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ventaI have just met the word "disambiguate" in some documentation I'm reading (DOM Level 1, if you care).
[Poll #357609]
Yes, I should be concentrating on DOM rather than posting silly polls. Thank you for asking.
Update: It is, of course, a great word. It covers a concept which (in my opinion) isn't covered by any other word, and is nicely euphonious to boot.
I'd now close this poll if I had any idea how to do so :)
[Poll #357609]
Yes, I should be concentrating on DOM rather than posting silly polls. Thank you for asking.
Update: It is, of course, a great word. It covers a concept which (in my opinion) isn't covered by any other word, and is nicely euphonious to boot.
I'd now close this poll if I had any idea how to do so :)
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 03:15 am (UTC)The question is whether people should be allowed to use "disambiguate", or should stick to the phrase "distinguish unambiguously" :)
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Date: 2004-09-29 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 05:31 am (UTC)"Furthermore, both OMG IDL and ECMAScript have significant limitations in their ability to disambiguate names from different namespaces that makes it difficult to avoid naming conflicts with short, familiar names."
Made my definition seem like a reasonable one. However, yours does demonstrate better why there is no pre-existing word which does the same job so well.
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Date: 2004-09-29 05:44 am (UTC)I liked the idea of an "Oh My God Interface Description Language" and was quite disappointed to discover it was just those Corba chaps again !
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Date: 2004-09-29 08:17 am (UTC)Oh is that what it stands for. I was happily reading it as Oh My God, on the grounds that I didn't need to know what it stood for. Mind you, I didn't know what IDL stood for, either ;)
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Date: 2004-09-29 04:53 am (UTC)Depends on context, I imagine.
> The question is whether people should be allowed to use "disambiguate", or should stick to the phrase "distinguish unambiguously"
People should be allowed to use whatever they like. OTOH, people should probably be _encouraged_ away from such vile constructs like "disambiguate". "Distinguish" seems like a good alternative to "clarify" (again, depending on context). Why should this require the addition of "unambigously" - that is surely implied?
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Date: 2004-09-29 05:11 am (UTC)Yes, I was wondering about that. In my mind, there is a difference, but I was having trouble coming up with an example with the "unambiguously" actually added anything.
If Onebyone is correct (http://www.livejournal.com/users/venta/112628.html?thread=1460468#t1460468), then I hadn't fully understood the implications of disambiguate, though, so may have been barking up the wrong tree.
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Date: 2004-09-29 06:21 am (UTC)Well, I was following "to dispossess" and "to disentangle", but now it occurs to me that "to dissociate" doesn't necessary mean to remove an association, it might mean only to draw a distinction. So I might have to give up on that theory.
In your context it clearly means "to prevent an ambiguity that would otherwise exist" rather than "to remove a pre-existing ambiguity", which is probably fair use figuratively even if the literal meaning were solely the latter, which it might not be.
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Date: 2004-09-29 06:37 am (UTC)Or to remove a tinctionion.
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Date: 2004-09-29 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 05:32 am (UTC)See here. (http://www.livejournal.com/users/venta/112628.html?thread=1462004#t1462004)
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Date: 2004-09-29 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 06:29 am (UTC)Come to think of it, maybe it isn't. Maybe a "disambiguate" ought to be one of the results of a process of "disambiguisation".