Re: otiose vs odious

On Friday, October 10, 2003, at 01:31  PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> Just to be clear, since I'm afraid some people didn't catch the
> correction, Bijan was calling Tim's spec-stack argument [1] "otiose"
> (pointless, superfluous, wasted) [2] not "odious" (abominable,
> detestable, execrable) [3].

And I use it with the rather more neutral connotation of "superfluous". 
Which I believe is how it's most commonly used and the implicatures are 
quite polite.

No "personal" attack was made; indeed, it's unfortunate that my 
deliberately neutral word choice didn't survive the phone line noise.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.