Disambiguation

 

This word became one of Cro's favourites, and I was the person who gave her it.

"Mr Chairman, if I could disambiguate here, are you saying we can't afford this or simply don't want to afford it?"

It simply means 'remove any (possibly deliberate) ambiguity from a statement or situation. Cro loved the fact that her despised antagonist had to deal with a scientific sounding word while wriggling on the end of a tough grilling. 

But for me, over the previous 20 years it had simply been a workaday word in lexicography. We used it to mean the process of showing the actual semantic distance (or even sociolinguistic distance) between two words with similar meanings. Why not have a go?

If you have the verbs 'choose', 'select' and 'pick' , how would you decide which one to use in a particular context? Are they semantically identical (spoiler: this hardly ever is the case) or are there situational or collocational factors that would make you pick one word over another?

And why did I choose to use the word 'pick' right there?

Answers in the comments please.

In another post I will tell you about the Longman Language Activator, which was the first lexicography project I ever worked on, over 35 years ago, with a great bunch of people who I still know today, and which was intellectually challenging and great fun to write.