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Comment by EngineerBetter | Hacker News Reader

This is not an ode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode

An ode is not a tribute, it is a particular form of verse. I guess people get confused because the word sounds like "owed", or something.

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An "ode to X" means a "praise to X", because odes in ancient Greece were used to praise gods, heroes, etc.

My favorite is "ode to a goldfish", a particularly concise verse:

    My

    wet

    pet

I don’t know why you are being down-voted but here’s my modest +1 of moral support for having made a factual statement and paid the bitter price for it...

Because complaints about rigorous/academic meanings of words don't really add substance to the discussion.

I quite like precise use of vocabulary, it makes it so much easier to ensure everybody intends the same concepts if what one expects to be conveyed is the dictionary definitions. Apparently the OP felt so too. I think he’s justified in wishing to draw attention to that.

It's a well known phrase used appropriately in the article. The OP suggested that the author got "confused" and misused the word, which is clearly not the case.

Besides "tribute" is also used non-literally today, the original meaning is very different

The world "ode" is rarely used literally - it's usually used in a metaphorical sense.

As the OP points out, there’s the word ’tribute’ to denote what was apparently the author’s original intention.

I disagree with the implicit suggestion that using a word like 'ode' metaphorically is undesirable. It's certainly popular and not novel, in any case.

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