English ambiguity
From WhyNotWiki
English ambiguity edit (Category edit)
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[edit] Slash (/) symbol
(This may not be specific to English...)
Usually, it means alternation: "a/b" means "a or b".
But sometimes it means other things...
- It can, in rare cases, be used more as "and" or "with": GNU/Linux. Not sure exactly what it means in that case...
- It can be used to indicate hierarchy (as in Linux-like file systems: /usr/bin)
[edit] Citation
[English / Questions (category)]
Does that refer to the text that was cited from the other work, or does it refer to the metadata about that citation (the book title, author, page numbers, etc.)?
I suppose a less ambiguous way to refer to the metadata about the citation might be "reference" (MediaWiki's <ref> tag, for instance) or "source reference". But that seems somewhat awkward.
It could also refer to the act of citation/citing.
[It's also what results when a police offer cites you for some offense.]
[edit] "saw"
"I saw Matthew at the concert"
Does that mean you talked to him or just got a visual of him?
Taken literally, of course, it should only mean the latter. But quite often we connote the former with it as well...
[edit] lead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style
The most important structural element of a story is the lede —namely contained in the story's first sentence. Lede (pronounced /lid/) is a traditional spelling, from the archaic English[1], used to avoid confusion with the printing press type formerly made from lead, or the typographical term "leading". The lede is usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences, and is ideally 20-25 words in length.
[edit] [Food ingredients (category)]
[edit] "spice" (or "spices")
What kind of spice, for crying out load? What kinds of things could or couldn't that even include? Can/does it include herbs? Things like garlic? Things like chili powder? Things like salt? Why do they have to list salt on ingredient lists but not other kinds of "spices"?
[edit] parent/child
[edit] Example 1: parent/child
...
[edit] Example 2: subclass/superclass
I started out with:
- "class variable for superclass shares same object as class variable for subclass"
But changed it to:
- "class variable for self shares same object as class variable for subclass"
Because if something has both a superclass and a subclass, then we would have a total of 3 classes being references: self, self.superclass, and "subclass" ... which is not what I wanted to imply.
Rather, I wanted to imply that we had the following situation/classes/relationships:
| self.superclass | |
|---|---|
| a class (called BaseClass for the sake of example) | Class |
| another class (called Subclass for the sake of example) | BaseClass |
Aliases: English ambiguities
