Comments on: Reverse and Invert

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 10:28:21 +0000

I just saw this episode (“Fleas”)…but I can’t remember the name (it was actually the victim’s middle name)

(It was another scene that jumped out at me: when Alicia was talking with the accused lawyer and his daughter/partner, the daughter said “we” had been at the office at the time she was asking about; Alicia asked “who is we?”, and she said “we, dad and me.” Ugh.)

By: Maeve

Maeve — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:33:14 +0000

Peter, yes. Transposed is better.

Emma, the word that ended in er was a surname that was supposed to end in “er,” something like Gardner.

By: Steve Campbell

Steve Campbell — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:52:25 +0000

This conversation takes me back to my college class in symbolic logic (taught, interestingly, by the philosophy department). There we learned the four variations of a proposition: the obverse (the proposition itself), the inverse, the converse, and the contrapositive.

Obverse: If P then Q.
Inverse: If not P then not Q.
Converse: If Q then P.
Contrapositive: If not Q then not P.

If the obverse is true, then the contrapositive is also true. The inverse and converse may not be. To test this, let P be “it is raining” and let Q be “it is cloudy outside.” Try it.

By: Emma

Emma — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:51:44 +0000

The interesting thing, of course, about “transpose” & in particular the “er/re” example given, is that it’s also possible that it’s a UK / US spelling difference – e.g. “theatre”, “theater” / “meter”, ‘metre” & so on!

By: Phil Dragonetti

Phil Dragonetti — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:36:03 +0000

“Transpose” is the word usually used to describe reversing the sequential order of two letters. Dyslexic people sometimes see letters tranposed like that. They might see “er” as “re”.