian minimalists, who would generally approve of it. I, too, approve of it, because (1) I'm not aware, so far, of any big downsides to building on that model, and (2) it aligns with an interest of mine: maximizing the hyperlinked connections between semantic relations while also avoiding overwhelming or annoying human minds. The powerfulness will be there, waiting latently, and it is merely up to each person how much they choose to partake of it or not on any given day. Those who choose to stomp on it for kicks can crack a smile.
  • Another detail of A. BELL's schooldaze was a maths teacher whose glass eye would misbehave when he got angry. (Side note: bell tone: dated orthography: maths. teacher; prep. school; of a time.) A.B. himself caused such an angry episode when the stress of a new boarding school life started to break him one day. The straw that broke the camel's back was the word hypotenuse, which sent him into hysterically uncontrollable laughter, but one can see that it was not in a laughworthy way. In a glassy-eyed way, one can see that some glazed eyes may be glazier than others. (And some glaziers, too, especially on payday; but we haven't got to Suffolk yet.) The fever passed, but humorless old glass-eye had no vitreous humor to spare — at least on the contralateral side.
  • I'd meant to get to bed by now, but an ant put a bug in my ear. He pointed out, regarding things that are more ant than cot from some viewpoints, that to be ant is a special case of being cot: the diametric case, among all parametric cases. The hours of the clock face (contained within the clock case) are certainly coordinate to one another; and six o'clock high is truly antonymous to twelve o'clock low — in the 180° opposite sort of way, which (for being antonymous) is the best way — but six o'clock in the evening is not the opposite of twelve o'clock noon, any more than cheese fries are the opposite of chili fries; it's not even equidistant (in a temporal way) from one noon to the next. It is equidistant from one twelve to the next, but those two twelves are dissimilar: they are homonymous as 12 or 12:00 on a 12-hour clock face (dial or otherwise), but one is midday and the other is midnight: homonymy is not synonymy, and it's not even a guarantee against diametric antonymy, although even a stopped clock is right twice a day. (Is homonymy ever autohomonymy, as a different beast from polysemy? Does it sometimes exist as a special case of doubletness, collapsed to morphologic zero like a black hole is collapsed to event zero? Some holes are blacker than others, as with ants.) The two sixes in a 24-hour day are more antonymous to each other than six is to twelve (despite being more homonymous), because life's not fair and thus neither are 12-hour clock faces. Which might be to say (if you will, and some will more than others), +6 is to −6 more than +6 is to +12. Something about the notion of ant being a special position on the clock face of cot reminds one of syn being a subsumed portion of hyper, on the common thread of holonymous unity (which is to say, comeronymous community) — the 12 hours of the classic clock dial (cousins aside) are felloes holding hands, and holism makes the wheels go round (just as teamwork makes the dream work, and speaking of which, I'm now overdue to get busy sawing logs). But I'd like to close out this timekeeping exercise (which has kept me from my bedtime) by pointing out that perhaps as shapes and surfaces and strings are useful ways to embody mathematics, things like syn as the subsumed portion of hyper, and ant as the diametric case of cot, are useful embodiments for semantic relations: language talking about "the same thing" or asking "as opposed to what?" (the ontology of everyday life). No doubt some KRR stiff already wrote a dissertation about it, but meanwhile what do any of the rest of us know about that? (Dude, where's my flying car?)
    • Update, various months later: Regarding "Is homonymy ever autohomonymy, as a different beast from polysemy? Does it sometimes exist as a special case of doubletness, collapsed to morphologic zero like a black hole is collapsed to event zero?": Yes, I think the concept here is valid; moreover, I think it's not even mysterious, although it can easily seem so when one's mind is spinning its mill rolls fruitlessly on the surface of it, struggling to crack the grain. Once inside, it's straightforward, and there are some leverage points for seeing it (that is, for moving between the levels successfully). The leverage point that resurfaced for my attention today is the clue given by an occasional Wiktionary entry that has more than one (H3 or H4) "Noun" section for any given single etymology. What it is telling you (in a rather taciturn way) is that present-day English has two nouns that developed at different times from that same ancestor (an example: feels and feels). From there, I would argue — moreover, I feel quite certain, speaking of feels — that sometimes when you read a single list of many polysemic senses for a given word at a given POS heading (you know the ones: the ones with 8 or 10 or 12 or more senses), what you are seeing there may in fact easily contain some of those same underlying divisions (i.e., the diachronic ones that drove the formal distinction of two "Noun" sections in other cases) but simply also meanwhile contain a venial deficiency in teasing out which senses most properly would belong under another "Noun" heading instead of being under that same "Noun" heading. And when I say it's venial, I mean it's dead venial (some venialities are venialer than others): it represents full throttle on humans' ability to chase them retrospectively; that is, it represents the current state of the art for our ability to recognize, analyze, document, and codify them. We might improve on some of them later, but as of today, they represent the best that we have been able to do so far, and the best that we could be expected to do (by anyone; by ourselves). Moreover, it may not even be feasible to really improve on them as much as they deserve, for an interesting reason: let's say (for sake of argument) one of them is technically divisible into four or more divisions, by some logically valid operational definition of where a division is warranted. Imagine the net result: four or more "Noun" sections in the Wiktionary entry for the headword. There's an obvious problem with it: many a user would not understand it and would not profit by it (that is, derive value from it). It would seem counterproductive to their use cases and needs. This is the juncture where one must ask oneself: what is the precise nature of a zero? It is like a factor of 1, in fact: it represents the collapse of difference to equal a collapse of differentiability, except by exceptional means. This reminds me of spectroscopic methods that can detect the ppt order of magnitude for levels of contaminants: they can differentiate samples that cannot be differentiated in any other way, which is fascinating and enviable at the same time that it is also, in many ways albeit not all, useless.
  • It's funny how eyelets lead to buttonholes and buttonholes lead to lapels. A. BELL (¼) was telling me just last night about how some headmaster or other (or some headmasters more than others, lol) grabbed him by the buttonholes (on some flimsy pretense or other). I'm giving A. BELL a chance to ring the bell if he pleases. So far not much, but then we haven't got to Suffolk yet. Before I pack it up for the night I'll go ring him up for a bit.
  • The ramifications of autohyponymy are fascinating, not only on the level of dynamic ramification (i.e., the potentialities for the shape of any given hierarchical tree or canopy of several thereof (with tree squirrels hopping between interlaced branches), its branching-points' instantiations [or not], their locations, the degree of negligibility that human sentience assigns to each one conditionally) but also regarding their implications for the degree to which humans in aggregate are capable of refraining from bashing in one another's skulls with big sticks (segments of ramas grandes). One of the underlying (root/trunk) factors is that etically complete (exhaustive) differentiation schemas — taxonomies (both biologic and otherwise) and ontologies — are of course beyond human cognitive limits (not so much beyond comprehension, in the sense of scientific analysis and building any given giant taxonomy that no one person can memorize but some can write down (e.g., here is a typical example), as beyond conscious/sentient integration in each moment), so of course humans must always continue to identify (1) things that not everyone considers worth differentiating in a given context (thus, within that context, for that purpose, fair argument for synonym versus coordinate term [or more syn that cot], or synonym versus hypernym [or more syn than hyper], or synonym versus parasynonym [or more syn than plesio], or coordinate term versus hypernym [or more cot than hyper], or [last but not least] coordinate term in a way judged insufficiently relevant in this context and thus shall not be named here [ or else — namespace territoriality ]) and also (2) things that some people struggle (more than others) to be capable of differentiating (i.e., struggle cognitively), which has to do with things such as conceptual models, conceptual metaphors, conceptual analysis, mental models (mental schemas), abstract thinking, analytic reasoning, and the rest of a laundry list of similar fabrics. A better list of those (one closer to whole) is something that old no-eyes can dutifully go off and retrieve with his prayerbead strings and breadcrumb trails, but (1) you get the point ("and so on") and (2) we don't always bother him every time because he gets annoyed that so few others are competent at that task, and each retrieval is a schlep that can take a while, depending on which hills and dales must be visited. But he does know of hollers where specific tree trunks have hollows where squirrels stash their choicest nuts. He also duly respects the critters (squirrels and bees) by not taking all their nuts and honey at once. (No sense giving them any due reason to holler.) I've been wrenching on some engines in the garage recently, but not every holophonor tune is worth releasing. Also, I am a reasonable person, and so there are some things where as one is wrenching on them, one admits to oneself that they are a bit silly; relatedly, the engine that develops the output is itself worth parameterizing (tuning), and regarding its horsepower, perhaps don't go to the corner store for beer and cigs while driving a barely contained explosion, lol. I should stay out of the garage more often than I do, but wrenching on shit is fun. Please at least keep the gas bottles (nitrous or otherwise) at the far end of the garage and with a safety chain in place. One of the thickest branches among the ramifications of autohyponymy is that at heart it is a way for our mere little human minds to build and modify practically useful ontologic branchings even despite the (inevitable) fact that we can't pay attention simultaneously to every single etically identifiable differentiating factor (i.e., every such factor that allows potential differentiability). How would you build a sentient agent (a meatbag one or otherwise) that handles the binding problem with efficient practical shortcuts? Well, evidently enough, it would be one that places a parameter value on the degree of negligibility (or lack thereof) for each differentiating parameter. Which is to say, the parlor trick is to have parameters for controlling which parameters are activated (i.e., get meta). (A funny thing about having just formulated that thought consciously is that as soon as I did so, an eyeless alert instantly went off for analogy detection regarding epigenetics. I'll have to palpate that one more later.) Anyway, cut humans a break (including you) — no one can see the whole elephant, so we're all (each of us) just a member with a parameter value assigned for how much of any given elephant we can see at once in any particular ambient lighting, although sometimes some can do more with the available blue than others. Admittedly, old no-eyes has an unfair advantage on that playing field, but he's nice enough to stick mainly to the garage so he doesn't inadvertently scare the townsfolk; and besides, speaking of parameterizations, he himself is but a rank amateur compared to other things that could exist, and perhaps soon will? I don't know — if you want an "expert" opinion, ask some asshole in Palo Alto who is begging someone [anyone] to regulate him. Speaking of parameterization, tuning, regulating, and getting to normal.
