Monday, 16 July 2007

End Homographophobia now

There is a dangerous prejudice afoot in the technical world - Homographophobia. Those who suffer from it call for segregation, to avoid the miscegenation of meaning - they want to ensure that their Humpty-Dumpty definitions are not polluted by sharing with others. But they are wrong. We are all imperfectly multilingual, we all have our own internal associations for any given word, but we can only communicate through overlapping meanings with some degree of sharing of concepts.

So we should eschew namespaces and hierarchies as they are just solipsistic security blankets, and embrace the overlapping ambiguity of using words as tags, as Roschian prototypes and as puns. Homophonophobia is a similar affliction, yet homophones give rise to so much entertainment and jollity, as the "four candles" sketch shows:

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