The Lair

No. I kid. There’s actually too much happening and I can’t keep track. First and foremost, there is Benazir Bhutto. Yeah, it was probably suicidal to come back. She did anyway.

Then there is the slightly more entertaining (in a utter tosser getting his comeuppance sort of way) saga of a guy who’s name rhymes with Erwin. Because there is a sense of justice in someone trying to mete out an extra-judicial vigilante ass kicking and having the ass kicking rebound on them, right?

And to complete my descent from the ultra serious to the utterly innocuous - seven common medical myths debunked. Including that perennial favourite (which I intend to forward to my parents) - no, reading in dim light doesn’t actually harm eyesight.

So, I was thinking recently. Uncommon, I know. Savour the moment while it lasts. I realized in a blinding flash of the obvious, that “pass”, or more specifically “pass on” is an ambiguous construct. In fact, there are at least two completely different ideas that can be expressed with that phrase. There is a third construct, as tez points out - pass on is the formal phrase to use for kicking the bucket. But to concentrate on the Wordnet senses -

Pass on

1. To give, impart - “They pass on the parcel to their parents”
2. To relegate, defer or decline - “He passed on the unpalatable choices on offer”.

Why does this lingusitic oddity suddenly interest me? Well, it is remarkably like the famous Dinosaur comic on homographic homophonic autantonyms. Actually, even more interesting is the list of words defined as contronyms (same word, opposite meanings). via LL

Why this sudden interest in the unparseable? Because if you are trying to cajole a computer into understanding these constructs as they appear in written text, you need to figure out the context in which the words are being used. Specifically, you’d need to disambiguate the word - and, as those examples indicate, this is more difficult than you’d expect.

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In any social encounter of significance, there are always things that I really shouldn’t say. No matter how pithy or accurate those observations may be, opening my cakehole inevitably leads to recriminations, raised eyebrows and the descent of an uneasy silence on the conversation (also see: dropping a clanger, putting your foot in it, open mouth-insert foot moment etc).

This then, is part of the problem.
Paul Graham »

Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.

Of course, this isn’t to say that I have either good ideas or I dress unfashionably. (One of those is definitely true, I have the clothes to prove it) - but I hold an opinion about any number of things, some of which seem to fly against the conventional wisdom, or prevailing fickle winds of online opinion, or whatever you may want to call the consensus. Actually, so does everyone else for their little niche. As Scott Adams observes, everyone is an idiot at something.

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Even calling it consensus is strange. Take politics. An entire country could be overwhelmingly conservative in its political outlook. As these things work, the more liberal (or conservative in the opposite extreme, take your pick) congregate online. That makes voicing a conservative opinion online pretty much a no-no - lest you be shunned, called a rethuglican and all manner of other epithets. Substitute any other political divide as you see fit. I’ve seen this repeated in many different places.

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