RE: A little respect for "unvalidated"

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Dan Goldstein wondered:
> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 9:38 AM
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: RE: A little respect for "unvalidated"
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: McLauchlan, Kevin
> > Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 9:08 AM
> > To: Robert Lauriston; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> > Subject: RE: A little respect for "unvalidated"
> > 
> > ... Unlike doctors and pharmaceutical companies and medical 
> > equipment companies, apparently, the rest of us understand a 
> > difference between "unvalidated" (nobody has validated it) 
> > and "invalidated" (somebody has actively tested and found 
> > that it fails validation)...
> 
> "Unvalidated" has a specific, technical definition. "Invalidated"
> doesn't.

But it does have a generally understood meaning, as captured in the major sense of dictionary meaning (see your fave dictionary).  I take that to be "shown or discovered to not be validated/validatable", which contrasts with "doesn't happen to have been validated" (implying it hadn't been submitted for validation, or if it has, it's yet to exit the process with a definitive answer).
 
> Why do you say that these people don't understand the difference?

I don't. I think Robert did, and you corrected him, but I was responding to a post (of his) earlier in the thread than your correction.  

In real life, I'd expect specialist groups like medical or aeronautical or <name it> to have a meaning for each word (in this case "unvalidated" and "invalidated") similar to the lay meaning, but perhaps with some additional restrictions to suite the niche. I would not expect them to impute wildly variant meanings to commonly used (or directly derived from commonly used) words.  

 - Kevin


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