Книга how to define
Книга how to define
How to Define Yourself: Taking Control of Your Life
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Table of Contents
Home » Education » The Definitions Book: How to Write Definitions
The Definitions Book: How to Write Definitions
The Definitions Book is Divided into Four Parts:
Contents
The Basics of Definitions
How to Write Simple Definitions
How to Write Advanced Definitions
How to Write Definitions for Specific Circumstances
The Basics of Definitions
Before we get into how to write a definition, you need to know a bit about definitions themselves, and how to spot good and bad definitions.
Once you know that, we’ll walk you through the five steps to creating a good definition.
Then we’ll teach you how to apply and extend those steps to craft different types of definitions.
So let’s start at the very beginning, shall we?
Using Words You and Your Audience Know
Ya know, this seems pretty obvious – almost so obvious it shouldn’t be the first thing you read in a book about how to write definitions. But it has to be said. It has to be said because all too often we read something in our business lives (not so much for entertainment, thank the universe) that just doesn’t make sense. In some instances, the author wants to «sound smart» by using «big words». As an example, here’s a paper from a student I read the other day:
«The dialectical interface between neo-obstructionists and anti-disestablishment GOPers is stuck in a morass of quibbling over pettifog.»
The paper was about discussions between students and lawmakers over stricter gun laws for assault weapons. The sentence, in plain English, reads as this:
«The logical discussions between student protesters and Republican lawmakers resisting change is bogged down because of arguing over petty things.»
In some instances, the author just uses the wrong words. One famous example, used in many word choice articles, is as follows:
«Cree Indians were a monotonous culture until French and British settlers arrived.»
What the author meant was that Cree Indians were a homogenous culture. So, before we get started on a conversation about definitions, when picking your words, if you run across words you don’t use often, ask yourself these basic questions:
If you don’t know what you are talking about, no one else will either.
What Happens When We Communicate
To understand what’s happening when we communicate, we need to understand what a concept is, what a term is, and what an instance means. Let’s start this discussion with a quick illustrative point. You and I are sitting at a table. In front of us is the plate in the diagram that follows. One of us is from Chicago, the other from London. I say to you «may I have a biscuit?» Your answer is «of course». I then pick up which item(s)?
If I were from Chicago, that plate would contain one biscuit and two cookies. If I were from London, that plate would contain one scone and two biscuits. What’s going on here is that
The concept of the big, soft, flaky, doughy thing has generally been given the term scone in England and biscuit in the US. The concept of the drier, smaller, crunchier things has generally been given the term biscuit in England and cookie in the US. When I asked for the biscuit, I’ve identified the term and the concept to me. It’s when I reach for the biscuit that I tie the instance and the name together for both of us. And that’s where the fun starts. You look at me and say «hey, I thought you wanted the biscuit/scone» (depending on where you are from). I would explain «yes, and I took one». We would both be baffled at the lack of the other’s comprehension of what we know to be true. If we were friends, we’d probably continue with «I thought that was called…» and then add the term that goes with the concept in our mind. A quick sharing between us would bring out both concepts, both definitions of what we think we are looking at. And we’d do the same, probably, for the cookie/biscuit concepts of the instances we see. This is why it is important to know how to write good definitions. More on this later. We took an instance from reality and stated the term we have given to the definition of its concept. We have, for one bright shining moment, communicated with each other. Being from Chicago, while living in London for a period of time, I ended up simply using the definitions of things I’d point to; «can I have one of those fluffy pastry things there…» I’d ask at the bakery. This is why defining your term is important.
The Importance of Defining Terms (part one)
If you want a real-word example, perform this Google search:
what is personally identifiable information?
The Importance of Defining Terms (part two)
«It is easy to be too precipitate in selecting a word for inclusion in the dictionary… In general, we learned to shy away from trying to define any new word-wherever possible-until it had a chance to settle down in the language. it is helpful for us to see whether others publish preliminary accounts of the word from their own impressions or research. That’s not cheating; it’s just good research sense.»
What is a Definition?
The format of a well written definition
All of the reading we’ve done, all of the research we’ve done, except for Purdue’s Online Writing Lab example 13 (which states you need to always start with the term, which we will ignore), breaks a definition down (roughly) into two parts, as shown below:
category of concept + differentiating characteristics
Or if you like to use scientific words:
This defines the category or class your concept fits into. In essence, you are relating the term to its broader category so that your audience says “yeah, I know what those are”.
Differentiating Characteristics (differentia) These are the specific characteristics that set your term apart from other terms within that category. Once you’ve related your term to the broader category, now you are saying “well, it’s like those things, but with these differences.” Most often, the category of the concept is presented first, followed by the differentiating characteristics. Other types of definitions will lead with what differentiates the concept and then show how it fits into the broader category. The best way to bring this point home is to give you some examples of the different types of definitions that are out there, using terms that we should all be familiar with. By doing this, we’ll be able to give you the definition and then point out how it was formulated. Let’s say that we were going to describe a Zebra using this method. We would say that a Zebra was a mammal in the family of Equidae (Equus) with black and white stripes and an erect mane.
