'Contrariwise' - New Word Parsing

'contrariwise'

Possible parsing procedure
1. Verbalise (silently or voiced)
2. Verbal word matching - sounds like 'contrary' + 'wise'
3. Contextual confirmation - rhymes with 'otherwise', 'other' and 'contrary' have overlapping meanings, and the word occurs at the beginning of a clause, like 'otherwise'.

Software imitation
1. Insert syllable breaks (imitating verbalisation): con~tra~ry~wise.
2. Try to see if any of the combinations fit existing words:
con~tra~ry~wise
contra~ry~wise
con~tra~rywise
con~trarywise ('con' means 'with' in some languages, but 'trarywise is unfamiliar)
contra~rywise
contrary~wise
3. Contextual confirmation (as per above).

Possible meaning is suggested from the most likely parsing:

'Contrary' at the beginning suggests 'contrary to popular belief', 'contrary to what has been said', 'on the contrary'

'~wise' suggests 'in all situations contrary to what has been said', since 'otherwise' means 'in all other situations'

These two meanings seem to reinforce each other, adding further support for the parsing that we first chose.

Source article:

Today's buzzword: plausible deniability
In deception problems, plausible deniability is the ability to engineer a reasonable doubt about secret behavior. An example is a backdoor that results from intentionally bad coding practice. This is plausibly deniable as an innocent mistake; contrariwise, you will have no excuse if someone finds working shellcode in some hex constants.

2006 Underhanded C Contest (http://www.brainhz.com/underhanded/).

2006-04-06 01:23:00pm (GMT +10) kyy