The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding

Bent C Dalager bcd at pvv.ntnu.no
Wed Oct 3 14:41:48 EDT 2007


In article <85sl4sqckf.fsf at lola.goethe.zz>, David Kastrup  <dak at gnu.org> wrote:
>bcd at pvv.ntnu.no (Bent C Dalager) writes:
>
>Not as much "been" liberated, but "turned" liberated.

I expect that either way you split this hair, using "free" in the
sense of "possessing liberty" is still going to be quite reasonable.

>But picking just a single word from a whole explanation of _one_
>naming and declaring it as equivalent is not really being careful with
>language at all.

I have never claimed equivalence. What I have made claims about are
the properties of one of the meanings of a word. Specifically, my
claim is that "free" is a reasonable description of some one or some
thing that has been "liberated".

As an example, when a slave becomes a free man, this is not commonly
understood to mean that he now has a low or zero monetary cost.

>And even when using a Thesaurus, it should be clear that the offered
>alternatives are not supposed to or capable of capturing all nuances
>of the keyword.

I have never claimed to be providing a full definition of the word.
Indeed, I quite clearly conceded very early on that "free" is commonly
associated with what might otherwise be called "gratis" - that is
"free of charge".

My effort has been to point out that the word also has other meanings.

Cheers
	Bent D
-- 
Bent Dalager - bcd at pvv.org - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
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