[HN Gopher] Unparalleled Misalignments
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Unparalleled Misalignments
Author : ChadNauseam
Score : 128 points
Date : 2025-05-05 01:19 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rickiheicklen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rickiheicklen.com)
| saagarjha wrote:
| I have to admit some of these took a moment to register.
| investa wrote:
| Hypothesis = Understatement makes sense, right?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| This is great, had quite a few chuckles.
|
| You could take it one step further and merge in Cockney Slang as
| an extra stage.
| jl6 wrote:
| Hacker News / Tweaker Buzz?
| chabska wrote:
| That's a very loose definition of "synonyms" . Most are like
| "conceptually adjacent".
| camtarn wrote:
| Indeed. 'beach' and 'wave' are definitely not synonyms, and
| while a shelf is a platform, not all platforms are shelves. Too
| many of these are essentially really forced puns. But there are
| some absolute crackers in there nonetheless.
| roenxi wrote:
| Some poet must have had a lot of fun with these slipping things
| past the censors. It'd be in the same league as the underhanded C
| contest - what is the most innocent short text that can be
| written while slipping in some subtle but likely rather dirty
| double meaning in.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This was a common thing to do in the late 90s and early 2000s
| when websites thought you could make 'safe chat' with a limited
| dictionary and it turns out they were mostly wrong.
| krisoft wrote:
| Some of these are very cool and fits their definition exactly.
| But some others are very forced. Who would think that "fashion"
| and "taylor" are synonyms? And they are both further synonyms of
| "fix"? Or in the "Cold Fusion // Cool Cat" pair how would
| "fusion" be a synonym of "cat"?
| jstanley wrote:
| A tailor makes clothes.
|
| To fashion something is to make something. To tailor something
| is to customise it.
|
| `cat` is a Unix command for concatenating files, which you
| could argue is fusing them together?
| krisoft wrote:
| I think you are onto something with 'tailor'. If we take it
| as the verb 'to tailor' that is the synonym of the 'to
| fashion'. Tailor as a profession is not a synonym of the noun
| 'fashion'. But it is enough for them to be synonyms in one
| sense. So that works.
|
| I hear you on 'cat' but i wouldn't call that relationship
| synonyms.
| em-bee wrote:
| when you make a list like this then it's always a challenge to
| deal with edge cases. fashion and tailor fit together as well
| as many other terms on that list. a swift taylor can be seen as
| producing fast fashion, even if not true in reality. fixing
| clothes is also the work of many tailors. with getting custom
| tailored clothes falling out of fashion (pun intended ;-) the
| bulk of the work of most tailors is making changes and fixing
| things. in germany it is even a recognized profession with a
| two year training (you can become a full tailor with an extra
| year). most of my visits to a tailor recently have literally
| been for a quick fix. stuff that i could probably have done
| myself if i had a sowing machine and time.
|
| i am with you on the cat fusion however. i don't get that one
| either.
| krisoft wrote:
| > fixing clothes is also the work of many tailors. with
| getting custom tailored clothes falling out of fashion
|
| These are all good reasons for semantic closeness, but
| semantic closeness and being synonyms are not the same thing.
|
| That being said while tailor (profession) is not a synonym of
| fashion (concept), tailor (verb) is a synonym of fashion
| (verb) and can be also a synonym of fix (verb).
| ben_w wrote:
| Ah, the difficulty of learning a second language as an adult.
|
| Reminds me of the ways that my mediocre grasp of the German
| language still haunts me => Resurrects myself out of specific
| tracks in which my half-hearted clutch on the Alsatian tongue
| still plagues me.
|
| Last year I inadvertently asked to borrow a fork-lift truck when
| I meant stapler. Still, at least my pronunciation is no longer
| Crabtree from 'Allo 'Allo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYNXMWRdCx0
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| this is absolutely genius
| gwern wrote:
| An interesting ML exercise (possible class project!) would be to
| try to automate this. A bigram corpus combined with word
| embeddings and a NSFW text classifier, maybe? Your usual word
| embedding might not work because the point is the multiple
| meanings, so maybe the twist would be that you need a polysemous
| word embedding with multiple vectors or something like that, so
| it's not just an off-the-shelf word2vec...
| myflash13 wrote:
| You don't even need embeddings or Ml. A simple search across
| dictionaries, thesauruses and the Wikipedia entry list (with
| disambiguations) should be enough.
|
| - Find all 2 word phrases and compound words - search across
| all pairwise combinations of mutual synonyms, and determine
| whether the compound synonym is itself a word or phrase
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6818d11d-f444-800a-96b0-7a932e9213...
| gwern wrote:
| That would be a good baseline. Maybe the ML part would be for
| ranking them? Because I expect you would drown in matches,
| and the hard part becomes finding the _good_ ones.
| myflash13 wrote:
| I expect the opposite. I would expect an ML/embedding
| approach to find lots of false positives, because lots of
| words have close embeddings but are not synonyms. A strict
| thesaurus lookup should produce _fewer_ matches. As for
| ranking the _good_ ones, an embedder might help with that,
| but then we need a definition of "good". I would argue the
| most conceptually "unrelated" matches are the "best" ones,
| so yes, an embedder could quickly determine the farthest
| vector distance.
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| Underdog/subwoofer is my favorite. A lesser known rapper needs to
| make a bar out of that xD
| myflash13 wrote:
| Somebody should write commentaries/explanations for all of these,
| especially for non-native speakers and technical jargon. Hell,
| ChatGPT can probably write it up quickly. Even as a native
| speaker, there were quite a few that took a moment to understand.
| Have Reddit-style voting for the "best ones" and you could make a
| whole social network out of this.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Brilliant, and hilarious. Thank you for sharing!
| svat wrote:
| Lovely. This is a fun, devious list (constable?), and though it
| says "since 2018", it's clearly actively maintained, as it
| contains entries like "Twitter ban / exterminate" and "quick jab
| / prompt injection".
| tmiku wrote:
| "since 2018" means "starting 2018, through the present", no?
| myflash13 wrote:
| Hacker News / Intruder Alert
| throw100 wrote:
| A related idea I've thought of is finding (comparatively) long
| words that have different definitions in different languages.
| E.g. "fetter" (English/German). In theory you only need a
| wordlist for each language, but in practice, most common words
| across languages also share definitions (e.g. "unintelligent" in
| English/German).
| edent wrote:
| These are called False Friends -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend
| myflash13 wrote:
| Someone please vibe code a quick website to submit, verify, rank,
| filter, sort and explain/comment on all of these. Should be an
| hour with Cursor.
| nullc wrote:
| Just noted to my partner last night, a screw and a nail are
| similar things, but "you screwed it" and "you nailed it" are
| opposites. But if you take them as sexual innuendo they mean the
| same thing again.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > Home-schooled / house trained
|
| The gifted kid to burnt-out transgender puppygirl pipeline
|
| Explanation for anyone who needs it: "Home" and "house" are both
| nouns that mean a place you live in. "School" and "train" here
| are both used as verbs that mean "to teach something to someone".
| But "Home schooling" is the practice of parents teaching their
| own children at home and keeping them out of public school,
| whereas "House training" is the practice of teaching dogs not to
| pee inside the house.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| home schooled is about the location of the teaching
|
| house trained is about the subject of the teaching
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