Linux Terminal Memory Usage

https://gilesorr.com/blog/linux-terminal-memory-usage.html

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The strange absence of ‘ambiguate’

If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech.

I mean, sure, I can say ‘makes the sense ambiguous’. But there’s no reason not to have a one-word verb. After all, we have its antonym, disambiguate: to make something unambiguous. More on that later.

Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Without further information, there’s no way to be sure. The choice of conjunction ambiguates the sense.

The same issue arises with other common words, like as and while. She made the sauce, while he chopped the vegetables. Does while have a temporal sense, indicating concurrent activities, or a contrastive or additive sense, like whereas or and? The comma and other factors might guide our interpretation, but ultimately we can’t be certain.

Usages like this are ambiguating. As a copy-editor I come across them fairly often, and I’ve begun using ambiguate judiciously in referring to them. Disambiguate is also useful, being more specific than synonyms like clarify and resolve. Disambiguate is a relatively new and specialized term, but it’s established enough to appear in major dictionaries:

to make (an ambiguous expression) unambiguous [Collins]

remove uncertainty of meaning from (an ambiguous sentence, phrase, or other linguistic unit) [Oxford]

to establish a single grammatical or semantic interpretation for [American Heritage]

to establish a single semantic or grammatical interpretation for [Merriam-Webster]

to make a sentence or phrase perfectly clear by removing all uncertainty [Vocabulary.com]

to make clear the meaning of a word, phrase, etc. that has more than one meaning [Macmillan]

(Note the tantalisingly near-identical definitions from AHD and M-W.) The OED has citations for disambiguate from 1960, generally in linguistic and philosophical contexts, and the word’s usage has risen steadily since then:

The noun disambiguation has been in use since at least 1827; it has become more familiar this century from its common appearance at the top of Wikipedia pages:

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As it turns out, ambiguate exists in the lexicon, but only barely – not enough for lexicographers to include it. Dictionary aggregator OneLook shows it only in the crowd-sourced Wiktionary, whose entry defines it as ‘to make more ambiguous’ (which implies, oddly, that the thing was already ambiguous).

A sense of the two verbs’ relative frequency may be seen in this corpus comparison:

Ambiguate is not even in the OED, that great historical cabinet whose vast shelves swell with obscure Latinate vocabulary. Instead of the verb you’d expect – even if labelled archaic or obsolete ­– nestled in among ambigual, ambigue (n.), ambigue (adj.), ambiguity, ambiguous, ambiguously, and ambiguousness, there is a lacuna where ambiguate might go.

Its rival, ambiguify, appears in none of the corpora above but shows up a couple of times in Google Books (e.g., ‘Her words seemed to ambiguify their meanings’ —Norman Spinrad, The Void Captain’s Tale). Its chances of happening, fetch-style, are even smaller than those of ambiguate, yet it has its champions.

I’m not the first to point out the utility or validity of ambiguate, and a search on Twitter Bluesky shows it in casual use. But even here its appearances are sporadic, and in printed or edited texts it remains marginal.

My recommendation is that if you ever need to use the word, do. Its meaning should be transparent enough in context, and with more usage it will gain in familiarity and acceptability. Whether it will gain enough to ever show up in major dictionaries, or even in language corpora, is an open question.

Updates:

Languagehat joins me in ‘urging the use of this occasionally useful word’.

Peter Gilliver at the OED tells me they have evidence for ambiguate back to 1969. Watch this space.

In episode 211 of the Weird Studies podcast, about 11 minutes in, J.F. Martel says of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that it “just ambiguates everything”. Great to hear it in the wild!

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[You’ll find more neologisms in the Sentence first archives.]

The Trouble with Harry’s grammar

Alfred Hitchcock’s comedy-thriller The Trouble with Harry (1955), amidst all its talk of murder and romance, has a fun little exchange of sociolinguistic interest between John Forsythe (‘Sam Marlowe’) and Edmund Gwenn (‘Capt. Albert Wiles’):

Marlowe’s correction is notable for being relatively polite. Those who correct others’ speech uninvited often do so in a rude and judgemental way. Marlowe corrects Wiles gently and off-handedly, as though automatically correcting a child. Indeed, Wiles doesn’t even notice and reacts as if Marlowe had merely echoed him. For good measure he adds another nonstandard usage: past tense say for said.

That Miles doesn’t pick up on the prescriptive nudge also chimes with what happens when children have their speech corrected – they tend to repeat what they said rather than immediately adopt the ‘proper’ form. Abby Kaplan, in her excellent book about language myths, Women Talk More than Men, reviews the research and concludes:

Some parents tend to repeat or expand on their children’s utterances, but it is unclear whether children actually use this kind of feedback to correct their own speech. Since there are societies in which this kind of interaction is rare, it is unlikely that repetitions and expansions are absolutely necessary for language acquisition.

Of course, Captain Wiles has already fully acquired his language: it’s just that the variety or dialect he uses differs in some respects from standardized English, prompting Marlowe’s useless intervention.

The script for The Trouble with Harry was written by John Michael Hayes. I don’t know if the same exchange appears in the source novel by Jack Trevor Story, but Hitchcock obviously liked it. He featured another linguistic allusion, to Alfred Korzybski and his General Semantics, in The Birds:

Hitchcock’s interest in usage also manifests in a letter he wrote to Ernest Lehman, writer of North by Northwest, in which he wondered, in a parenthetical aside, if his use of while should be whilst. I covered the whilst, amongst, amidst issue in a previous post.

https://blog.gslin.org/archives/2026/05/01/13021/github-coploit-%e8%ae%8a%e6%88%90-usage-based-%e7%9a%84%e6%94%b6%e8%b2%bb%e6%96%b9%e5%bc%8f%e4%ba%86/

GitHub Coploit 變成 usage based 的收費方式了

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Claude Pro: Opus model will only be available if extra usage is enabled

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GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

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