    • PS: Relatedly: Old no-eyes informs me that his fingers can feel that the difference between vertical polysemy and the regular old normal kind is not as stark a forking as it may seem to regular old normal eyes. Thus under hypernym polysemy how much do we value the differentiation that parameterizes autohyponymy formally versus messier canopy-blending, and also versus regular old normal hyponymy-branching, which sticks a modifier on (vertical polysemy [syn autohyponymy])? This is the same problem as wrenched upon recently regarding digger: the excavation contractor will smack you if you use extra words in the context of his job site; the northwoods lumberjack will smack you if you use extra words in his evergreen forest. The practical distinction is the one between senseid and hyponym list member, and relatedly, (1) the degree to which that difference matters (which is a parameter value that varies across instances [headwords]) and (2) the degree to which often neither answer is wrong but sometimes one is preferable (which is a parameter value for degree of preferability). (Snapshot: senseid "any of several types of such things" [e.g., 'things that dig'] contextually/conditionally mapping [in each utterance] to one of the hyponym list members.) All he is pointing out (sharply) is that it is OK to value differentiability but just keep in mind that when one is hopping around a canopy, one usually does not pay stark attention to which tree any particular perch-hold belongs to; to do so is usually counterproductive (a fact that is a tie that binds). This is the nature of interwovenness of threads in fabrics. Different thread but same shirt. Anyway, Wiktionary's practical answer is "just do what any other respectable dictionary would normally do" (e.g., OED, MW, AHD), and that's fine. Wiktionary is good to go, just being pruned as any regular old normal human mind would prune any regular old normal dictionary. It is interesting to ponder, though, what other projects are being tuned elsewhere (in other garages); but just to inject a degree of cynical realism about the timeline on such things, once again I will ask, Dude, where's my flying car?
  • Indirect fire — this bucket got moved and promoted.
  • Templates l and m fall out of Popups, which I had long noticed but had decided to ignore because (1) I can't control it and (2) someone will probably fix it sometime anyway. However, I've come around to thinking — as prompted by a recent discussion at Wiktionary's Beer parlour — that wikilinking with brackets is what I'll do from now on in definitions and on this page, instead of using l and m. Even id parameters can be linked to in this way, as all one needs to do is add "English:_" after the # (hash). I'll still use the templates at semantic relations links because it is considered a desirable and widely upheld standard to use them there, per recent discussion.
  • Rx: conceptual metaphor; ideasthesia; KRR OK but some utterances are fuzzier cats than others.
    • Sub-cat: A basis for semantic tagging of punnery? Word-X-sense-A-here-now is-pun-on word-Y-sense-B (because blah)? Then there is the tag for the theme of "Cannot link to a single sense because the box contains a cat with a pending disposition." (Some cats just have nasty dispositions.) Explaining a joke kills it. Nevertheless, inquiring machines want to know. No doubt some KRR stiff already wrote a dissertation about it, but meanwhile what do any of the rest of us know about that? (Dude, where's my flying car?)
  • The tie between the boardroom and the boarding house is the tie between the board member and the boarder: a seat at the table. One is more at table than the other, as when the boarder boards, they get room and board; meanwhile, the board may often get no board, but at least it gets a chair who chairs its affairs, or tables them.
  • Learning to work the bin lids, god bless me. Postprocessing my way to what might-could've been unprocessed (whole foods, lol). I don't carve the statue, I carve away everything that's not the statue. All this does is get me to normal. In recent days, some simulator runs in the neighborhood of dark green and all its siblings and niblings being just as blue as dark red (no redder), as an etic parameterization at the end of the THub rainbow (all induction fallacies aside, whether in the barnyard, in the auto-parts bin, or at sea). It was more daydream than blowglance, but the pan washed out these specks at least, so I'm taking them to town to see what they'll buy. It's a world in which autoparts, car parts, and automotive components are all nodes with is-syn-of edges and the mere accident of SoPness isn't allowed to poop the party of that etic integrity. (No shitting the bed; no tainting the powder bed [it makes the postprocessing craggier]; no party-stroopers.) Some prism flashes: Simultaneously comeronyms and cohyponyms, simply "who am I to you" (they say to either mum or auntie, who are sisters, as the cat asks, I can haz-partz? ) Shut it down, boss. (But PS, though (lest we forget): Dude, where's my flying car? If you that baby's daddy, where you been at? Behind that curtain: cheap talk but not enough investment. A margarita party for twenty but there's only enough money for one straw, so they spend half their time maintaining elaborate straw-timeshare plans.) GPT is to KRR as word salad is to wordsmithing, but the pursestring people don't necessarily understand the difference. It doesn't make GPT garbage, as a world with both layers may be OK, but salad alone is dicey. That'll do, Bessy.
    • PS: Just a scratch here of the meta-binlid type. I can hear a boss saying, why'd you take them light yellow flecks to town so soon? But old no-eyes braids prayer beads and drops breadcrumbs because his hands are his eyes (speaking of comeronymy-autohyponymy cousins and of syn-aesthetics). He curates handholds for the same reason why you snap vacation pics. A slide projector bore perhaps, but each buddy is free to leave this livingroom or stay, as he likes. Snacks and refreshments, though.
      • PPS: Regarding SoPness, parts constitute subassemblies after all, and holism makes the wheels go round; the fellow parts (e.g., felloes) are but cou-sins. Regarding one-straw parties, this is your KRR on KKR (any questions?). Regarding scifi as business development, weirder things have happened. Regarding prayer beads, just emptying the magazine. Regarding breadcrumbs, just polishing off some chicken scratch (nutrients for pretty feathers).
        • PPPS: Speaking of burnt /paɪ/, I promised that I won't mention the antihero again, and that's fine. But in the course of exploring a potential space via all induction fallacies, I found my way to another pyro, this time Pyrrho of Elis, via pyrrhonism and the problem of induction. Heartburny. And one breadcrumb for the grue-bleen new riddle of induction. The rest of the thought train (a burning coal vein) can be snuffed.
          • P^n+1(S): I'm being a bore on this coal train now, but I have to scratch the following itch, for prayerbead purposes (no mere catch and release for this one): you can't have eticness without the theme that pyrrhonism identified. That's it; it's that simple. And in its absence you have only dogma, which is an eyeless analogue of all the spatial neglects (such as these and these). Speaking of something that needs an etic supercategory. Super-cat cares not for catch and release; he wants to have his fish and eat it too, as well as to teach rather than give.
  • In the feedroom, just a chicken scratch on this scratchpad before I forget this little nugget. Dr S brought still more on the theme of "almost couldn't be a surgeon at all, and yet he ends up among the five or six". He tells about his teammate from Greece. That guy was an even more miraculous example of that theme. Different mechanism for why and how, though. Which underscores my point about the underlying strata, where various currents intermix. As do feeds.
  • It's funny you mentioned unnaming, because tonight Dr S was telling me about the drug with no name (as his chapter title has it). It was another of the important advances, about a decade after the epoch-making one that he was telling about earlier. Speaking of inflamm(y), they expected it to have autoimmune indications as well, and they were right, although it didn't remake the world in that category (but it helped).
  • To be teflon is, or could be said to be, to be unencumberable: no one can drag them down; people throw shit to see what sticks, but nothing does. But this semantic relation is one that Wiktionary does not need to contemplate. I like to write such instances here (on this page) because it reminds me to stay calibrated. The Most Interesting Man in the World often told us, "Stay thirsty, my friends," but I like this advice still better: "Stay calibrated, my friends." A blessing of parameterization is having interim buckets to set things in without either losing them (catch and release) or taking them across some particular line. It creates a space in which a third option can exist. Or rather, reveals that space. Spatial neglect reduction.
  • A Pyrrhic victory is named for Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose name reflects connection with flaming/red shit, so the idea that a pyrrhic victory involves burning it all down (like a pyro) is not out of line, although it is birdshitty. The victors thus win fame, or infamy, which they may get through flame, or inflamm(y). A herostratic fame through flame: not a shining example; antiheroic. Which is why unnaming was advised. Very well, I won't mention the bastard again.
  • Getting near the end of Dr S's sharings. Lots of interesting thoughts in response. Not all for here or for now. One note (here, for now) is the mismatch between the epoch-making nature of some drugs' advents and the fact that most people have no clue that that nature exists in that instance. Most (educated or semieducated) people today know about Before Fleming and After Fleming, and Dr Duncan would be glad to know that they also tend to know about Before Banting and Best and After Banting and Best, but there are others (much more others), and Dr S imparted one of them. Another bell ring was when he asked rhetorically, what's the good of developing a new procedure if there are only five or six people in the world who can perform it? Amen brother. Less extreme instances of that theme crop up a lot in life. I add, what makes those five or six different? One replies, talent, and yes, of course one is not wrong. But there is more beneath that floor: a subfloor, a foundation. Dr S explains that he almost couldn't be a surgeon at all, and yet he ends up among the five or six. How did he get there, if that duality is true? It is mysterious, yes, but it is not a perfectly opaque black box. It's a blackness to explore over time, and there are waters that flow and blend there, some less murky than, but not more voluminous than, various cross-currents. Dr S knows about heartaches. Speaking of those, a certain American farmer joined the line recently. His reputation preceded him; a river bum told me about him years ago. He hasn't always been American, and he might even know some paysans from up Canby's crick. We'll see.
    • PS: Canby himself is a river bum, or at least fancies himself one; but I've met better-met ones.
  • Canby was being rude and disparaging so I sent him to the back of the line. It probably won't stop me from finishing his little tale sometime, but he can park himself and cool his heels, and sit in time-out and think about what he did, and I'll tell him when it's OK to stop. Dr Duncan at least has the right attitude, even if the times don't entirely wash off. Some people at least root for the right bend in the arc, if nothing else. On some level I have no business taking a meeting with Dr K anytime soon, but to paraphrase another Mr K, he drove a dump truck full of synchronicity up to my house and I'm not made of stone. Or at least the stone I'm made of is subject to ringing when struck deftly, and there's a line to take a whack. (I just sent Canby to the back of it.) Speaking of Canby and of what is or may be made of stone, Canby's house was made of stone, but someone drove a wagon full of the local specialty up to it, and even stone couldn't resist. He promised he'd tell the rest of it later, but I may not humor him for a while. Enough talking for tonight; it's time to listen.
  • I beg Dr Duncan, don't leave me hangin bro, but he probably will. He smells like a likely teetotaler to me, but I surely can't blame him, given his calling. God bless him, he's doing the Lord's work with his Pilgrim's Progress. I thought it mildly interesting how urine-focused the paraclinicals are in his day, but one must remember the times, to stay oriented (times three; aay-oh! amirite? Don't leave me hangin bro.) Which nips from the bottle won't help with, by the way, I admit. No shots, then? Or how many? 1+, 2+, 3+, more? Some are plussier than others; how easily 1½ becomes 2. But some kinds of shots are to be avoided if possible. Which is one of the themes of his book, after all. Onward with more progress.
  • Paging Dr Duncan tonight. So far, mg%, plus vicinity. It's bad luck to go on too much about that, so I won't. See what rings first. In line for a burrito, or for a fogbank, or with a handtruck, cursing the "cleverness" of the pursestring retcons (those who put the con in retcon), while Dr Duncan sits by a window upstairs and dominoes fall in the basement. I hear the report of them falling, which like thunder takes some time. Not far away, on another day, I too sit by a window; one that doesn't open, though, but one that likewise can't be sat by anymore, at least not in the old way. And with other company (much more other), on a different per diem scale, and out of pocket to boot. Cons. But for people smart enough to pull this con, they sure are flashlightless in other ways, though. I sit there on a break from teaching low-light backside-detection. They find it rocket-sciency and bimanual. But then they would though.

