Hacker News Reader

Comment by bacon_waffle | Hacker News Reader

I'm a native English speaker and agree that it is a slightly weird corner of the language - thanks for asking!

"Against" can also mean something like "adjacent to" or "in contact with", like "let's put the chair against this wall".

View on HN

Thank you for answering. Also, I did check the dictionary before asked. As others comments pointed out, it does have a meaning of adjacency or contrast, and I guessed that this is where this usage was coming from. But still, even with this meaning, I feel a bit of an adversarial meaning. "Contrast" itself is adversarial, right? Because it comes from comparison. For instance, in "the chair against the wall", I can see the chair exerting force against the all, and the wall reacting to it with equal intensity and opposite direction (Newton's Third Law). Yet, in Willson's tweet, I can't imagine anything like that coming off of a git repository and git notes, hence my comment.

As an addendum, my first language is Portuguese, and a direct translation for this word is "contra"¹ which fits all the meanings for "against" listed in Merriam-Webster, except the adjacency one. I've never seen "contra" being used for this meaning in the wild, and I guess this is the reason I feel a bit off about it and never used it myself for that meaning when communicating in English.

¹ https://dicionario.priberam.org/contra

The same with Czech (and I assume all Slavic languages?). Would be interesting to track the etymological development of this meaning.

I didn't understand if in the end you can say "contra o muro" in portuguese (about the chair). In Italian, you can.

You can say that in portuguese, it's completely correct but it seems to be much less used than "junto ao muro" as in "next to the wall/adjacent to the wall". Even being correct in this use, "contra" is a word very charged with adversarial context. Maybe that's the source of the strangeness the thread OP feels about the use of "against".

The physical act of comparing two objects or testing one object against another would typically involve some physical contact or proximity, so even in the case of testing some code on something, it is natural in English to by analogy use the word "against." But I think you are right in this case that "against" has significant adversarial meaning in the act of testing something: often, one introduces stress scenarios or edge cases that could cause some software to fail. Tests are in large part adversarial to the object under test.

But I think a distinction between "against" and "next to" is that generally speaking, "against" implies a closer contact than just being "next to" or "adjacent to" something. Like in the chair example, "against the wall" would mean pushing the chair up as close to the wall as you can make it, whereas "next to the wall" would mean putting it close to it, but not necessarily touching it. If it was a folding chair and someone told me to put it "against the wall" I would take that to mean "fold it up and prop it up on the wall".

I can confirm that in your example the German "Stell die Sessel gegen die Wand" would be valid too and well understood, yet with a slight touch of colloquialism and old-fashioned phrasing.

Interesting how the notion of symmetric contact can be seen as a positive or negative relationship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com