Both Uses of
ambiguous
in
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
- Gottman has taught his staff how to read every emotional nuance in people's facial expressions and how to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue.†
Chpt 1 *
- The police procedure, in other words, is for my benefit: it means that the only way the officer will ever draw his gun on me is if I engage in a drawn-out and utterly unambiguous sequence of actions.†
Chpt 6unambiguous = clear (not open to multiple interpretations)standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unambiguous means not and reverses the meaning of ambiguous. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
Definitions:
-
(1)
(ambiguous) unclear -- because there could be two or more interpretations
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, ambiguous can mean uncertain or doubtful -- as in the expression "an ambiguous smile".