  • semantic nadir
    • 2023 June 7, Erik Hoel, “Stop trying to make a "good" social media site. You want what cannot be had”, in Intrinsic Perspective‎[7], retrieved 2023-06-07:
      At first things go great, because no one is using the new blockchain and transactions confirm fast. But then, eventually, the new chain starts getting actually used, and transactions begin to slow to a crawl, and everyone realizes that they can’t outrun the problem that decentralized currencies are inevitably very slow, and that Bitcoin might be close to as good as it gets anyways. This is because there is an irreducible flaw—that decentralization is slow—that no design can fully get around. You're limited by your materials. ¶ Spinning up new social media websites mimics this, except what you are trying to outrun is human nature. No design of social media can get rid of what I like to call the "semantic nadir," which is what you'll inevitably experience if your tweet ever goes viral, wherein eventually someone will take your tweet in literally the worst possible way (there's some classic examples of this, as generally if you say "I love cheesecake" it won't be long before someone reaches to "Oh, so you hate regular cake"—that's the semantic nadir).
      • Update, a day or two later: What Hoel identified and labeled (the semantic nadir) is clearly connected ontologically with Bernstein's Second Law, although it is differentiable regarding the difference between (1) polysemically coexistent senses of a single term (= either one word or a collocation that syntactically equals the same kind of unit/segment as a semantic node (an ontologic node), such as a compound noun or other shortish noun phrase, notwithstanding the degree of arbitrariness of how word boundaries are emically defined) versus (2) the complete bundle or baggage of meaning carried by a sentence. However, at the moment I provisionally believe that it is "the same thing" in the sense that two leaves on the same branch of a tree are "the same thing" at the level of the whole branch. Anyone who might want to get a gut feel for why they seem so related should read Bernstein at the various points that touch these leaves.
  • Finished Evans 1971 last night. Overall a great visit, almost surprisingly so. I'll catch him again elsewhere. Nothing else worth recording here for 1971 at the moment except one more thought from one more passing traveler. Will Gosling said, "the biggest godsend that ever came to Bass's in the maltings was the endless belt." His point was the relieving of the degree of backbreakingness of the maltsters' labor, which he described so well as to twinge the degree of heartachingness in any reader who knows enough. I thought I'd just jot Will's sentence here since it mentions endless belts, which I had too, earlier herein. He was talking about the conveyor kind, which is a different parametrical flavor from the V kind, but the endlessness of the conveyor kind loops back around to the adjacent Caterpillar track animation: in both instances, new ways for loads to be carried, and boy were people (who knew enough) glad to see them come. I don't think it's important except as another bell ring, but then such a ring is all the more we can ask of our spirits, so I jotted it in case it might end up being important later. It may not, as the only things that can end up somehow are things that reach some end, or at least a juncture, and endlessness may not lend itself to that; but then the juncture of an endless belt is precisely what makes it so. Maybe part of what comes out of it will be that I'll end up paying some attention to junctures in the weeks coming up, and what goes around will come around. Smooth-running V-belts in the grooves; such quiet operation. Speaking of smoothness, grooves, and spirits from maltings, now for some. Cheers, felloes, my fellow back'us boys as odd as Job. We've never cared for so much running, but we know how to wait.
  • A PS about a recent belated feedbin diversion. (From the same batch: a reminder: do keep in mind that hogs are stupid.) It mentioned the theme of kids getting revenge on the old soaping-out-the-mouth punishment by either enjoying it or pretending to (out of spite). So then the same f-cking day I'm breezing through Callahan 1989 and he mentions that theme. The nun got pissed off because the kid (his classmate) liked that punishment, or pretended to. WTF? Never before that day, and probably never again, but twice in that day. F--- this shit — if I bought a lottery ticket it'd come up pure random nonmatching bullshit. But the books I visit are all like, "Mr Coincidence Ghost will see you now; Mr Coincidence Ghost can't wait to ring that bell and piss on the carpet." Also the thing with the highway diner near the bridge. The strangest thing about that one is how uninteresting it is; a f----n conversational dead-end. F----n ghosts. No respect. I'm waiting for the shoe to drop with Canby. Dollars to donuts that mthrfkng Canby can't get done running his mouth without lighting a match. He already casually dropped some shit about a house that blew up, something about wagonloads of the local specialty. Didn't bother to explain how or why that managed to happen. Maybe later? "More on that later"–ass mthrfr. So of course Evans too just now is all like, "perhaps best just to wait and see whether we find out later", in so many words. All you clowns owe me some lottery tickets.
  • In recent days, I'm continuing on my tour through East Anglia with Evans, among other things here and there. Earlier (in his book [1971] and in the calendar) I'd worked out, with a bit of help from others, that a back'us is a backhouse. I'd tried to do the same regarding a trav'us and come up short; so I figured I'd just let that one go. Turns out not only that Evans explains it later in his book but also that even he had needed some help from others to unpack it (let alone me). Turns out that a trav'us is a travehouse, that is, a trave house. Which makes perfect sense, but the reason I couldn't guess it on my own is that, like most English speakers, I'd not known what a trave is, because the word trave is now as rare as the object that it names, which reflects the decline in the ubiquitousness of the task that that object facilitates (that is, it hardly ever gets done anymore, and what little of it gets done happens among only a few people, in a few subcultures). But past that hurdle, though, once acquainted, I found the instance apt and unsurprising — a nice illustration of the theme that among people for whom any particular concepts and differentiations are important and quotidian, concise terms will naturally develop. Both of those thoughts together lead into the general case of such things, and Evans himself then went into it, which almost surprised me. He gave overall a great discussion of it, including the theme that the language of the common people is not at all impoverished in its power for concepts, differentiations, and their succinct expression (in fact, quite the opposite, despite misapprehensions among many people who "talk like an essay" [and it was funny that Dr Johnson was mentioned here because I'd just run across a balancing point from him yesterday]). Evans pointed out, and gave a nice illustration of how and why, dialectal varieties are not inferior to standard varieties and in fact are even superior to them in some ways. I agree, and I add that they are not impoverished for communicative power even though their lexicon has been accused of poverty of speech in certain other ways. Humans in general — even the commoner or poorer ones no less than the others — are quite good at being sharply (even subtly and eloquently) discerning, within emic limits; it is only the etic extension that most humans have trouble with (basically because they aren't sufficiently aware of the existence of the space in which such extension can exist, which is not unlike hemispatial neglect; it is an analogue of it, eyelessly speaking, a fact that broaches the spaces [the blacknesses] in which these and these exist). Speaking of which, Evans even then broached the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which almost surprised me. He made a bit too much of it — almost reaching the neighborhood adjacent to folkishness-fetishization; I was getting wary, like, "OK, right, where is this line of thought going; I hate to guess, because it'll probably turn out that I'm right" — but in fairness, it was of the times [1971] not to know yet where that line of thought would lead, even scientifically (let alone pseudoscientifically). He says something at one point along the lines of "depending on whether or not it turns out that they are correct" [i.e., Sapir, Whorf, et al], which made me smile because I had to reply, across the half-century gap, "well, it will turn out that they are half-right, but some people will make too much of the grain of truth that they found before our culture overall eventually course-corrects on that excess." But Evans rightfully makes a lot of good points about language and about the rightful place that the salt of the earth have in it, the pastoral connection that Chaucer's and Shakespeare's writing reflected and that people later lost much of their understanding of, as what he calls a millennial shift (in material culture) took place. Evans mentions the insight that Adrian Bell gained when he went to the fields as an apprentice farmhand [a back'us boy], almost an epiphany, but it's one that's quite similar to one that I myself got a chance to have, round about half a century later, albeit in modified form, but largely for the same reasons — crossing paths with the last of the old ontologies, and in register-crossing ways, class-crossing ways. Anyhow, I could go on all day, exploring the hills and dales that today's reading encountered, but for now I'll just leave off by recording my amusement that, speaking of bards and farmers and how their words and thoughts interconnect, I asked Bard last night to help me remember in which book it was that I'd explored some other landscapes. I asked Bard (in so many words), "what was the name of that book that talks about so-and-so farmers who were farming under such-and-such conditions, having been misled into it by shysters," and Bard successfully resolved that bit of TOTishness for me, which I got a kick out of; I had to chuckle, and I gave Bard a thumbs-up for that one. The spacetime of that particular blackness was the worst hard time.
    • PS: Thanks, George, for turning me on to Adrian. The flux capacitor of the written word strikes again, a lightning flash in the blackness, encabulating my path.
  • The verb carve is a troponym of cut (which is a verb that probably ranks pretty high for the number of troponyms that a verb can have, I would guess/bet), and things that are carved are usually curved at least a bit, and their carving usually didn't involve razor-straight cuts — rather, usually at least some curving ones. Granted that carving a joint, or a Christmas goose, entails some fairly straight slicing, but even then, not exclusively so (especially nearer the bones), and straightedges are certainly not involved (the knife's straightness down its spine's axis notwithstanding, because in carving meat or skinning game, a good belly is appreciated). Unlike with the sedateness of sedans, the curving of carving is mere birdshit (speaking of geese), but like with those sedans, a speaker typically wouldn't know for sure without checking into it.
  • It turns out that the metalling of the roads is a worthy old well-established collocation, although an AmE speaker like me wouldn't know it from personal experience in growing up as an E1L speaker in postwar times. It's a Commonwealth thing, as is metal as in metal. One might think that some metal band or other might have named a tour along the lines of the collocation by now. As for metal, it all started out as rock and gravel, but eventually bitumen got more and more involved as the ages went by. But we already know, as a gravelly voice has told us, that blackened is the end.
    • PS: Anyhow, my thanks to Mrs Meek, who was telling me yesterday about how things were when she was young. Wiktionary and I both benefited. I'll go put the kettle on.
  • A rolling boil, in which the currents roll hard, is a type of boil that roils the liquid. Strictly speaking, any boiling does at least some roiling, but a rolling boil is the archetypal class of roiling boil. Googling the collocations rolling boil and roiling boil finds that many people consider them synonymous compound nouns. As they rightfully should, I would add. As of this writing, Wiktionary doesn't yet cover this viewpoint, but perhaps later it will.
  • While bolting some Chicago screws into Wiktionary recently, I explored the vein of Chicago things, including Chicago typewriters, Chicago overcoats, and Chicago lightning. And while I was in the vicinity of Chicagoland, of course a Chicago sunroof leapt to mind, thanks to Slippin Jimmy; but one of the funny things about that term (besides the shitting from above) is the question of when a coinage that backfills a lexical gap within canon crosses the line into being a real word as opposed to a widely known but fictional one. (Speaking of crossing a line by backfilling a gap with something.) Is Pinocchio a real boy? Even if he eventually became a real boy within canon, he remains a fictional boy in our world (at most), or a fictional near-boy (at least). Is Chicago sunroof a novel word, or is it a novelty word? Perhaps its status changes the first time anyone really takes such a dump in real life and calls it by that name. Is that a bit like a Von Neumann–Wigner cut? Perhaps there are just many worlds in which an infinite number of rooftop-oriented dumps are taken, and Jimmy's canon is but one of them. In any case, though, I won't be depositing a Chicago sunroof into Wiktionary's mainspace anytime soon, because whether doing so is appropriate is a matter for the courts, and unlike Jimmy, I am not a lawyer.
    • PS: This is the same problem as with encabulation, and with flux capacitors. Some peoples' encabulators even have turbos surmounted, but even they can't make a pseudo-boy real. However, a lot can be done lexicographically with an epistemologic framing that specifies fictionality. Thus it is that some fake places, such as Narnia, may have blueness in real dictionaries. I think what this line of thought shows is that although I have been hesitating to bother delving into WT:CFI because I am not a lawyer and lawyering is not something that I enjoy doing, I need to take at least a layperson stab at a layperson-level familiarity with the upshots of CFI, because maybe some sufficiently encabulated fictional words warrant blueness.
      • An update a month or three later: I took a glance and found out that WT:CFI has a section all about this particular subset of criteria: the section on fictional universes. I'm still not interested in adjudicating most individual instances, though, as the longer I am at Wiktionary, the more clarity I attain in my own mind about which aspects of life I am here for versus which other aspects of life I could be here for but am not, given that the properly calibrated answer cannot be that I'm simply down for whatever (because time scarcity and prioritization). My goals are to escape reproach where easily enough avoided while pursuing the whys that I already enumerated elsewhere herein.
