More words I wish there were

[simont]

Words for similar but distinct concepts, that are not themselves similar. The ELF standard for object and executable files contains two concepts which are similar enough to confuse, but different enough that it's normally important not to confuse them, and they're called ‘section’ and ‘segment’. I often wish they'd been called by more obviously different names: ‘section’ and ‘kangaroo’, or something. And I was just reminded this morning of another similar case: ‘project manager’ and ‘product manager’ as distinct corporate roles.

If two concepts are similar but distinct, the words for them should not reflect this by also being similar but distinct! They should be as different as possible.

Moral versus probabilistic ‘expect’. This might fall into the same general category as yesterday's moral vs tactical ‘should’, though I'm not sure whether ‘probabilistic’ and ‘tactical’ are similar enough for it to count. But even if so, it's a particularly noticeable sub-case of it and worth mentioning in its own right.

Imagine a parent saying to a child, before going to visit someone for the day, ‘Now I expect you to be on your best behaviour’; and then, when the child has left the room to get ready, they turn to their co-parent and say ruefully ‘I expect him to throw a huge screaming tantrum, so we'd better be ready to leave in a hurry’. Two clearly distinct words for ‘expect’, please!

Comments

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

At a former orkplace we - the tech team - found ourselves dealing with both product management and product marketing, which pitched themselves as distinct roles but were often both confusingly referred to as "PM". I saw so little of one of those role holders, I'm still not entirely sure what the distinction was.

expect

[ewx.livejournal.com]

'request' or 'order' (etc), and 'predict'?

[(Anonymous)]

Are you determined to remove all the things that make English actually worth speaking, and reduce it to something computer-parsable?

s.

[simont]

Do you think that phrasing your complaints as rhetorical questions relieves you of the need to make them proportional to the thing you're complaining about?

[(Anonymous)]

Did I make that point about the first such comment in two days, or the fourth?

S.

[simont]

Could four or forty such comments even begin to cover the full spectrum of ambiguity in the English language?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, one or two looks like a couple of things you've noticed. Four in two days starts to look like a general principle.

S.

[simont]

Statement! One-love.

These four grumbles represent several years of backlog, so I wouldn't worry too much.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

"More words I wish there were"

S: Are you determined to remove all the things... and reduce it...

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, this'll be in the way that adding more explanation to a joke doesn't reduce the funny?

S.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily.

[songster.livejournal.com]

Heh. One thing I'm learning is never to phrase an order as a question. If I turn to James and say "Now, are you going to be a good boy tonight?", he looks me straight in the eye and says "I don't know". The dangers of having a logical son.

[simont]

I think it was rmc28 who said recently that another danger of talking to young children entirely in questions is that they imitate the speech patterns they hear – so a year or two down the line you find they're phrasing all their communications to you in the form of patronising rhetorical questions, at which point you find out just how annoying it is firsthand :-)

[rmc28]

Yes, I learned the hard way not to say "Do you want to go to bed now?" "No" he said. Oh bother.

[ixwin.livejournal.com]

"Ok then, you can go in 5 minutes"

[simont]

"... and if you still think that's too soon, you can go in five minutes and a huff"? :-)

[ixwin.livejournal.com]

(but, yes, if it's something with no such wiggle room avoiding the question format is wise)

[meihua.livejournal.com]

There's no such thing as a moral "expect". That's just a guilt-enducing ploy by the parents. "I expect you to be on good behaviour. If you're not on good behaviour, it will show that you're not as good a person as I think you are, and I'll revise my expectation of you so that I think of you as a worse person from now on."

[simont]

Perhaps "moral" wasn't quite the right word, but the sense I'm stretching for is "I will be outraged if it doesn't happen", as opposed to "I will be surprised if it doesn't happen".

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Yes, and that first sense is just an abuse of the second in the way that I described. It's a passive-aggressive guilt trip.

[simont]

Only in some scenarios. I still think they're perfectly good concepts, and not so awful as to be denied words to describe them by.

In particular, the two senses of 'expect' can perfectly well come up in cases that have no guilt-trip dimension at all. Network protocol design, for example: a server might expect{1} its input to be well-formed (and is justified in abandoning the entire connection if it isn't), but expect{2} 99% of its input to consist of the three most common requests (and therefore implement a fast path to provide cached answers to those three, but must still contain the more general code that handles the remaining 1% of cases correctly).

