On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 02:11:08PM -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote: > On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, 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? > > Well, he DID, so obviously he CAN. But I would prefer "ambiguate", as > Pamela has already commented. I'm not familiar with "ambiguate", but > "disambiguate" has been in my technical vocabulary (linguistics) since > grad school. It has my vote for one of the ugliest but most useful words > I know. I cheated and Googled for it. There are quite a lot of hits for "ambiguate," mostly very recent. I imagine it's a back-formation >from "disambiguate", as David suggested. I have to confess that when "disambiguate" first crossed my path I was delighted to see it; it did seem to fill a much UNneeded gap. "Ambiguify" has far fewer hits, but among those is fiction by Norman Spinrad. I guess I could get used to it, but to my unfamiliar eyes it keeps trying to look like an adjective. -- Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet (pddb at demesne.com) "I will open my heart to a blank page and interview the witnesses." John M. Ford, "Shared World"