Dragaera

Great Weapons (was Possible spoilers for _Sethra Lavode_ (was Re: Dumas))

David Dyer-Bennet dd-b at dd-b.net
Tue Aug 19 10:34:33 PDT 2003

pddb at demesne.com writes:

> On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 01:26:06AM -0700, Steven Brust wrote:
> > At 10:35 PM 8/18/2003 -0700, David Silberstein wrote:
> > >   On the other hand, he also says: "The
> > >two artifacts were, or are to be, created together --", which
> > >ambiguifies the causality and sequence.
> > 
> > Mark?  Pamela?  Can he say that?
> 
> Sure, as long as he's being whimsical about it.
> 
> If he's being serious, I'd think it should be "ambiguate."
> 
> Though these opinions simply reflect the ways in which I've
> happened to see the words used.  In a context of literary
> criticism, I'm much more accustomed to "ambiguate."  But I'm
> not really up on modern lit-crit.  And in any case, I
> guess you might say that the above context is what the
> Serioli makes it -- whether that would be physics, history,
> or weapons design I do not know.
> 
> "Make ambiguous" is less open to various charges, but it creates
> a sentence that is either very formal -- "makes ambiguous the
> casuality and sequence" or else is perhaps less formal than
> is desired -- "makes the casuality and sequence ambiguous."

Would "ambiguate" be a lost-positive form of "disambiguate", then?  
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, <dd-b at dd-b.net>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
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