Hmm, that example makes me think even more that "moral" was a poor choice of word on my part, but I'm not sure what should best replace it...

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I think the interpersonal use you described is a third, emotionally manipulative case.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

I don't see what's passive-aggressive about it. Telling people that a particular behaviour will outrage* you sounds like fairly straightforward boundary setting to me.

*or upset, or disappoint**, or whatever
**generally what I would mean by "I expect you not to do this" if I don't mean surprise

[(Anonymous)]

Well, that's good, if it inspires the kid to try to be a better person (though not if taken so far so that the kid decides there's no point in trying to be a better person).

S.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Not really. Inspiring kids to be better through threats of loving them less is a great way to raise unhappy adults. A lot of counselling work (which I'm partially trained in) focuses on helping people identify and untangle these kind of guilt trips.

[(Anonymous)]

But inspiring kids to be better by making them aware that they will disappoint you if they aren't is exactly what a parent should be doing. Are there no situations where you are helped to do the right thing because you know that if you act wrongly you will disappoint someone you care about -- be that parent, friend, lover or child?

Anyway, if they're a bad person, guilt is the correct reaction. And the idea that people should be happy rather than good is a silly modern notion that can't pass soon enough.

S.

[rmc28]

Certainly I try to phrase what I want from my son in terms he can follow, and I try to give reasons.

"Please sit quietly on this bus because it's not safe to stand up while it's moving, and there are lots of other people that don't want to hear you making a loud noise."

(We are still working on that; also on the horrific idea that other people may want to sit in his favourite seat.)

But honestly, if one of my parents said to me "I expect you to be on your best behaviour" I would take that as an instruction at face value without the guilt-inducing subtext you have added. In a more destructive parent/child relationship I can see that subtext existing, but the word 'expect' doesn't have to imply it.

[pne.livejournal.com]

(We are still working on [...] the horrific idea that other people may want to sit in his favourite seat.)

Heh. Sounds familiar.

Made even worse by the fact that Amy not only wants a window seat, but (a) it has to be at the back (where the floor is higher up, so that she can actually see through the window more easily) and (b) it has to be next to me.

There are, in many busses we take, exactly four seats satisfying criterion (a), and hoping that both they and the adjacent seat are free is, well, a good setup to frustration.

[factherd.livejournal.com]

Also, "program manager". Though in that case you can rely it vanishing due to the fashion cycle in business jargon, in the same way that all the higher-ups in my company used the word "skew" obsessively for about 9 months in 2007-8.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Hope and predict?

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

There's a whole load of the type 2 things, if memory serves they're epistemic(expressing a belief) vs deontic (expressing a desire or an order). I'm not sure to what extent it's a feature of the language that things are so consistently dual-purposed.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Hypoglycaemic and Hyperglycaemic is my least favourite example of the former.

[simont]

Probably hypo/hyper several other things too, now you mention it. When we imported those prefixes from Greek we made a big mistake putting the stress somewhere other than the distinguishing vowel...

[pne.livejournal.com]

Also oral/aural.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Especially because when you need to say it, you (a) can't say it clearly, (b) through sod's law end up saying it to somebody who understands only the opposite word to the one which is true, (c) need help QUICKER than that.

[pm215]

The other thing that gets me about the ELF terminology is that the sections are listed in the section header table, but the segments are listed in the program header table...

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Also declare and define which I may still get as far as colour coding so I can tell the stupid things apart.

[simont]

(Coming back here months later because I just remembered the other one of these that always annoys me)

Qualitative and quantitative are often used to deliberately constrast with each other, but sound so similar that you have to say "hang on, which one did you just say again?" and the entire point of what was just said to you gets missed.

[simont]

Another example added long after this post: immoral versus illegal. (Inspired by a journalist having managed to actually confuse them in a published article.)

[simont]

Good grief. How has this post been accumulating examples of annoyingly easy-to-confuse words for over four years and not yet got latitude and longitude?

(An especially annoying pair since they're not only lexically similar, but also used in confusing circumstances, specifically the way people always talk about a 'line of Xitude' which of course points at 90 degrees to the direction the Xitude coordinate is actually measuring.)

Anyway, these ones have an easy fix: we should rename them Snourth and Weast.

[simont]

This is still my best place to accumulate lists of the confusables, so here's another pair: probable and provable can easily be used as antonyms (for example, in the context of choosing a prime-generation strategy for crypto keys), and they're a single QWERTY-adjacent typo apart.