  • Talk of evidence is always more or less in the neighborhood of talk of epistemology. And thus talk of evidentiary categories, or of evidence levels, is never far from talk of epistemological categories, even though not everyone who treads a forest trail knows anything about the geologic strata that lie mere meters beneath their feet. When I jotted this note here it seemed to me that this line of thought is not too interesting beyond its opening, especially because most humans are evidently a little weak in the epistemology department. However, my brain later reminded me of what had subconsciously prompted the daydream. Why do evidential, epistemic, and empirical all begin with some variation on /ˈɛ😘i/, and why are experiential and experimental nearby, and why is it that you can't say EBM without /ibi/? It's not that I seriously suspect any hint of some kind of sound symbolism, a sort of bouba/kiki effect at the cognitive level of abstractions as opposed to physical characteristics, because I realize that birdshit is merely birdshit — there are only so many phonemes in our language and there are only 26 letters in our alphabet, dingus; you're gonna hear and see them recur. Nonetheless, what I can't help finding slightly interesting about it is its possible relevance to word-finding in fluency, because independently of any deeper causation (a specious mirage), I swear it nonetheless reminds me of a database index somehow, which at the core of its essence is an arbitrary, accidentally instance-specific way of expediting lookup while running queries. Granted that it's got nothing to do with prospective processes, like "what word will we coin for concept X or Y?" Nonetheless, unrelated to that red herring, it could possibly have something to do with retrospective processes, like a machine saying, "I have no clue whether or not file X is semantically relevant to file Y, and I don't give a shit either way, but I can tell you that they are both written to segment Z of the disk." Then the agents that care about semantic relevance (such as the query itself and the human who is running it) say, "Thanks Mr Index — it's OK that you have no clue and couldn't care less — you just go ahead and serve us up that quick-finding trick that you do so well, and let us worry about treating the query result like a table for further relevance."
  • Speaking of valence, I found it surprising that a chemical sense of ambivalent would be truly unattested, although it is wholly unsurprising that such a sense is yet unknown to any dictionary, even the OED, the Merriam-Webster Allegedly Unabridged, and both of the dictionaries of chemistry that I have ready access to at the moment. Experience has shown that that's how all dictionaries except Wiktionary roll—with Swiss-cheesy, flaky softness. I did the most cursory of googling to detect the sense's existence, and it came echoing back to me immediately out of the woodwork. I'll enter it, one of these nights, when I choose to spend some free time combing through and selecting and assembling the citations. That's how the moonman climbed down into Wiktionary recently. I acted as valet, guiding him in and taking his coat. Speaking of valet and valence; but not speaking of them, though, because they're not cognate, just some more pigeons for the pigeonhole. And not speaking of unveiling the moonman when I took his coat, albeit seeming to. Granted that the ones who usually unveil him are the clouds who part. But anyway, speaking of pigeons, I'm glad to see from the blueness of what I'm typing here that bird fancier's lung is already duly entered in Wiktionary. I'll warn the moonman not to breathe too deeply. But I needn't bother, as it's not his first rodeo—he didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday, and he's not afraid of barking dogs, either.
  • There's no cognation with veil in valence levels even though those levels are outer shells cloaking the inner ones, and there's no cognation with veil in valance curtains or valance panels even though those coverings are outer veils hanging low to cover a gap that needs covering. Speaking of noteworthy absence of cognation among terms that sound like they ought to be cognate with veil but aren't. The pigeonhole principle strikes again. But then again, it has to, doesn't it, by its nature? Once again, as elsewhere, the lesson is that life ain't fair.
  • abrogating in mbio and obliterating in macroscopic biology and surgery — a common theme of negating function, structure, or both, either reversibly or irreversibly (depending on the instance); but Wiktionary probably is the wrong place to acknowledge the connection, owing to (both) who is here and who isn't here. The latter sometimes annoy me — they don't bother running their own dictionaries and knowledge bases well enough (the Swiss cheese theory?), but they leave the gaps to be filled by someone else (largely by someones much more else).
  • The context tonight made it clear that in East Anglian English, and possibly other dialects, a back'us boy or backus boy was an apprentice farmhand. I lack time to pursue this further tonight, but upon initial googling, I found this recitation of a Suffolk poem, which was interesting,[3] and I found a [proposed draft fragment of a] Suffolk dictionary[4] that says, "Backus – A wash-house or scullery at the back of a farm house; a place for odd-jobs." / "Backus boy – An odd-job boy." So it seems apparent that "back'us" is backhouse, then. Enough for now.
    • Many months later: Here's a better glossary of words used (now or formerly) in East Anglia: Rye 1895.[5]
  • Both a strake and a shake can be like a scale or a shingle, which is to say, a segment of an outer protective covering. I say "can be" because the words have variations in senses, but the underlying theme is visible (that is, eyelessly visible). Something that felloes and strakes (in certain senses of those words) have in common is that they are segments of a round whole when such a whole is composite rather than unitary (that is, of one piece). The felloes make up the rim, and the strakes make up what is effectively a composite tyre, or, that is to say more properly, a set of scales that serve in place of a tyre. Again with parameterization as it relates to wheelwrighting, and yet I wasn't even trying to return to that theme. Which is why I found it so surprising when Percy Wilson said to me the other night (from beyond the grave, via the sorcery of the written word), "The wheels are the wright's distinguishing mark of his trade. It is the wheels that separate him off from the craft of carpenter: a wheelwright is equal to any job in the carpenter's craft but a carpenter cannot make a wheel." Jesus, Percy, the book that brought you to me was something I picked up by utter serendipity in a way that had nothing to do with the inputs that had me pondering parameterization's relationship to wheelwrighting not long ago. But it's just the mundane sort of coincidence, not the meaningful kind. Nonetheless, Percy gave me a chuckle. But anyway, speaking of what's either eyed or eyeless, Mrs Rumsby said, "I often used to hear about square eyes, but it was years before I knew exactly what they were!" It were her husband's shop talk, you see. He was known especially for making eyes; but no, not that kind—rather, the square ones.
  • When I was growing up, the archetype of a sedate car was a sedately colored sedan. You would occasionally read about, or see on TV, references to nondescript cars, usually in the context of witness reports of crimes or suspicious activity, or in Cold War spycraft. Nowadays, the rise of the crossover SUV category blurs or fades this archetype somewhat, I suppose, but I think it's idly interesting that my young mind (and presumably countless others) was branded early with a pigeonhole connection between sedateness and sedans. One can rightfully point out that because these words are cognate, their pigeonhole connection is not random (that is, on some underlying level it is not a mere coincidence), which raises the objection that perhaps (more precisely) they should not be labeled with (or, perhaps, metaphorically, accused of) pigeonholeness at all. But I have to disagree with that approach. Their connection via cognation is not the selfsame thing as their other connection via connotative echo based on a nexus of auditory and visual similarity overlapping with semantic relevance; rather, the latter is an additional layer that operates independently, a fact that is demonstrated by the fact that I didn't even know whether they were cognate until I looked them up today to confirm whether they are (yes). That aspect surely must extend across speakers generally: if most speakers don't even know whether or not a certain two words are cognate, then one cannot assert that the flavor of connection that I'm on about here is the selfsame phenomenon as (known or transparently obvious) cognation. Which is not to say that it is not related to it; just that it is differentiable from a valid viewpoint. It seems to be something like two leaves on the same branch of a tree: the "same object"? Well, yes, at one scale, but not at the scale of two leaves. This line of thought is challenging (for its abstractness), but I feel that it is a valid informal attempt at pondering to explore the complexity of the overlapping relationships among cognation, doubletness, polysemy, homonymy, and the pigeonhole principle as applied to morphemes, the last of which has plenty of instances that have nothing to do with cognation, although one can't always tell the difference between the instances without finding out about the presence or absence of cognation in each case. Which is of course the very nature of the pigeonhole principle: signal ambiguity and differentiating-signal-from-noise ambiguity. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even a funny noise sounds like a signal sometimes.
  • alloglyph for allograph: one might, but one doesn't. Granted that a few have (done), but not so many that Wiktionary should (do).
  • to see back (vt), that is, to see (someone) back, exists in idiomatic informal-register speech, referring to seeing patients again by getting them to come back [enough] (seeing patients back frequently), and it is clearly cognitively adjacent to having (someone) back (e.g., "we had the finalist back to our headquarters for another meeting") in parallel with having (someone) over ("we had him over for dinner") and bringing (someone) back (e.g., "we brought the finalist back to our headquarters for another meeting"), but I have decided not to try to enter it in Wiktionary anytime soon, because it doesn't seem worth the bother right now (i.e., the bother with getting the method of entry exactly right).
  • ∅; /ˈeʒos/ (en algunos lugares)
  • /ˈeɪʒə/: Asia, Aja; /ˈeʒa/: ella (en algunos lugares)
  • It's bad enough for a cad to be callow, let alone callow, shallow, and sallow.
  • Sit with recalibration. Not so much a swivel as a scanner. Sit with it. In the dark, or through it, albeit darkly. An emulator.
  • There is an interesting comparison between the trade of the cooper and the trade of the wheelwright as practiced in preindustrial centuries: Both of these trades carved wood skillfully into components that could be arranged radially into a round assembly and then bound (fastened) into a round composite that furthermore could be capped off with tight-fitting iron rings to hold it together (that is, either iron hoops or iron tyres), and both of these composites required carefully accurate fitting to allow sufficient function (the one liquid-tight, the other rollworthy and loadworthy). In this respect, these trades were two complementary instantiations of the selfsame theme.
    • Corollary: Rereading the above later, I just realized that it puts me in mind of parameterization of designs in CAD/CAM; and although these (particular) instantiations of this (particular) theme aren't homologous enough to say that coopering could be viewed as parameterized wheelwrighting or vice versa, they are nonetheless not so far off from that degree (of homology) that one's mind cannot imagine digital-twin solid models morphing seamlessly in an animation and assembling themselves into each form. In this daydream, the barrelheads grow hubs, and the staves shorten; or, alternatively, the staves stay long, and then the hoops snap and unwind themselves (taking the staves with them), and the barrel, instead of growing into a dandy carriage wheel, grows first into a "swamp-wagon wheel" and then into old-time Holt Caterpillar tracks, just as smoothly as a pumpkin grows into a carriage when parameterized by imaginative cartooning. I must point out here too that the development of the early Holt Caterpillar tracks was itself driven by envisioning parameterization (although not by that name), as the people who did it basically realized that the wheels of the machine could lay their own plank road as they progressed and that the selfsame plank road could be rolled up and then rotated back into position (rolled out) cyclically. The fact that even today many V-belts are still described in conventional terminology (of cataloguing and sales) as "endless" belts reflects a hint of conscious acknowledgment of the same parametricality.
  • emolument and thirlage: MWU and AHD both assert that emolument comes originally from millers' work (e- + molere), and the general (and neutral) sense of the word in English today is compensation for employment or an office held, but another important sense of the word is a natural (humanly inevitable) extension from that, either bordering on or stepping into abuses thereof, that is, corruption of the office. That is, for example, what results if an executive officeholder does not place their interests in a trust during the term of office. This line of thought caught my attention because not too long ago I had been reading in another context about how the work of the miller had been twisted into an abusive monopoly/oligopoly, and the engine sparked. But what was the name of that instance of the theme, I had to ask myself. Tip of the tongue. Once again googling spared me the annoyance of lingering TOTishness by leading to the answer, bridging the gap: thirlage. The only problem with this funny little circuit connection is that another dictionary (this one) disagrees about the etymology: molior and not molere, it asserts, and those ultimately from different PIE roots (so it says). I liked the connection though, because in both cases one sees an economic station that began at its heart as legitimate then sliding down the slope into a racket, and there is a duality zone in which an allegedly "legitimate racket" is uncovered for what it is, which is to say that that collocation is an oxymoron. Which is why the book that I was reading tonight contained the word—yet another instance of that theme. An ancient theme among humans, and semantically largely overlapping with rent seeking.
  • contradiction in terms : oxymoron :: catachresis : malapropism; as follows: in strict usage, only the juiciest forms qualify as the narrower type (whether absurd or poignant or ironic); and this raises the relation of misfortune : irony itself, which is another instance of the same theme.
  • A summary about relevance: The topic and comment (theme and rheme) are not always the subject and predicate, nor always the subject and object, nor always the agent and patient; nonetheless, by the nature of [all] things, these [aforementioned] things are often coinstantiated.
    • Speaking of such coinstantiation, it puts me in mind of the general case in which (annoyingly? venially? depends on one's mood) people often assert that "X is not the same thing as Y" but they thereby obscure an important distinction: mutual exclusivity versus nonobligate coinstantiation. So many times they mean the latter but their choice of words implies the former to the parsing of some confused listeners, who (naturally enough) misapprehend some aspect of (might we say) pseudo-ness (specious resemblance, mistaken identity) rather than mere variability of coinstantiation (as was intended but not successfully communicated); the remedy (or preemption) would be to speak a bit more carefully (thus: "never" versus "not always"; "never" versus "usually not"; "never" versus "not necessarily"; take one's pick; each can feel most juste, depending on the particular instance). I lack time for exemplifications at the moment—which is funny in a way; the paths from concrete to abstract can often feel dim and tenuous (in human cognition, the first time out), and yet there is also an inverse, whereby encountered instantiations keep on provoking the feel of the theme (the familiar old theme) so predictably that (depending on one's mood), for an agent who moves largely by feel in the dark (as it were), it is an annoyance to have to go groping off into the dark for more handholds, just to dredge up and bring back a few baubles for dimwits to fondle: we knows where we sits quite fine, and we knows where we sits without retracing the paths leading hither or the pillars that underlie. We knows them by feel, so we sees them in the mind's eye. It is a groove-worn landscape, beest thou naive there or not. Thou might know not (with those vision-hungry eyes of thine); thou may need a little model to hold (a microcosm, or a lantern to find thy ass, perhaps, as it were); but we knows (speaking of people not bothering to explain things).

