army1987 comments on Unpacking the Concept of "Blackmail" - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (136)
Anyway, it depends on how much variance of nuance you want to allow. (Does the fact that extortion is Latinate and blackmail is Germanic count for anything?) I've seen a claim that no language has truly perfect synonyms (i.e. two words such that P(X|someone says word1) = P(X|someone says word2) for all X in all circumstances), which might well be true, but which would make the phrase perfect synonym useless.