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
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.
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.
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...
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".
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.
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”?
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).
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.
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
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.
Hacker News / Intruder Alert
Underdog/subwoofer is my favorite. A lesser known rapper needs to make a bar out of that xD
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.
This is great, had quite a few chuckles.
You could take it one step further and merge in Cockney Slang as an extra stage.
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...
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".
> 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.
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”?
Hypothesis = Understatement makes sense, right?
That's a very loose definition of "synonyms" . Most are like "conceptually adjacent".
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).
Hacker News / Tweaker Buzz?
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.
I have to admit some of these took a moment to register.
Brilliant, and hilarious. Thank you for sharing!
this is absolutely genius
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.