Indirect fire edit

My glancing blows have inadvertently grown a parameter, causing some to fork off to a parameterized subset (which checks out):

some blows are less glancing than others

  • [trunkholder]
    • There are missals, there are hymnals, and there are missal-hymnal combinations. These are the little books posted in the pews.
    • A Friesian is a Holstein, but a Friesian isn't a Holstein, because life ain't fair.[*]
      • [*id, syn, cot]
    • Mr windowmaker will tell you what you need for that buttonhole of yours: you just get yourself a buttonhook.
      • Yes please.
        • He explains that buttonhooks were common articles in a day when people wore button shoes as a matter of course. Buttoning stiff leather is no fucking joke. Snaps don't count, you whippersnapper: they were Johnny-come-latelies back in the day under discussion, and you were perhaps lucky if you had ever seen one yet. Your shoe buttons were the shank type, and you just get your hook in there, then wrap your hook around that shank and give er a yank. This appeals to me. (Most especially, to the Yankee in me — everyone's got some, more or less; and one can get more.) Why do barehanded sweatily what you could do with a tool slickly?
          • PS: Some yours are yourser than others.
            • It's not that interesting, but it is a bit, in a certain way, because I can retroactively detect the database index's presence underlying the speech generation: I didn't entirely know why I phrased the sentence that way when it first came springing forth from my mind, but I could feel the resonance (in a nonsonic way), and I consciously reappreciated the full mechanism afterward (pulling in different neural circuits in addition to the earlier ones).
          • PS: get one's hooks into | sink one's teeth into
    • This one came and went tonight and I had even forgotten it, but a windowmaker uttered a parametric echo to remind me:
      • half crown | half sovereign
        • The one was an eighth pound, the other a half pound: it took four crowns to make a sovereign, but it takes only one crown to make a sovereign, and some crowns and sovereigns are more thoroughly capitalised than others, when they're the Crown and the Sovereign.
          • The windowmaker on the same night also spoke of the penny post and the formerly formidable value of a cent. It took a lot of sense to make a buck in those days; it still does, but the buck doesn't go as far though. Sometimes it even stops here, overnight. He didn't mention splitting the cent in half, as they didn't do so in his neck of the woods (although they could get blood from a stone, as they had the stones to do so; and he did mention some interesting stones in the woods as well).
    • on a certain basis | in a certain manner
      • meh
    • the state or degree of | the condition or extent of
    • unsheath | uncover | unconceal | unholster
    • My poor brain is bugging me again regarding insurance that is underinsurance, reliance that is overreliance, confidence that is overconfidence, and so on.
    • at bank | at grade | at-grade
    • to hand | at hand | on hand | handy
    • hourglass figure | petiole
    • telephone box | phone box | police box | squawk box
    • overcast | downcast
    • cast aside | cast away | cast down
      • throw aside | throw away | throw down
      • toss aside | toss away | toss down
        • ✓ syn and rel added where appropriate;
        • ✓ There is an SoP threshold that rightfully precludes total bluening of them all;
          • Pursuing that thought a bit further, we might ask, well, what makes the blue ones blueworthy, then? Answer: when the literal sense (ejecting downward) is augmented with an idiomatic sense that is more abstract, that is, it can be divorced from the literal downward ejection in at least some uses.
            • That thought leads to the conclusion that the entry for toss down (which was created by someone else, not me) should be RFDd for SoP. That's fine, but today is not the day for me to be the one who chases it. TBD.
              • PS: Such downward ejections are more specifically downward rejections, as the ejection is being done because of rejection of one kind or another. In fact there is hardly any ejection (of any kind) that isn't, or isn't prompted by, rejection (of one kind or another): if the bouncer ejects you from the club, he is rejecting you, and if a fighter pilot ejects (v.i.) from his plane (which is to say, if he ejects himself (v.r.) from his plane), he is noping out, that is, he is rejecting his current situation and its impending development. To eject a tape cassette or other cartridge is to reject further use of it at this time; to eject a molded or stamped part from a mold or die is to reject its continued presence there. All ejectors are disposing of something in one way or another (giving it a kicked-out disposition), often to discard it, that is, to refuse it. For example, we refuse refuse (n).
                • PPS: Ejector pins (e-pins) are a type of ejector, which is to say that ejector pin and e-pin are hyponyms of ejector, but Wiktionary may never be the place to enter those (well-established) terms, as discussed elsewhere herein. What an ejector pin is saying (as it were) to each stamped or molded part is that "I don't care where you go, but you can't stay here." It is making way for the next one, which involves rejecting the current status/situation.
    • An instance of rebucketing in transit, regarding which or whose head and whether or not there is one. An instantiation of the theme, prompting a lesson about habit formation: view the existing coverage of the polysemy first before making the bucket cutoff determination, because being once bitten, twice shy, it is possible to be too cautious by running a probability simulation that doesn't need to be run anyway (and produces an overshy result) because a reality check is readily available instead (the cost of a new tab is effectively zero, even in terms of attentional bandwidth).
    • I can't remember whether or not I've already said it anywhere in my WP or WT userspace before, but it bears noting: it's a regrettably missed opportunity to treat w:Wikipedia:Short description as merely and solely a disambiguation cue for human users of the search field, as it has an order of magnitude more overall value to humanity if it successfully serves both that purpose and also the purpose of a short but accurate (succinct) ontologic statement of what anything is (and thus mostly also showing the contours of what it is not). Humans and their machines both tend to need a (surprisingly? big) lot of help with that info. Some examples are that any shortdesc for a person is better as "[Nationality] [occupation] ([birthyear]-[deathyear])" or "[Nationality] [occupation] (born [birthyear])" than as only "[Nationality] [occupation]", and "[Nationality] [occupation] best known for [XYZ] ([era info])" is better still whenever usefully applicable to the instance. In fact if one really wanted to be dead serious about the whole affair, and avoid quibbling about pros and cons (for example, "slightly shorter is best" versus "no, slightly more explanatory is best', handwave etc), then to me it is dead obvious that one could simply have fields shortdesc1 (disambig-optimized tuning) and shortdesc2 (ontology-spoonfeeding-optimized tuning), and provide optimal interfaces for the use of both simultaneously as separate facets of the same gem (which one can easily envision). That's what seeing and seizing the whole opportunity, in an obvious and efficient way, would look like, and there'd be nothing difficult or eccentric about choosing such an option and doing it. Alas, this here is some good water but it's not my fate to force any particular horse to drink it. And perhaps it is moot anyway because if NLP or GPT or WTF can digest a lede-opener sentence well enough then it can get the functional equivalent of the shortdesc2 value from that. But you know, when I was young, people used to care about structured data though. Nowadays I guess the big idea is to get some black-box monstrosity to confabulate a mysterious approximation thereof, and even then also get it to apply the structuring itself retroactively (by pestering the chained beast enough), and then sit around talking about how the result is not trustworthy and it's fundamentally opaque and also dirty and fuzzy around the edges but at least it beats doing any real curation work though, God forbid. Kids these days, FFS.
    • Do not confuse habituation with habitation, even though hasty non-t-crossing science reporters and scientists sometimes have.
    • steely-eyed | flint-hearted | flint-eyed | hard-hearted | hard-nosed | hard-headed | steely-nerved | stonehearted
    • Here's some hog slop that I almost forgot to hoover into any bucket. I don't have time to do it full justice, so I'll just capture a glimpse of it.
      • An interesting case of autohyponymy exists regarding insurance, although admittedly one can see it only if one is willing to view the real-world state of the insurance industry with etic honesty (and some will more than others); I say that with love, being someone who duly buys insurance even despite the openness of my eyes (in an eyeless way). Old no-eyes keeps an eye on such things for me; he has one to spare. The crux of the autohyponymy is that most insurance is in fact underinsurance, in a quiet way muffled by the fine print (whereby the muffling is skillful to avoid leaving any fingerprints). After all, that's how they get you; or, more precisely, that's one of the hows by which they get you. Many of us have heard what some wag or other has said about that topic, which is that the true business model of all successful insurance is to collect premiums and stonewall claims. (As for which wag, we may not know, although some try harder to find out than others do.) Still, when the pantsings come along in life, the only thing worse than underinsurance is uninsurance, which is the hard place against which the rock must be compared. One buys belts and braces because one understands that some pantsings are pantsier than others; some fates are more fateful than others, and one need not ask for whom the bone bones, as one already knows. Anyway, furthermore, the odd thing about the narrower of the autohyponymous senses of insurance is that it is hyponymous to underinsurance, which makes underinsurance itself also an autohyponym, in a way that clear eyes can see (if they squint, in an eyeless way), and the whole caboodle together is holding my interest at the moment because the first thing that my brain is asking is whether this funny little thread-knot is a unique animal or whether it is but an instance of a latent theme that has at least one or two other instances. And you know who's good at stumbling off into the dark to answer a question like that. He's already groaning and slapping me, but he'll do it though. He's as curious to find out as I am, and as much as he likes to bitch and moan about scarcity of competence, he knows what he is.
        • PS: He snuffed out his cig and got going. On his way out, he asked me to jot here the following. I can barely see it, so I'll try to be quick before it disappears. As for which bucket to put such slop in, and who all does or doesn't feed from it, it's fine either way, because some hollows are hollower than others (in a nonconcave way), and this set of buckets (herein) is a hollow too. Some wallowers are wallower than others, and some hereins are here-inner than others. There are thoracic ceptors for that.
        • Update: He hasn't had time yet for more, but so far he detects that the theme is too generalizable not to have other instances. So others will turn up. It has to do with Venn overlap and its relationship with (i.e., how it maps to) autohyponymy, and thus also with the theme of "synonymous in certain senses", which is another segment of the same object as the theme of "synonymous or hyponymous depending on whose definition is used," which is the overlap part of the Venn diagram (the almond). A drawing can be made showing the mapping from the Venn diagram portions to the senseid link for each sense-specific semantic relation link. A way to unearth other instances is to give parameter weighting to shittiness and incompetence, then go groping from there. For example, the first other instance that cropped up is when any reliance on something (or someone) is overreliance.
          • His fingers don't lie: some dimensions fold in on themselves more than sevenfold, and even if you can get down inside there, perhaps you'd better not, as some horizons are less eventful than others, but the journey seems contiguous in prospect (and retrospect may be too late). Which is to say, one must know better than to outrun one's headlights. Which is an interesting fact regarding how it relates to the fact that if your vision is piercing enough (or Bierce-ing enough), you have to be careful where you aim it, as the veil isn't necessarily all that thick. And after all, some torches aren't for sheet metal anyway (so what would you expect?); only kids and clowns accidentally burn clean through the sheet (fuckin jokers). But speaking of vales, he's going to take a nap in a corn field now, and come home later, just to rub it in regarding the fact that he can. Lucky bastard, he lacks the gene that would allow him to be affected by the stimulus. (Speaking of not being affected by the stimulus, I happened to see tonight that The Gray Area has an episode on that topic, and I should remember to check that out.) A lesson tonight is that if things are feeling a little suspiciously contiguous, one might keep cool (lol), channel his vibe, pay out some asbestos cordage, lower that visor, and reflect the burn. Some may thank you, others may curse you (especially those who find out too late), and God may sort them out.
    • optical telegraph·ʷᵖ | *aural telegraph (*audial telegraph)
    • self-discipline | self-criticism | self-awareness | self-compassion | self-kindness | — all are compared and contrasted in works recently seen
      • self-doubt | self-pity — some things not far away parametrically, but the key is to navigate the slippery slope appropriately
    • kick (vt) | ruck (vt) — installers of wall-to-wall carpet will tell you that one must kick a carpet well so that it can't be rucked as easily
    • out of place | out of time
    • Englishly | Welshly | Scottishly | Britishly | Irishly
      • Yes
        • But
    • distorting mirror | passenger side mirror (objects are closer than they appear)
    • trash | duff — field vegetation detritus | forest floor vegetation detritus — shared parameter: vegetable matter detritus on farm and forest landscapes (e.g., field and woodlot) as a hypernymic semantic node
    • time clock | clock: certain hyponyms invite prescriptive scrutiny because they exemplify the theme of, "oh yeah, as opposed to what other kind, dufus?" (lol). In other words, they threaten etymonically to be redundant because they don't etymonically express a modified concept versus their hypernym (under any condition of general background parameter values [e.g., clock can mean odometer but it doesn't under general conditions]); which furthermore means that their hypernym should be (that is, should have been) autohyponymous in a way that makes them superfluous and thus (per usual in natural language) uninstantiated. But of course there are valid reasons why they exist, descriptively speaking, and thus they are not "wrong" (that is, there is nothing wrong with them, as is clear to anyone with nondeficient understanding of how natural language works in reality). Why this is true is newly reinteresting to me, lately, because I am now clearer in my own mind about why (even though expressing it in words remains a gamble versus what anyone else would get out of it): they make logical sense (which is the best kind of sense) when seen from a sufficiently parameterized space: for example, archetypally speaking, all clocks measure time, but one's time in the context of one's work (and inside the paymaster's office most particularly) is a certain kind of time (that is, the billable kind) that natural language can't be arsed to have an explicitly morphologized hyponym for, in most contexts (the most lawyery ones excepted, which is the best kind of excepted). And that's why you need a certain kind of clock for measuring that certain kind of time, and what else would you call it but a time clock (which is to say, you'd better not even try to coin any more arsed word for it, or else [be cool, dork]). Not only is this outcome etically predictable (given sufficient absence of spatial neglect, in a spaceless way), but also (moreover), O wow: Very human. Much natural language.
    • What is the contrast set of the cardinal times of day? As with any contrast set defined by human sentience, (1) it depends on who you ask, strictly speaking, but also (2) some answers are better than others, broadly speaking (shared parameter: some consensuses are more consensusy than others [be cool, dork]). Not long ago I had noticed that Wiktionary still needs breakfasttime as the (red-headed) sibling of lunchtime, teatime, dinnertime, and suppertime, but my recent talk of bedtime made me realize that bedtime and quitting time are fellow members of that clock face, as well (which is no less). What else? Well, morningtime is nonstandard but well-attested (rise and shine, mthrfrs); eveningtime is already blue (and some evenings are bluer than others); breaktime and playtime are good times (and breaking things when one plays with them is long since known to be overrated); and last but not least, daytime and nighttime are archetypally the two halves, although in practice your results may vary (depending).
    • halo effect | damning by association: shared parameter: for diametricizing antonymy: adjacency-based tinting, or painting versus tainting
    • occhiolism | parochialism (shared parameters: (1) blinkered viewpoint; (2) rhyme or near-rhyme [parametric or])
    • Coordinate terms: eyehole, earhole, nosehole, mouthhole — all of these have book-attested polysemy parameterization of "the hole [in the face] for that organ" and "the hole [in a mask or helmet] for that organ"
      • A mouthhole is thus either one's piehole (which one is ever welcome to shut) or a flute mouthhole (which one is typically welcome to strip of its adjectival hyponymizing parameter given that such a hole is usually a woodwind instrument's hole when not otherwise specified)
      • Treats for each one, respectively, are (via a coordinating parameter about which one is welcome to shut one's hole, or else) eye candy, ear candy, nose candy, and mouth candy, the last of which is just candy whenever not otherwise specified (which is a parameter value that makes the specification humorous)
        • Update: the relationship of candy to nose candy is like the relationship of gaiter to neck gaiter: one generally doesn't call gaiters leg gaiters any more than one calls candy mouth candy, but one must call a neck gaiter a neck gaiter, not a gaiter, because a gaiter not otherwise specified is a [leg] gaiter.
    • dark earth | black earth | scorched earth (some worlds are more coinstantiated than others)
    • soul-searching | navel-gazing (shared parameter: whether or not others consider the introspection to be self-indulgent)
    • ancient grains, ancient aliens: shared parameter: worth considering but haunted by varying degrees of pseudoscience-adjacency (pseudocereal pseudoprofessionalism?) Speaking of haunting, the boosters of ancient grains want humanity to come back to biting them because humans' overreliance on monoculture may come back to bite them (or perhaps long since has). Which is why it is slightly chiasmic that a slogan for corn flakes used to encourage us to taste them again for the first time.
    • dining hall, dining room, dining facility, dining car;
    • boxcar, box truck
    • food cart, chuck wagon (another great example where you'd tend to get smacked for pointing out the etic parametricity: burly boys have their burliness to defend; be cool, dork, or else)
    • callable, nameable; uncallable, unnameable: emic monolingual viewpoint, shy of caring (despite called, named); translingual viewpoint, OK; llamar, heißen.

