One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meanings

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Richard W
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Richard W »

KathTheDragon wrote:
Richard W wrote:Do we allow if [Ifː]?
Iff you mean the "if and only if" logical operator.
Clearly my spelling was off this morning.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

KathTheDragon wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Richard W wrote:Do we allow if [Ifː]?
Iff you mean the "if and only if" logical operator.
In which case presumably we need orr as well...
What's that?
Exclusive disjunction ('or but not and'). Although apparently in computing they sometimes use it for non-exclusive disjunction ('and/or'). Just to be annoying, no doubt...
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by KathTheDragon »

Salmoneus wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Richard W wrote:Do we allow if [Ifː]?
Iff you mean the "if and only if" logical operator.
In which case presumably we need orr as well...
What's that?
Exclusive disjunction ('or but not and'). Although apparently in computing they sometimes use it for non-exclusive disjunction ('and/or'). Just to be annoying, no doubt...
Ah.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Travis B. »

KathTheDragon wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:In which case presumably we need orr as well...
What's that?
Exclusive disjunction ('or but not and'). Although apparently in computing they sometimes use it for non-exclusive disjunction ('and/or'). Just to be annoying, no doubt...
Ah.
This is because exclusive disjunction is typically known as exclusive or in computing, which is typically abbreviated xor.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Richard W »

Salmoneus wrote: In which case presumably we need orr as well...
<snip>

Exclusive disjunction ('or but not and'). Although apparently in computing they sometimes use it for non-exclusive disjunction ('and/or'). Just to be annoying, no doubt...
Well, setting to contrast 'orr' and 'or' is daft when the the participles would be the same ('orred' and 'orring').

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

Richard W wrote:
Salmoneus wrote: In which case presumably we need orr as well...
<snip>

Exclusive disjunction ('or but not and'). Although apparently in computing they sometimes use it for non-exclusive disjunction ('and/or'). Just to be annoying, no doubt...
Well, setting to contrast 'orr' and 'or' is daft when the the participles would be the same ('orred' and 'orring').
Dude, this is a discipline that contrasts existential with existentiell, différence with différance, and intention with intension... (though the first two of those are continentalisms)
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by gmalivuk »

Wordsmith.org's words of the day this week were all short: dint, moil, guff, weft, quaff

I suspect at least "weft" has probably been mentioned though.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Xephyr »

Musth or must /ˈmʌst/ is a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants, characterized by highly aggressive behavior and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones.
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Richard W »

Salmoneus wrote:
Richard W wrote:
Salmoneus wrote: Dude, this is a discipline that contrasts existential with existentiell, différence with différance, and intention with intension... (though the first two of those are continentalisms)
And where does the visual contrast disappear? Surely they're just as secure as 'oral' v. 'aural', and no more confusable than 'hypertension' and 'hypotension'.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Alces »

Ooh, here's a good one: ked is a word used to refer to certain species of parasitic flies of the family Hipposcobidae. One of them, Melophagus ovinus, is a common parasite of sheep, which is presumably how it has ended up with a common English name. The word is attested from the 16th century, and has a variant cade up to the 18th century; its derivation is unknown, according to the OED.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by kanejam »

zompist wrote:
Xephyr wrote:If we're using MMORPG slang, I might add "deeps", "dot", "hot", "rez", "farm", "pot", "wipe", "tank", "pull", "pat", "threat", "nerf", and "buff". There's also the FPS slang terms "gib", "camp", and "frag". And forget not "zerg"!
Many of these are used in MOBAs too, and we might also add gank, feed, mid, sup, creep, drag, lane (as a verb). Bot has two meanings (bottom or robot).
Just to add a few more: juke - a feint to mislead opponents, taken from sporting; crit - a 'critical hit'; proc - basically an occurrence of a timed or random event, apparently short for 'programmed random occurence' (or else just process or procedure) but often used as a verb; gubs - another word for loot; smurf - a high level player with a low level account.

Edit: and grief, used as a verb
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Xephyr »

I also missed twink and toon.
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Xephyr »

sept - division of a family or clan in Celtic society
"It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be said, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is.' Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by alynnidalar »

Also a type of church in ASoIaF.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Viktor77 »

Would 'form' count when its used to refer to the nest of a hare? I discovered this word today after translating the French 'gîte.'
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Chuma »

Never heard (or seen) anyone use "orr", but then I'm mostly in computer science, so "xor" is pretty established here. I guess that could also be a one-syllable word, although I don't know anyone who says it like that.

In computer science, we also have the somewhat special usage of tree, but that should hardly count. More special, however, is the word trie, which is a kind of tree, and supposed to be pronounced the same way... Most people pronounce it like "try" instead.

Role-playing games have a bunch of nerdy words - special words like larp, and words with special meanings like roll, save, check... Oh, and let's not forget grue.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

Chuma wrote:Never heard (or seen) anyone use "orr", but then I'm mostly in computer science, so "xor" is pretty established here. I guess that could also be a one-syllable word, although I don't know anyone who says it like that.

In computer science, we also have the somewhat special usage of tree, but that should hardly count. More special, however, is the word trie, which is a kind of tree, and supposed to be pronounced the same way... Most people pronounce it like "try" instead.

