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Comment by sushisource | Hacker News Reader

Not a comment on the content of the article, but I find it pretty obnoxious when an author uses a word like "hereodox" which has a much more commonly known nearly-exact synonym "unorthodox". It's hard to imagine any reason for that beyond "look at how clever of a writer I am".

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Nearly-exact is definitely not exact. To my ear 'heterodox' connotes difference and pluralism while 'unorthodox' is more of a negation. (Of course other mileages may vary.) But different words always exist for a reason—if they didn't, one would have fallen out of use. Pretentiousness is not enough to keep a word alive!

At risk of sounding foolish... I even read yours/his comments, and I am still confused.

I am fairly confident that I have never seen the word heterodox used before.

That's because it means exactly the same thing as "unorthodox" and almost everyone simply says that. Hence the discussion - you aren't alone.

When given the choice of a naming a variable notSomethingDescriptive or somethingElseDescriptive, I always choose the positive name, because it's easier to understand in logical expressions, and reduces double negation. It's better to describe what something is, instead of what it's not. So unOrthoDox is more negative (and more complex) than heteroDox, because it begins with the prefix "un".

You're right, but on the other hand, it's probably not best to use words that few are familiar with if you are trying to make yourself understood. On the gripping hand, a variable name is just a variable name and its true meaning doesn't really depend on its name at all, so okay, go for the burn. (especially if you're writing Java code)

For each of us there are good words we haven't seen before. That's lucky, since life would be duller otherwise.

The word aside, he's not wrong. That article is filled with flowery non-sense, making long prosaic paragraphs from thin-air. I like reading long articles, but this doesn't contribute much.

I respectfully disagree. The article made considerable effort to evade techno-solutionist fantasies.

Nobody? Tough crowd.

Quite possibly! But a bad article can contain a good word. I wanted to stand up for 'heterodox', first because words are my friends and I like my friends, and second because HN is a textual place and good English is part of the business here.

Have you tried deconstructing it?

http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure

by Chip Morningstar, June 1993

"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman

I wonder if you can offer a pair of online dictionary definitions that illustrates what you see as the difference in meaning between the two words. (I bet you can't)

Look closely enough and you'll see that they all do. One meaning for 'heterodox' is 'holding unorthodox opinions'. That's an attribute of the person, not the opinion.

The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain. Hetero = different, dox = opinion, ortho = correct. So the distinction here is something like "diverse opinion" vs. "incorrect opinion", which to me seems clearly meaningful.

Cool.

The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain.

Is it? (to either of those things). In current English usage, 'unorthodox' doesn't mean 'incorrect' and doesn't connote 'incorrect'.

Etymology be damned: I'm still trying to figure out if he meant "royal" as in "Royale with Cheese" or "royal" as in "royal pain in the ass".

> The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology

No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means (either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.

I couldn't disagree more.

How is heterodoxophobia more nuanced than literally meaning being afraid of different opinions?

http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2010/05/homodoxuals-and-hetero...

There is definitely a difference in meaning, maybe just in specialized fields like theology and economics.

An Austrian school economist, or an Arianist in the early Christian church, would be called "heterodox" but probably not "unorthodox". It has the connotation of following a definite tradition that is not the main tradition in the field. "Unorthodox" means something more like "doing your own thing", so Steven Levitt (the Freakonomics guy) might be called an "unorthodox economist" because he studies unusual topics like drug dealers, but not a "heterodox economist" because he studies these strange topics using mainstream theories.

I think "heterodox" fits reasonably well in this article, it suggests that these engineers are following a distinct tradition, not just "doing their own thing".

Funnily enough, an essay cited by the article contains this quote in its opening paragraph:

"...defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming Information Age..." [1]

Presumably Victor's research group is working in opposition to this conventional thinking, making them... unheterorthodox?

1. 'THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY' - http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-i...

i got to know Götz and spoke to him about his time 'in the field' at HARC

you can look at your complaint from at least two perspectives

first, he is german and english is a second, or possibly third or fourth, language

as the saying goes 'there's a perfect german word for that', but in this case Götz was able to find the perfect word in a second language

second, one of his favourite revelations from his time at HARC was the inhabitants', and i argued many 'creators', nearly obsessive, nearly detrimental, preoccupation with 'naming things'

every new idea, every new prototype, every new function, every new variable needs a name and Götz would watch as the team labored over 'what to call it'

a practice that fascinated Götz and when he recalled it to the room and those of us who had been there confirmed the same preoccupations he erupted in glee

so to call out Götz for naming something exactly as it was meant to be conveyed i think would engender in him a pride of assimilating this ritual

Not sure if I agree with your assessment, but the author certainly loves the word - it appears in the article 5 times. Maybe it's a technical term with a precise, widely used definition in the ethnography field?

I find it obnoxious when a commenter whines about a single word in the first line of a long article. It's hard to imagine any reason for that beyond "look at how good of a complainer I am".

I agree with both of you.

I think he was trying to be ironic by being picky and pedantic about the exact meaning of a word, while spelling it wrong at the same time. I took it as a successful attempt at self deprecating humor, by criticizing "clever writers" while ignoring the squiggly red line his spelling corrector drew under the word he was talking about.

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