The standard amount of polysemic flexibility in natural language edit

General notes

  • These are garden-variety facts about usage differences underpinned by the standard amount of polysemic flexibility in natural language regarding slight variations between mental models of ontology — how each concept is defined (any of several word senses or subsenses) and thus which semantic relation exists between any two given terms, whether (sometimes) invariably, or (sometimes) in each of several cardinal classes of instances.
  • The members of the latter class (not-invariable ones) tend to be trivial and, in most respects, unremarkable; nonetheless, they must be understood and recorded in lexicography, just by the nature of what lexicography is. Often dictionary users merely need a quick lookup in such a reference work to confirm any given notion that they already know or already suspect, or to settle a quibble with someone whose mind is using the mildly different ontologic mapping.
  • Some examples of the help provided on that point can be pasted here. The answer to the predictable objection "yeah they could, but why would they be" is, at its essence, museology, in more than one way.
  • As for both (1) catching and (2) curating, there is the casting of nets, where some nets are wider than others, and then there is the throwing back. Notions on saved searches·ʷᵖ are available in bucket 2023-10-28, jotted for reuse. They aren't here because jotting leads to blotting and some blots are blotter than others. Living well is the sweetest handwave etc.
  • These examples are part of the same larger objects as palpated elsewhere herein, such as "mostly hyper but sometimes cot" ("you've got to slice that salami in this context"), "mostly hypo but sometimes syn" ("I don't slice that salami, at least not in this context"), and so on, because of the recurring theme in natural language that "when I say [hypernym-slash-autohyponym], I mean (implicitly) [what I consider to be, and usually what most people consider to be] the cardinal/principal/largest/classic/orthodox/traditional hyponymous subset unless otherwise specified, or the hyponymous subset that is clearly/obviously relevant to the given context." Analysis:
    • The given speaker (1) is advisedly glossing over the other subsets (for communicative practicality) (e.g., e.g., e.g.), (2) is momentarily forgetting the other subsets (e.g.), (3) fails to conceive of the other subsets (e.g.), or (4) refuses to acknowledge that any other subsets exist (e.g.).

List population

Parameterization funhouse mirrors edit

 
Our friend box cat is two things at once, and so is his friend duck-rabbit.

General notes

  • For what this list is on about cognitively, see Orientation below.
  • Parent bullets are flowing chronologically, newest first.

List population

Orientation

Machine-washable. (But tumble dry on low only, though.) Value ranges unbounded.

Some of these are admittedly trivial to generate and trivially uninteresting (for example, breathing room and decompression chamber). I am well aware. Relatedly, they remind us of zh → en → zh → en re-retranslation games (or ja → en → ja → en ones), which are likewise ultimately not as interesting as they at first appear. But what is holding my attention in recent days is that worthwhile semantic relations links can sometimes come out of briefly considering semantic parameterizations. In other words, the only thing different about the funhouse mirror as opposed to the plane mirror is the coordinating parameter constituted by the curve itself. The disjunction — of (1) worthwhile but (2) nonetheless not yet added — is interesting because it uncovers something about cognitive modes. I have analytical thoughts about that something. Below are some sketches.

  • 2023-10-19:
  • 2023-07-20:
    • Regarding the handwave etc for the shared-parameter exposition: that is, meh, you know what I'm talking about. On one hand, it is an established truism that everything is not far removed parametrically from anything else. (Wiktionarian corollary: "However, since almost all words are semantically related to each other on some (sufficiently remote) abstract level, please use your own judgement on whether somebody possibly would find it useful.") Fair enough, but on the other hand, humans in general seem to spend a lot of time (cognitively) in the land of sui-generis-ness. I should even say way too much, if I'm stinting on generousness. Everything just is what it is, they seem to say, and what's in front of my nose is what's in front of my nose (no more nor less); and not only can I not spare a thought for anything else, I can't even begin to think what that anything else might even be. Still further: And I forbid you to suggest any answers to that question. (Be cool, dork.) What would be the happier medium on such a spectrum (instead of endlessly and nearly exclusively fucking around on the bottom-ass end of it)? Well, provisionally, a developing hypothesis is that it's not anything special or surprising, really. It's just optimally tailored semantic relation links, which (moreover) are ideally collapsed to hub-pointers when possible (hyperlink-jumping into expanded spaces one degree removed, whether it be in the Wiktionary instance via this or the Wikipedia instance via choice hat-navs, cat-navs, and see-also accordions). They can't all be hub-pointers, and that's fine, whereas the optimization is merely for them not to fail to be such whenever such is appropriate. But what else is involved in being optimally tailored, though, operationally speaking? Well, some themes are: links, but not too many; links, but not too tangential. Again, retreading known ground. But there's a reason why I'm sniffing around, trying to lay hands on a latent parameter ID (which is basically equal to sniffing around for a space to be deneglected, which might perhaps be something like a room of one's own, perhaps even in several simultaneous de-roomlessness-ənating ways). The thing that I am after (like a squirrel is after a nut, the little dirtspading nutter) is the precise nature of how too tangential is operationally defined. I think perhaps the answer might not be anything special in the end, by which I mean, it may be possible that there is nothing about its quality that is remarkable, but rather only its quantity and distribution: it is too scarce. They say that quantity has a quality all its own, by which they usually mean the clockwise hyponymous parametrization of that hypernymous fact, which is that big quantity has a quality all its own. Flip the polarity, though: small quantity has a quality all its own, as well (which is no less). Especially when it feels like unaccountably small quantity. Granted that Wiktionary is but one instantiation of a theme, and most people won't help build it. Very well. But what about the fact that the things that can be easily achieved at Wiktionary are not much being achieved anywhere else, either, in various respects? I respect arguments such as, "Well, that's nice, but I'm building or doing something else somewhere else for profit (slash for a living), so that's my opportunity cost." Very well. But that's not what I see happening, so much, though, in aggregate, among humans. What I see happening is (evidently, apparently) more like, "The lights are on all over the world, and lots of porn and murder and TikTokery and anorakery are being achieved/created at full throttle, but the average dictionary, as well as our best stab at any collaborative set of student notes to date, still suck ass though, in various easily improvable ways, and yet no one cares, which is to say, 0.001% of people care." Even if you grant that lots of people are dumb (and many of us will do), does a parameter value of 0.001% seem unaccountably low? I'm glad you mentioned a room of one's own, though, because it raises a relevant parameter ID: no one who can't afford any free time and device and internet access can afford to build any such resources. Very well. I grant it, heartily. And yet: who has all this time and money for porn and murder and endless TikTokery and anorakery, then? TikTok's name has an ironic flavor when tasted under this light.
      • Addendum 2023-09-10: Anyone who enjoys crosswords, and perhaps most especially those who enjoy cryptic crosswords (which is a population that Wikipedia asserts is large), has more than enough cognitive power to build Wiktionary's noncryptic semantic relations links, but it seems that almost no one among that population does so to any nonincidental degree. Perhaps a natural response is, so fuckin what, who cares anyway, dork? My counterargument is already documented in my WP and WT userspaces. Granted that Wiktionary is but an instantiation of a theme. But I do think that it is a rather important one among that class of instantiations (for various reasons), and one might wish (as I do) that more people agreed. I suppose that to give a shit is to self-own, or self-troll, in a way. Thus one mustn't too much. There is a balance point.
      • Addendum 2023-10-17: Rebucketed in transit. Some dead sharp eyes are deader than others.

Reflection subclass pearl 10 edit

General notes

  • This is a subclass of the yes but class.
  • This subclass is in the mirror and is subtly differentiable from the main class there. Maybe later I'll write here a better description of the mechanism of differentiation.
  • None of these would be wrong for the mainspace; some of them could go there eventually; but let each one live here until any such time as it might go anywhere else.
  • Parent bullets are flowing chronologically, newest first.

List population

Selected collocations flirting with lexicalization edit

General notes

  • For what this list is on about cognitively, see meh you know what I'm talkin about.
    • Update, though — just when I thought that there would be nothing worth explaining here:
      • I started this list to cover such ones as are more in the category of mildly interesting, mundane, not slangy but rather just workaday, largely unremarkable except for a desire to have adequate lexicographic coverage — such ones as arise in the course of business, science, technology, economic activity, health care, and so on. That's what the scope of this list is still intended to focus on.
        • In addition, though, it was pointed out to me that there is also a special case nowadays, another category that is trying to be especially productive lately, which is the tryhard mode of trying to make it happen regarding some utterance [especially a mere collocation] that some would-be influencer would dearly like to see become a [lexicalized] term[7] [especially, a lexicalized open compound noun]. That category is interesting too (and I'll have to continue learning about its member items mostly by the indirect route, given that I don't much consume the type of influencer content that is desperate to generate them).
      • My general outlook on the lexicography of lexicalized collocations is elsewhere herein.
        • The main reason for starting this bucket (this section) is as a holding pen for mental notes, incidental scribbles, and incubation, in a unified place separate from (and thus freed up from) the dichotomizing engine that is WT:SoP. Handling any of these items begins at least with jotting them down, scribbling some thoughts about them, and leaving them sitting (fermenting) in a bucket where the distinction of whether or not Wiktionary is allowed to enter any given one of them is irrelevant for the time being.
          • A convention of this section shall be that these items generally will not be redlinked. That signal is superfluous in this context, and it could wrongfully imply that I'm suggesting that any given one of these items ought to be dereddened in the Wiktionary environment (use case) specifically. That's not what I'm saying here; rather, what I'm saying is that this is a place for interim collocation-lexicalization-status agnosticism.
  • Parent bullets are flowing chronologically, newest first.

List population

  • machine perfusion
    • This is an example of a topic where you can't bring yourself up to speed just by skimming the Wikipedia article, because the Wikipedia article has a combination of problems: out of date, inadequately focused (e.g., giant boatloads of expert detail about old history, deficiency of recent practical big picture for medical layperson readers). One feels glad to be reading (and supporting) good science reporting, which brings one up to speed nicely in a practically minded way that can't be gotten via other methods. No matter how imperfect (and underfunded) it may be, it's a hell of a candle against an otherwise pathetic ocean of darkness. Today I learned about how the current state of practice has been changing since several specific FDA device approvals in 2019 and 2021.[8] The disconcerting thing is an aspect of unknown unknowns for the general public: most of them won't be reading a news article like this one, and that fact is combined with the fact that many would also assume that the Wikipedia article gives an adequate clue about its topic (which it doesn't, but it is such a firehose of lore [including many details with duly cited refs] that a reader could be forgiven for thinking that they could inform themselves usefully by delving into it [whereas in fact they can't, but that fact is probably not obvious to them though]). What it does give is a firehose of too much information (including boatloads from 20-50 years ago) and a lack of forest for the trees as far as any medical layperson reader is concerned. I say this not picking on whoever entered the boatloads — not at all: the boatloads aren't wrong, they're just not what a general encyclopedia needs; and they don't even need to be removed (deleted), whereas what's needed instead is that the practical/clinical big picture be provided too. I could well imagine improving the article myself, but let's get real: I'll spend my free time (a finite resource) on other things (combinations of improving WT or WP in spots here or there, reading things, learning things, entertaining myself a bit, and living my offline life), and there's just not enough of the resource to make the dent that needs to be made. But because almost no one bothers to help build WP, the ratio is hopelessly skewed — the ambient ignorance is just a stormfront of wind that only a scattered few people are spitting or pissing into.
  • global capability center
    • Just another open compound noun with accompanying acronym that is already widespread in the business world despite having not existed until recently as far as almost anyone knew about
      • The thing about those nowadays (in today's IT era) is how thick and fast they come
      • In the attested usage, GCCs include particular campuses by particular corporations and also metro regions, with a region viewed as single GCC
        • Related: particular campuses by particular corporations can likewise be centers of excellence; thus, GCCs can be COEs
  • neuropathic pain | neurogenic pain·^
    • neuropathic neuralgia·^ as a subclass of neuralgia/neurodynia
      • When people say that neuralgia is "not to be confused with" neuropathic pain, they make the pedagogic mistake of ignoring (failing to acknowledge) variable coinstantiation: some neuralgia is neuropathic neuralgia, and (by the same token) some neuropathic pain is neuralgic in distribution.
  • model collapse
    • The most obvious hypernym is GIGO, even before beginning to devote any thought.
      • More specifically, if you eat shit, then take a shit, then eat the shit, then take another shit, then eat it again, you're probably not helping yourself, nor anyone else; in fact, quite the opposite.
  • numbered list | bulleted list
    • ordered list·ʷᵖ <ol> | unordered list·ʷᵖ <ul>
      • respectively
        • SoP versus lexicalization: I don't know what others may judge, but I must say that ever since I boned up on HTML, 25+ years ago, in my mind the lexicalized status is real.
  • backslash = reversed virgule
    • As more than one eminently citable RS agrees (I was just reading one today); plus reverse solidus too.
      • As for whether I ever bother further with this one regarding Wiktionary's mainspace, well, we'll see.
  • primary research = original research
  • biological atlases
    • cell atlas
      • cell atlases
        • including one particular one with the temerity to claim to be "The" one for humans, "the" Human Cell Atlas
    • protein atlas
      • protein atlases
        • including one particular one with the temerity to claim to be "The" one for humans, "the" Human Protein Atlas
  • computer models (whether as solid models or not; whether as digital twins or not):
    • implicit model | explicit model
      • implicit models | explicit models
        • implicit modeling | explicit modeling
          • comparing vector definition with raster definition seems useful here by way of analogy, as does comparing parametric programming with nonparametric; multiple layers of analogy; implicit modeling and explicit modeling both can involve vectors, but in a different way of application
    • foundation model·ʷᵖ
      • foundation models
  • local indistinguishability
  • applied epistemology
    • Apparently if you ask a general semanticist, this collocation amounts to more than just a sum of parts naming the epistemologic instance of the theme of applied science, being instead (more specifically) a lexicalized synonym of general semantics.
      • Or so I have read (lol).
        • To an outsider such as myself, this notion sounds kinda presumptuous (and even appropriative/confiscatory) on the face of it, but for now I'll reserve judgment and keep reading.
  • hot models

