![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) simont |
Fri 2006-10-20 17:38 |
The only other one that springs to mind is the verb "smell" in the sense of "intuit, from very little visible evidence, the presence of". I use it in debugging when I'm starting to have a hunch about what sort of problem I'm facing. "I smell a memory corruption here."
I suppose that usage could be explained from the point of view of my unusual attitude to smell – when other people say they "smell" things I can't perceive the physical evidence on which they're basing the judgment, so I use the same word when the physical evidence on which I'm basing a judgment is meagre or non-obvious or both. But I don't think that can be the whole story, because the metaphor "to smell a rat" has much the same flavour and is used by normally osmic people. |
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