All 3 Uses of
bias
in
Ulysses, by James Joyce
- A course that lay between undue clemency and excessive rigour: the dispensation in a heterogeneous society of arbitrary classes, incessantly rearranged in terms of greater and lesser social inequality, of unbiassed homogeneous indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants of the widest possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing with confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown.†
Chpt 17 *unbiassed = without a personal preference; or without any tendency to move in a particular direction"Editor's Notes"This is more commonly spelled, unbiased. The prefix "un-" in unbiassed means not and reverses the meaning of biassed. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- Pure fluke of mine: the bias.†
Chpt 6
- He personally, being of a sceptical bias, believed and didn't make the smallest bones about saying so either that man or men in the plural were always hanging around on the waiting list about a lady, even supposing she was the best wife in the world and they got on fairly well together for the sake of argument, when, neglecting her duties, she chose to be tired of wedded life and was on for a little flutter in polite debauchery to press their attentions on her with improper intent, the upshot being that her affections centred on another, the cause of many liaisons between still attractive married women getting on for fair and forty and younger men, no doubt as several famous cases of feminin†
Chpt 16
Definitions:
-
(1)
(bias) a personal preference -- especially a prejudice that prevents objective consideration
or:
any tendency to move in a particular direction -- such as a car that tends to want to swerve toward the right -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Specialized meanings of bias include:- statistics: any of several errors that distort results
- textiles: a line or fold that is diagonal relative to the sides or grain of the fabric
- electronics: a steady-state current that is forced through an electronic device