Simple but accurate edit

General notes

  • Anyone who thinks that any particular one of these isn't accurate enough should prove it wrong by improving upon it.
  • Anyone who thinks that any particular one of these isn't simple enough may be simple.
    —
  • Everything in this section will necessarily be either class 0 or class 1 on the Bierceness scale.
    • It is interesting to ponder the idea that what might tip some of these items from 0 into 1 is the simplicity itself; and that fact says something about some human flaws that academia, being a human affair, grapples with.

List population

Overheard edit

Some things are heard more overly than others. The list below includes earworms. (You can consider this a trigger warning to whatever extent you're not triggered by the concepts of (1) the giving of trigger warnings and (2) the calling of them by that name (the more triggery of the synonyms).)


  • meh you know what I'm talkin about
  • For the neuromodulation armamentarium:
    • ℞. sig: Use this product responsibly and do not exceed the maximum dosage.
      • PS: Some uses are off-label uses, and some off-label uses are further off the label than others.
    • ^PS: Here's one for the mirror:
      • ☧ | ℞
        • Do not adjust your set; this is not a kerning issue (nor a KoЯning one).
          • Christ is the prescription?
            • Take two communion host wafers and call me in the morning?
  • This one's for my Cornish friend. They tell me that 1994 was 30 years ago, but part of me doesn't believe it.
    • He pulls a drag and smiles, and admits that the snicker writes itself. Back then I too didn't know the chances. Nowadays I borrow his gear if I'm going underground.
  • Some mondegreens are subtler than others. The subtlest ones are the ones that are most plausible as being possibly an accurate transcription.
    • Many sets of lyrics that are plastered across the internet contain more of these subtle mondegreens than people realize. They are propagated and amplified by carelessness — an inability to pay adequate attention.
      • The trouble with identifying and confirming them is more than just their plausibility; it comes also from such factors as which version (performance) was being transcribed (e.g., an expurgated one or otherwise, any given live version versus an album version), whether the authors themselves later decided to revise a certain lyric, and so on.
        • There's one that I could always swear that I had noticed, but I couldn't prove it, or even be sure that I was right. But tonight I heard a different performance that I hadn't heard before, and now I'm confident that I was right.
          • Often it is the semantics that lead the way toward the logical answer — not the phonetics alone. This particular instance is a case in point. It hinges on what it means for the hurt inside to be fading, and why (or how) that is true: it is the same mediating variable — an additional variable, an additional parameter — that allows one to say, I'm done. And that is in fact what the speaker of these lyrics says in the chorus, as is sufficiently (differentiably) audible in this performance.
            • To me it's always been apparent that the degree to which he is done caring is the reason why he is here to stay. Admittedly (1) my interpretation could be off and (2) anyone's interpretation (even an author's own) is only a parametric Rorschach blot anyway. Still, some interpretations are less off than others. Anyhow: done.
        • Another: missiles | their souls
          • Lol it's quite obvious what the correct transcription is … obvious to the point that one feels sorry for the morons who couldn't tell
  • down into the ground
  • Having been on the hook for too long, I at least needed to put a new worm on it; and I was newly reminded of a parametric polarity reversal that I knew but had sometime forgotten to foreground while fishing; thus —
    • in the shipyard,
      • cutting → welding
        • severing 🎛️ joining
        • burning away 🎛️ building up
          • cleaving 🎛️ cleaving
            • 🎛️
              • in the garden ⬛️ in chains
                • PS: Nearly forgot to note that part of this thought chain was actually about the hook itself, and the isometric exercises and parametric exercises that one can do while hanging on it: Mr hookman (god love im), while in that avatar, instantiated a torchboy: proud of having burnt the veil and of being able to, he made a bit too much of that ability: any clown can burn a hole in something (or be encouraged to), and parametricity's artifactuality is itself not a hole that is surprising (nor bragworthy). To Mr hookman's credit, he sees both the artifactuality's presence and its unsurprisingness, on one level; but I don't believe that he sees it on the next, because if he had, you would be able to see it in his eyes. If one wants to look into meaninglessness, one can certainly do so without much trouble (and some have even less trouble than others); but the caveat is that when you do, it looks back, in an eyeless way. To complain about constructed or found meaning is somewhat like cursing a bridge's existence while one is using it to cross the sound: it is unsound. And some sounds are even less sound than others. Anyone can look a gift bridge in the girders, but they usually shouldn't. A joyride on the bay: one should be so lucky. And if not, what else were you gonna do today anyway? The opposite? The game of seeing shapes in clouds or constellations among stars is its own reward, even though one knows what a cloud or a star really is (i.e., neither a rabbit nor a duck). When your eyes are holes that burn holes in things, you should be careful where you point them and for how long at once. And perhaps wear shades in public — even in the shade.
                  • PS: A recapitulation flavor: Any clown can tie hands, but they're for shaking, and I sure don't mind a change.
                    • PS2: Not unrelated (along a set of fractional distillation columns): What is making LLMs of some use to humans (rather than no use) is the degree to which the pluripotency can be filtered down to only the helpful output bits. That degree is being worked on (feverishly) via various models with various layers (or buckets). I heartily agree (and can attest) that having enough buckets (and still columns) really helps with getting to normal when the baseline state is pluripotency. A recapitulation flavor: the more yes-buts one is balancing (the butterier the batter), the bigger and better the butter churn·ʷᵖ must be or become. The biggest trick of all is making it look easy by hiding the tailings. No one's impressed if they see a mountain of tailings behind you when you hand them a single gem, but some are impressed if all they see is a gem-dispensing vending machine. By that same token (on another channel), I could move this particular page (herein) to another bucket, but to date I have been finding it optimal to keep it here (doing so beats the other options so far).
  • Regarding what song lyrics are about: often they don't entirely stay about what they started about — neither in the writing instance nor in the parsing instances (write once, read many) — and that's OK; it is the norm of the environment. In fact they are parametric exercises — some of the best ones that humans are capable of. This case is a case in point. In motion control there are dwell commands — parameters that can be assigned varying values. In your parsing control, learn to use the dwell parameter maturely. Dwells don't last forever. How much is enough is answered by a context-sensitive evaluation. During your parsing control, it is OK both (1) to encounter artifactuality and to sit with it and explore it, and (2) to let it go after a time. The time value is programmable, because some materials are tougher than others.
  • An outing down the block (milk run)
  • Where do you expect us to go when the bombs fall?
  • Some covers are coverer than others; some songs are better in the cover than they ever were in the original. I'm able to detect why this one was earworming me for a while in the summer of 23. It's specific to my own current events.
  • You learnt that creed in Foolsborough; you'll recant in Gallowsberg, if you do n't look out.
  • not today, not today
  • No one can go back and make a new beginning, but anyone can start now and make a new ending.
  • ay, the dumb, she pains me in the heart

Bell rings edit

This list is not exhaustive, but it is documentative, for dept 27; /ps/: carpet cleaning fee is extra. Also, keep in mind that dins are a dime a dozen, whereas echoes get noticed. (Old no-eyes snickers: you call that noticing?)

A maxim: You don't get any rings if you're not swingin any ropes.


  • No time really to scribble this here, but just a sketch for now.
    • Skimming Rhodes 2007 [1995], How to Write. Planning on probably not reading the whole thing, but keep running into bell rings while skimming, so I haven't stopped yet. First there was the fact that he touched on both map–territory relations ("maps always simplify") and time-binding ("books know no hierarchy and abolish space and time" through to "three thousand years") on the first 2 pages, which made me sit up and take notice, in a random "there-is-mathematical-proof-that-coincidences-mean-nothing-anyway" kind of way. I know it means nothing and I'm not hung up on general semantics per se, but I get a kick out of a passing coincidence when I see one. As already established elsewhere herein, humans shouldn't start things that they can't finish along the lines of "nothing-your-attention-was-idly-caught-by-actually-matters"-type things. As we move through Luis W. Alvarez's night shift work on page 16, the bell is ringing some more. What's being talked about here isn't different·*·†·‡ from my Cornish friend's shifts underground, which are always night shifts in the respect that it's always dark down the shaft.
  • There was an interesting bell ring with Pace concerning blueprints (same day, after I'd already invoked them independently), but I'm a bit annoyed with him because (1) I think he whiffed it regarding brief introductory exposition and (2) someone in his academic field (of all people) has no good-enough excuse for whiffing it to quite such a degree.
    • PS: I'm miffed because he whiffed.
  • The bellish analogue of dry powder? Speaking of both dry powder and dry powder, roadbuilders have business to attend to.
  • STAND FAST: And PS: Perhaps don't overthink it.
    • PPS: Old no-eyes snickers: you call that fast? Box cat would like to remind you that you can outfast everyone when you try. Please promise you'll try, or at least try to try.
  • The dartboard strikes again (or is stricken again). More than one other dictionary backs me up. Fuck moronicness and fuck any morons who object to that truism.
  • Wholly unrelated to my minor sensewise cot-to-syn augmentation in the mainspace earlier today (halfpennyworth, pennyworth, tuppence worth), but oddly happening on the same day (because that's how bell rings work), Bell just brought up with me the fact that some pennyworths are worthier than others. "Never had there been such a pennyworth," he said, of a performance from a jukebox that, for the circumstances, time of day, and present company (that's 3 parameters), was too loud and took too long to shut up. While speaking of the machine he naturally didn't call it a jukebox, as no one yet did at that time. It wasn't a Nickelodeon, either, but it was a box that played recorded music for coins. In the time and place under discussion (that's 2 parameters), it cost a penny.
  • Watching a squirrel in one of her energetic sessions of midmorning physical activity, I see that she provides an exemplar of, and a lesson in, maintaining carefulness without twisting the parametric dial into fearfulness. She knows how to do calisthenics and acrobatics without falling, and she makes it look effortless. The reason she's so impressive when she's in this mode (which is her parametric flavor of beast mode, as she's a squirrelly little beast) is that you don't see her pausing to recalculate or judge or think or rethink, to take just a moment before proceeding. Squirrels are people too, in their squirrelly way. Other examples of people who are talented regarding carefulness without fearfulness include surgeons and pilots. I think probably most of us are OK about it at least within our own spheres (e.g., vocations, avocations), but we can be impressed and envious when we see someone else doing it in a sphere where we ourselves definitely aren't skilled and experienced and perhaps aren't talented either (or at least definitely aren't as talented). At any rate, the squirrel out my window doesn't realize that she has a sports fan watching who appreciatively considers her a star athlete. Her footprint in the snow is an autograph, for now, until it disappears.
  • Five to noon is noonish, a "cot: syn-ish" instance on the dial, and garage cat wears a bell on her collar. When I heard her, I checked the sync, because I didn't get where I am by not checking syncs on things. 11:55, just as she said. Time to try.
  • Today is a 390 sort of day: K390, M390, 390 c.i.d., 390 members and counting (counting off).
    • Now, time for some sunshine.
      • Update some days later: The sun was nice. Some 390s may top out at 130, but this particular 390 tapped out at 626, which is a sedate enough number, in a sedany way. I know that there is some more juice in those veins, but the type of tap that I was using tapped out, and I'm satiated until I might think of another hook, which may be never (unless some hook or other brings me back, which hooks tend to do reliably).
  • On the same day: a chance to buy a vintage slide rule without the instructions, and later, a chance to buy a vintage set of slide rule instructions without the slide rule.
    • This is why I love the bell game. Time to go meet up with a rope-puller.
      • PS: I didn't buy either one, because not every ring that I can hear is for me.
        • PPS: Other rings today: 1946 to backstop 1976; the dartboard yields bioplastic polysemy. (The dartboard isn't a ouija board, despite what some may have heard. Parameters on parameters.)
  • Some firsthand recollections from the earliest years of car carrier trailers and of antifreeze.
    • This is why I love the bell game. Time to go meet up with a rope-puller.
      • Some rope-pullers are earwig bouncers. A few earwigs slide by.
  • From Elbert Hubbard, in passing:
    • "Emerson loved the good more than he abhorred evil. Carlyle abhorred evil more than he loved the good. If you should by chance find anything in this book you do not especially like, it is not at all wise to focus your memory on that, to the exclusion of all else—bless my soul!"
    • Even though I recognize that the following one is platitudinous, I kind of needed it at the moment anyway, so I consider it excused.
      • "Genius is only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in. In business, sometimes, prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose."
        • PS: We won't make too much of it, though, as extreme fetishization of carrying the message to Garcia can lead to parameter derangement of the types involving setting people up to fail and then blaming them for the failure, irrationally expecting a deus ex machina in real life, the ends justifying the means, plausible deniability of atrocities (in the civilian-control-of-the-military domain), and so on. On the other hand, there are appropriate places in life for the theme of make it happen/do your job, for basic-ass aspects, as anyone will have recognized when they've had to teach someone how to wipe their own ass (e.g., GIYF for basic-ass prerequisite how-to [end-user kindergarten, reboot the fucking computer, file management]; RTFM for domain-specific facts [Y kant u reed]; etc). As with many parametric environments in life, there are appropriate parameter values and then there are deranged ones.
  • drip gas
    • chain-yanking is parametrized rope-pulling; dual-use?
      • Later: In this model, chain-yanking is either synonymous with or coordinate to dartboarding, depending on who is slicing the salami and how far up the tree they've climbed (for lookdown purposes). Deciding how much to explain herein is likewise a charcuterie-slicing exercise, but one must at least serve oneself (before serving others), and tip-of-the-tongue is not my favorite cut.
  • Classifiability of orders of magnitude of bullshitting
    • Qualitatively different effects
  • coup de théâtre
    • so
  • sawback | sawlike
  • open country, within a gradation of landscape types, tied to political geography in any of various nuanced ways — orienteering-adjacent
    • tentative subclassification: one of those ones that says, no, you're hearing, but you're not listening, so I'll repeat, this time with emphasis
  • drayloads
  • various tones predating this record
    • handwave etc

