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.

[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.

[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."

[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.

[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.