The late linguist Dwight Bolinger famously wrote in Aspects of Language (1968):Ī difference in syntactic form always spells a difference in meaning. In the entire thesaurus project (spanning two years, if I remember correctly), the only pair that we all agreed were completely identical was "flammable" and "inflammable." For example, "He rushed/ran/bolted to the door" all mean about the same thing, but rushed and bolted make implications about motive which ran does not. That means that even when we confined a pair of synonyms to specific dictionary definitions, there would still be differences between them in certain contexts. That is a "word" wasn't just a string like "run"-it was an entry like "run 6" from the 9th New Collegiate dictionary. The Webster editors at the time kept hammering at us that we could not get away with modeling synonyms as words that mean exactly the same thing-not even when we separated them by senses. Thirty years ago, I led a software team that built one of the first online electronic thesaurus products, based on a Merriam-Webster thesaurus. The best way to interpret synonyms is that they are words that are interchangeable in at least some nontrivial contexts. John Lawler has added: Language doesn't have any use for two words that are exactly the same there's always contexts where you use one and not the other for some particular effect. (Though apparently, the shuffle is a type of dance.) There are some amusing candidates - tango, foxtrot, conga, jive, passacaglia, slosh. Probably, no two words are totally interchangeable (ignoring variants like artefact / artifact).Ĭoincidentally, I said to someone the other day, "I must be careful not to waltz off with the key." I then thought of possible substitutes for waltz in the pretty transparent idiom, and decided that I couldn't immediately think of any that are actually used. And when we get on to connotations, the same word will conjure up different nuances in different people. They will usually also have distinctly different senses. There's a wide variety of answers saying 'no', 'maybe' and 'yes', and I'm sure some of the misunderstanding stems from the dual meanings of 'imply'.I forget who said, "All words are infinitely polysemous," but it's probably also true that 'No words are truly synonymous.' Words will have some senses that largely overlap with those of other words, but not totally overlap. Here's an example of a Quora page (about correlation implying causation) in which the two meanings come into conflict. and the provided definition of 'infer' is somewhat closer to the mathematical sense in which 'imply' is normally used. Imply and infer do not mean the same thing and should not be used interchangeably: see In fact, the above dictionary entry goes on to state: In stark contrast, the usual math definition is of a conclusive nature - A implies B means that whenever A is true, B is definitely true. To my understanding, this usage of 'imply' only relates (in a way) to the likelihood of something. This gives rise to expressions that cover different degrees of strength in a connection between statements - 'weakly imply', 'imply', 'strongly imply' etc. The word imply has significantly different meanings in ordinary speech and mathematics, and has caused me some confusion in the past.Īccording to this dictionary entry, the word indicates a suggestion (rather than a definite conclusion) that some statement is true.
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