weird typo
Reading along in the Meno for Ancient Philosophy, I tripped on this word in the last line of a page:
perlexity
Yeah, yeah, it was supposed to be perplexity. But I was momentarily perlexed, er, perplexed when I tried to parse it. When reading philosophy you always have to try to apply the principle of generosity: assume the author meant something worthwhile and do your best to figure out what that was. So I tried to take the word apart: "perl" + "exit" + "y", no, they wouldn't have had things that exited like perl back then... "per" + "lex" + "ity", no, they wouldn't have had universal law or dictionaries either... um. And definitely not parsers.
But it sounds like an ictionary post -- perlexity (n). 1. a tendency to give up when presented with undocumented Perl code. 2. confusion or an inability to parse when there is more than one way to do it.
Yeah. so. back to reading now.
perlexity
Yeah, yeah, it was supposed to be perplexity. But I was momentarily perlexed, er, perplexed when I tried to parse it. When reading philosophy you always have to try to apply the principle of generosity: assume the author meant something worthwhile and do your best to figure out what that was. So I tried to take the word apart: "perl" + "exit" + "y", no, they wouldn't have had things that exited like perl back then... "per" + "lex" + "ity", no, they wouldn't have had universal law or dictionaries either... um. And definitely not parsers.
But it sounds like an ictionary post -- perlexity (n). 1. a tendency to give up when presented with undocumented Perl code. 2. confusion or an inability to parse when there is more than one way to do it.
Yeah. so. back to reading now.