29 Jan
2011
29 Jan
'11
6:07 a.m.
On 28 Jan 2011 at 20:48, Tony Duell wrote:
Actually, at least how 'dustiong' is normally down over here, it means
getting the dust from the coffee table into the air, so that it lands
somewhere else. Personally, I'd rather have dust on the coffee table than
inside one of my comptuers :-)
> I think it was Martin Gardner who pointed out
that many terms lie
at
opposite ends ofa contimuum, but that does not
make them worthless.
And the same words can mean something and its opposite. The verb "to
dust" for example. If I dust the furniture, I (hopefully) am
removing something from the surface of the coffee table. On the other hand, if I dust my toast with powdered cinnamon,
I'm putting
something on the surface of my Wonder Bread.
Yet, we don't seem to get the two meanings confused...
I remember reading some chains of words where each word and the next were
almost synonyms, but the ends of the chain had completely opposite
meanings.
Of coruse the meanings of words also vaires with context. A 'bus driver'
might be the man who was sitting just in front and to the right of me on
a Routemaster about 4 hours ago. Or it might be a 74LS244 on a PCB in the
comptuer I was fixing. Again, we don't seem to get confused by this.,
-tony