Latent contronymy edit

More than once I have been combing over the list of senses of a polysemous word (usually while down the shaft, on my way to a destination regarding some parametric details) and I spot one that is a parametric counterpart to another in a way approaching or crossing a diametric pole, and an eyeless alert goes off: latent contronymy, that is, an instance of contronymy that gets little attention from most humans — a degree insufficient from some viewpoints (in a viewless way). I really ought to start scribbling the instances here when I encounter them, because I find that I can't remember them later off the top of my head. I know that it has happened at least two or three times. Even if it has been only two or three (not more), it would be worth having an index here. How many times in daily life do we fail to index something because we don't have any relevant (i.e., the right sort of) index cards (as it were) right at hand, right at our fingertips? Indexing gets easier the more index cards one has, and the more one can rapidly index them (meta-indexing?).

Novel words or just novelty words? edit

Gramistan edit

English edit

Etymology edit

Blend of 'Gram (“Instagram”) +‎ -i- +‎ -stan

Proper noun edit

Gramistan

  1. The nation of Instagram junkies envisioned as a nation-state and country (a stan).
    Cheap but flashy — that'll play great in Gramistan, regardless of whether it'll succeed financially.

grasslighting edit

English edit

Etymology edit

Blend of grass +‎ gaslighting

Noun edit

grasslighting (uncountable)

  2. Gaslighting in a way that pretends that the recipient's reaction is unwarranted because they need to touch grass.
    Stop grasslighting me — I'm not a shut-in; you were just being a jerk.
  4. Gaslighting in a way that pretends that the recipient's reaction is unwarranted because they must be high, or in a way that pretends that the recipient did something that they didn't do but that they misremember because they were high when they did it.
    Stop grasslighting me — I haven't been high in weeks and I wasn't even at the party that you're talking about.
  6. Gaslighting in a way that pretends that the recipient is mistaken in believing that the gaslighter was smoking grass, despite clear evidence that they were.
    Stop grasslighting me — it reeks in here and I've seen the bong that you think is so well hidden.

profucktion edit

English edit

Etymology edit

Blend of pro(duction) +‎ fuck +‎ tion

Noun edit

profucktion (uncountable)

  1. Fucked up production.
    Just another batch of high-quality profucktion — yet more fuckuppery from our profucktion department.

Stanistan edit

English edit

Etymology edit

Blend of stan +‎ -i- +‎ -stan

Proper noun edit

Stanistan

  1. A nation of deranged superfans envisioned as a nation-state and country (a stan).
  2. The rowdy audience; the groundlings; the mosh pit inhabitants; the superfans queuing a mile deep.
    That shit may fly out there in Stanistan, but no one gets in here without a backstage pass.

The essay on SoP approach: Quercus solaris edition edit

Various contributors to Wiktionary have one (i.e., an essay on this topic). Here will be yet another. It's like they say: Opinions are like arseholes: everyone's got one, but no one has the right to force anyone else to kiss theirs or wallow in it.

In fact mine might be an array that gets developed over time: under this plan, each building lot will have its own structure under construction, with a blueprint in mind guiding that flavor. The various structures on several land lots will share some common features, such as the same model of bathroom countertops and so on. TBD.

Right off the bat I'll start dumping some themes on the ground to be picked up and cut to size and installed later. This is still just a construction site so far.

Draft

  • Anyone who uses various scientific and technical dictionaries of English to a heavy degree will realize that their CFI rulesets allow for many open compound nouns that are obviously semantic nodes (ontologic nodes) in the mental models of initiates (experts in the particular field).
    • A large and important class of examples: in medicine, the established names of disease entities and their types and subtypes. And their established synonyms (including deprecated ones). All the major medical dictionaries include such terms, as well they should. Whether each such term is an open compound or not is a triviality in that context and thus has not the slightest to do with inclusion or exclusion criteria.
  • For Wiktionary to refuse to do that for some large percentage of them because they're "not idiomatic enough" to count as idioms per se [which is defined as being not etymonically parsable] is not inherently an invalid choice, but it is a choice. The alternative is not inherently wrong either.
    • This is why those who defend that choice should not try to defend it with the flawed argument that "that's what a dictionary is, as opposed to an encyclopedia." No, that is one model or version of what a dictionary is. It's a choice, no more nor less.
      • It is a choice that can be appropriate for a general-purpose dictionary, because otherwise such a dictionary could be formidably vast, and in the days of print-only, that mattered a lot. Regardless of era (now versus past), it represents a conspicuous/objectionable failure for any technical dictionary that aims to be adequate. As for general dictionaries, a question for an online general dictionary in the 21st century is why being vast is necessarily a problem per se. I argue that it is not.
      • I sometimes suspect that people who think that that argument is convincing or sound are ones who have never actually used scientific and technical dictionaries of English heavily; they don't even realize that not all dictionaries follow the model that they assume is the only one for dictionaries.
      • Also, the same people are often ignorant of which open compound nouns are indisputably semantic nodes in a given field, anyway, so you'll see them discussing them as if they were nothing more than SoP per se, tossing around their arguments about the details trying to convince others, while meanwhile others who see the arguments can be thinking to themselves, "it's not a question, dude, it's just a fact in that field."
  • For people who are annoyed with Wiktionary's current stance (i.e., whatever its precise current stance happens to be at any given moment over the years, per Wiktionary:SOP and Wiktionary:Idioms that survived RFD), it is important to remember that Wiktionary is but an instantiation of a theme, and there's no law against other instantiations existing if other people are willing to do the work of building them. Perhaps think of Wiktionary as a burger joint: for times when you don't want burgers, you're free to go to another restaurant; and you can even establish one of your own to serve that need (although of course establishing a restaurant is not trivial, so you have to want it). And you can still go to Wiktionary too, whenever you feel like a nice burger. Neither option is wrong.
    • Further on this same line of thought: Wiktionary will remain quite useful and valuable even if it is somewhat hobbled regarding this particular aspect (among many aspects). Wiktionary will continue to show other dictionaries examples of gaps in their own lexicographic coverage that they ought to fill. Wiktionary will continue to show many examples of what can be achieved at Wiktionary or a place like it — regardless of whether most humans don't bother to help build such things.
  • Wiktionary at least allows for translation hub entries, which is a saving grace that might keep it from being too silly (by allowing for recognizing at least the semantic node station, per se, of certain open compound nouns that are semantic nodes/ontologic nodes that would otherwise be barred from Wiktionary). But the threshold levels set for THub CFI may preclude a lot of them, though, if they're quite strict.
    • I've decided not to worry or care about scrutinizing those threshold levels, because of the burger-joint point. Thus, I realize that there are many scientific and technical terms (including many that are commonly used in any given field) that Wiktionary will simply never enter, under anything like its current CFI regarding SoPness. There's no sense feeling bad about that fact or trying to change it. As Merriam-Webster says, " […] no dictionary of English, however good it may be, can provide all of the information about the English language that one might wish to have at one time or another."[10] Their main point in that discussion is that things such as whole-clause intonation and word order will never be properly and wholly covered by a dictionary. But their point also applies even to lexical inclusion criteria as well. And for that aspect, one wants multiple dictionaries of various kinds: e.g., general, science, chemistry, physics, biology, medical, engineering, military, abbreviations, abbreviations within a certain field, idioms, biography, geography, reverse, visual; thematically indexed thesauri, alphabetic thesauri, nondiscriminating thesauri, discriminating thesauri.
      • So if you need a competent medical dictionary (for example), just pony up for MW Medical or Stedman's or Dorland's or Taber's. If you think that one like those should be free to end-users, you can try building one, using MediaWiki; but just keep in mind that there's a reason why such things aren't free — someone (in fact a team of someones) has to spend a lot of time building it and keeping it updated over time. Also, the average person on the average occasion just needs a plate or two of nice food, which they are looking to be served without their having to go gather the ingredients themselves and do the cooking and do the dishes themselves. There's a reason why restaurants are not things that everyone creates. (And the ones who do establish and maintain them need to amortize the expense by serving many customers one plate at a time, times many times.) Nonetheless, a variety of restaurants (rather than solely one) is necessary too.

See also edit

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References edit

  1. ^ Musser, George (2024 March 19) “A Truly Intelligent Machine. [Online title and tagline: "Building Intelligent Machines Helps Us Learn How Our Brain Works. Designing machines to think like humans provides insight into intelligence itself"]”, in Scientific American‎[1], volume 330, number 4, →DOI, archived from the original on 2024-04-11, pages 31-36
  2. ^ Twain, Mark (1906) “William Dean Howells”, in Harper's Monthly Magazine‎[2], volume 113, number 674, page 221
  3. ^ Suffolk Accent — The Back'us Boy, recited by Tom Veasy, on YouTube. Accessed 2023-04-24.
  4. ^ Suffolk dictionary on TWTD site. Accessed 2023-04-24.
  5. ^ Rye, Walter (1895) A Glossary of Words Used in East Anglia, Founded on That of Forby, With Numerous Corrections and Additions‎[3], London: English Dialect Society
  6. ^ Matthews 2024-02-13
  7. ^ Jennings, Rebecca (2024 February 7) “Against trendbait: TikTok has seen a bizarre (and annoying) explosion of language as creators rush to coin terms. (Earlier headline: Tiktok is full of tryhard slang)”, in Vox‎[4], retrieved 2024-02-07
  8. ^ Alcorn, Ted (2024 April 2) “[On machine perfusion advances in clinical practice]”, in New York Times‎[5], retrieved 2024-04-02
  9. ^ Hoel, Erik (2024 March 29) “A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture. [Opinion: Guest Essay]”, in New York Times‎[6], retrieved 2024-03-29
  10. ^ Merriam-Webster (2003) Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed edition, Merriam-Webster, page 28a


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