At 18:15 -0500 on 03/01/2014, John Gilmore wrote about Re: CamelCase:
Robin is right. In a mathematical paper cosh is all but certainly a hyperbolic cosine. In a (chiefly British) whodonit, newspaper piece or the like it is almost certainly something akin to what Americans call, problematically, a blackjack.
The difference between British and American English can (as you note) be a problem in terminology (and sometimes played for laughs or suspense). I remember a mystery where for suspense purposes someone had to stop a crime that was going to occur in a room on the second floor of a building. Initially he want to one floor above ground level before realizing that that floor was known as the first floor and that the floor above was what was being referenced to as the second floor (ie: 2 floors up from the ground/entry level). Then there was a story played for laughs where someone overheard another being referred to as a fag and thought it was a reference to that person's sexual orientation not the fact that when he was a student he acted as a servant for an upperclassmen student (at least hearer did not think the other was being called a cigarette).
Inferring denotation from context is the thing that machine-translation schemes are most prone to botch
... as are translations of idiomatic phrases. I remember the case of an early English->Russian->English attempt on such a phrase. "The Spirt is willing but the Flesh is Weak" came out when converted back to English as something like the "Liquor is Powerful but the Meat is Spoiled". I also read a story where some Russian Blueprints (and build instructions) of a device were transmitted by a spy to the US. For security reasons the blueprints had all their notations converted into a word list which was then translated into English to make an English Copy of the documents. Since the translator only saw the word list but not the context the translation was junk. They finally had to get someone who knew Russian and the Technology who had a high enough clearance to actually see the blueprints. The problem was basically that the terms on the list had multiple meanings. For example if you are talking of an electrical circuit where the wires were made of the lead, they would be "lead leads" and the same word (lead) would be used for not only the function (ie: a connecting wire) but what the wire was made (lead not copper).