Role-playing games have a bunch of nerdy words - special words like larp, and words with special meanings like roll, save, check... Oh, and let's not forget grue.
You mean the RPG 'grue', or the philosophy 'grue'? "Green if examined before a specified time, and blue if examined afterward". Star of such amusingly named philosophical papers as "A Grue Thought in Bleen Shade", a chapter of the book "Grue! The New Riddle of Induction". As the paper's name suggests, the colour "bleen" is also sometimes discussed, though less often.

In a similar vein there is "quus", a mathematical function of philosophical interest such that x quus y = x + y iff x < 57 and y < 57, but x quus y = 5 if either x > 57 or y > 57.
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by KathTheDragon »

Salmoneus wrote:In a similar vein there is "quus", a mathematical function of philosophical interest such that x quus y = x + y iff x < 57 and y < 57, but x quus y = 5 if either x > 57 or y > 57.
Why is that interesting?

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

Kripke uses it as a concrete demonstration of (his interpretation of) Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations, framing them as a skeptical paradox. The problem is, if you have never added together numbers higher than 50, all your additions are compatible both with taking "add" to mean "mathematical plus" and with taking "add" to mean "quus". It may be that everyone asking you to add things together has really been meaning you to quus them all along, and you've been plussing them. It's only when we deal with numbers over 50 that we start to see that plus and quus are different, and the question arises of which rule we are meant to follow when we are told to "add", and we discover whether we have been following the same rule as everyone else. But more than that, in what way is it true that we have been quusing when they have been plussing, because in what have they following the plus rule rather than the quus rule? Not because of what they did, since what they did was compatible with both rules. And not because of what they thought, because it's possible that they never even considered what they would do when dealing with numbers over 50 (have you ever consciously considered how you would answer 547+789? Maybe you would answer '5'. You probably wouldn't, but that fact doesn't come from what you have consciously thought before about what you would do in this situation). And of course you can't try to explain by using other rules (like 'x+y means give the yth successor of x'), because those rules are themselves subject to the same ambiguities, and indeed in the case of mathematical rules are just restatements of the problem in other words ('the successor of x' is no less ambiguous than 'x+1').
So how are we ever able to learn, and use correctly and in the same way as everybody else, rules that cover an infinite number of different circumstances, when we can only learn from a finite number of circumstances, and when an infinite number of eventually-conflicting rules are compatible both with our finite experiences and with any attempt to describe the rule in language?

"Quus" isn't a very commonly used word in philosophy (nowhere near as common as 'grue', I'd wager), but people do still talk about it.
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I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Xephyr »

karst - a type of landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum
tack - to change course by turning a boat's head into and through the wind
jibe - change course by swinging a fore-and-aft sail across a following wind
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

Xephyr wrote:karst - a type of landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum
tack - to change course by turning a boat's head into and through the wind
jibe - change course by swinging a fore-and-aft sail across a following wind
Also to make overall progress in a given average direction through a series of counterposing tacks or jibes. And I think square-riggers can still gybe, although the process is different?

and shunt. to make progress at sea by following a series of ogival paths repeatedly crossing the intended line of travel, at the limits of which paths the direction of travel is directly reversed. This has the advantage of allowing progress to be made into a headwind without having to face into the wind at any point the way that tacking requires - hence this is both faster and safer. The disadvantage is that it requires the craft to be able to sail backwards. A shunt is also any of the reversal manoeuvres that are employed in shunting in this broader sense.
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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Tropylium »

Some relatively nontrivial Game of Life / general cellular automata jargon:
ark (n.): any nontrivial combination of two switch engines (by backformation from a particularly fruitful combination initially named "Noah's Ark")
ash (n.): the stationary periodic objects generated by a pattern that has "run its course"
blonk (n.): an object that is either a blinker or a block
rake (n.): a moving object that generates other moving objects
tie (n.): a still life that can be decomposed into two or more contiguous still lifes
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Alces »

An ort is a leftover scrap of food. The word may be derived from the English cognate of the German prefix Ur- added to a reduced form of the word eat.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Pole, the »

In computer science, we also have the somewhat special usage of tree, but that should hardly count. More special, however, is the word trie, which is a kind of tree, and supposed to be pronounced the same way... Most people pronounce it like "try" instead.
And “treap”? :P
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

Quire:
- a gathering, section, or signature within a book: that is, a group of sheets of paper folded, typically sewn through the fold, and sewn or glued to the spine. In most bookbinding techniques, other than perfect binding, books consist of a series of quires

- a unit of quantity for sheets of paper. Quires can have 15, 18 or 20 sheets, but are more commonly 24 (old imperial/US unit and sometimes used for specialised papers) or 25 (modern metric unit) sheets. Quire length in turn defines ream length - the modern standard long ream is 20 long quires, whereas the short ream used with some specialty papers is 20 old quires. [A perfect ream, however, is 516 sheets - I don't know why)

- a unit of 80 pages used in blankbook binding

- a book(let) short enough to be printed as a single quire (i.e. gathering), or perhaps specifically 8 pages long

- an alternative spelling of 'choir' found in some of its more obscure uses, such as a division of a pipe organ.



yapp:
- an adjective found in the expression "yapp edge". A yapp edge is an edge of a limp cover that extends beyond the block.
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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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