Hacker News Reader

Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Language question as non-native speaker: (M-W) dictionary definition of "success" refers to "succeed" which goes..

"1a : to come next after another in office or position or in possession of an estate especially : to inherit sovereignty, rank, or title " and "2a : to turn out well, b : to attain a desired object or end "

When people use the word to mean securing a good position in a corporation, are they consciously using the 1a definition?

In casual use I always thought it's just a practical word to mean whether you attained your goal in a specific contextz, so general "success" should naturally mean whether you are content with your life.

View on HN

It's usually meaning 2, but “success” as applied to life can refer by contextual metonymy to success in any number of areas of life, so securing a good position in a corporation can be considered a particular form of success. Career-oriented advice shows up a lot on HN, in which career-focused successes are likely to come up as central examples of the idea of life success, even though they aren't necessarily a representative class of all successes.

No, they're using the 2a definition. Office in this sense does not mean "room in a building."

The more common usage is 2a/b, as you point out. I believe "success" is specifically derived from this meaning of "succeed", not 1a. Typically, securing a position in a company is still in the sense of definition 2a/b.

As far as I know, the definition 1a is unrelated and specifically meant to describe sequence relations, usually for positions of power. For example, "Trump succeeded Obama as president" means Trump became president after Obama. Related words are "succession" (e.g., "succession of the throne" refers to the process of transferring power in a monarchy), "successor" (e.g., the successor function in mathematics takes an integer n and returns n+1), and "precede" (the antonym of "succeed").

Reply on news.ycombinator.com