If this were a conversation, you might be stating it like this; “Hey, you know what a horse is, right? Well this is in the family of horses, but they Zebras have black and white striped coats and short manes that stand straight up.” You are equating it to something they know and then adding the differences for this particular concept or thing. This is the basic form of a definition. Of course, folks can’t leave well enough alone, so they’ve created several kinds of definitions that you can either delve into or skip over.
The Various Types of Definitions
The wild thing about definitions is that there are many different types of definitions, each used to explain a particular type of concept. However, the two most general types of definitions are intensional and extensional definitions.
The two general kinds of definitions
There are specific types of definition forms we’ll cover in a minute. But first we need to start with the most used forms of definitions, intensional and extensional. Let’s look at defining what we see in the illustration that follows:
An intensional definition specifies the necessary and sufficient set of features or properties that are shared by everything to which it applies.
Foods that are cooked in an oven of some fashion that uses prolonged dry heat, usually based on flour or corn.
In this first definition, we see that the category portion of the definition is “foods that are cooked in an oven”, followed by the differentiator of being “based on flour or corn”. It is both necessary and sufficient for anything being baked to be cooked in an oven of some fashion. Intensional definitions are best used when something has a clearly defined set of properties and have too many referents to list in an extensional definition. For instance, you would want to use an intensional definition to define business records, as a business record is a document (hard copy or digital) that re-cords a business dealing. To attempt to enumerate each and every type of business record would be nearly impossible.
The opposite of an intensional definition, an extensional definition is usually a list naming every object (or at least enough of a list to create clarity in the reader’s mind) that belongs to the concept.
Breads, cakes, pastries, cookies, biscuits, scones and similar items of food that are cooked in an oven of some fashion.
This example presents the individual differentiators first “breads, cakes, pastries, cookies, biscuits, scones” that belong to a common category “cooked in an oven”.
Beyond the two basic types of definitions, there are several other notable definition types that can be employed. We’ll cover them now.
This is used when you make up a term for the first time. Which means that you’ve completed all of the research necessary and can’t find that term anywhere. It is your assignment of meaning to your term. The illustration below shows two scones, a plain scone on the left and a Charlotte’s Sprinkle Scone on the right.
Charlotte’s Sprinkle Scone
A baked vanilla flavored scone, dusted with sugar, covered in chocolate sprinkles both baked in and rolled onto the top of the scone.
The stipulative definition here begins with the general definition of scone, the category and then adds the differentiator, or specific characteristics of this particular type of scone.
This is how the term is used in a particular community (think Urban Dictionary), or many of the definitions in Compliance Dictionary that are derived from usage in a single document. In this case, let’s say that the document was Charlotte’s Cookbook, the stipulative definition and the lexical definition could be one and the same, as probably no one else would name their scone Charlotte’s Sprinkle Scone.
Charlotte’s Sprinkle Scone
These wonderful scones are made with
Most definitions in cookbooks, like this one, will start with the category of the item “scones” and then the rest of the definition, the differentiator, will be a listing of ingredients. One of our collective favorite recipe sites, Epicurious, follows this format quite often. They’ll describe, in general (the category) what is being cooked, and then provide the differentiator not only in ingredients, but several versions of the ingredient lists for variations of the food in question.
However, there are other times when industry-specific terms are used in various documents, where you’ll get each of those documents giving their own, particular, definition of the term. Take, for instance, the term retail payment system. Within the United States’ banking world, the FFIEC defines a retail payment system one way. Within the European banking system, the European Central Bank defines it differently, with the European definition being more precise.
retail payment system
A system that transfers funds between non-financial institutions. (US’ FFIEC)
retail payment system
Notice that both of these definitions provide the category first “systems that transfers funds” and “funds transfer system”, and then follows that with the differentiator “between non-financial institutions” and “handle a large volume of payments of relatively low value in forms such as cheques, credit transfers and direct debits”.
While these lexical definitions are fairly close, there are other lexical definitions that are very different. For instance, a common term used in many laws is covered entity. Generally speaking, that’s any person or organization covered by the particular law. Two examples show how the US’ healthcare law called HIPAA, defines the term and how the US New York State defines the term:
Healthcare providers who transmit health information. (HIPAA)
Any Person or organization operating under or required to operate under a license, registration, charter, certificate, permit, accreditation or similar authorization under the Banking Law, the Insurance Law or the Financial Services Law. (New York State)
Each document has a specific audience they are writing to. Each document has defined the term for the readers of that document. What both of them share in common is the format of the definition. Both start with the category of “healthcare providers” and “any person or organization” and then provide the differentiator after that “who transmit health information” and “operating under or required to operate under a license, registration, charter, certificate, permit, accreditation or similar authorization under the Banking Law, the Insurance Law or the Financial Services Law”.
Here are a couple of different takes on writing a definition that you’ll see sometimes, the partitive definition and the encyclopedic definition. To show the differences, we’ll define yeast, first as a part of something, and then provide a more, exhaustive, definition.
These are definitions that explain the concept as being a part of a greater whole; the distinct part(s) of a more comprehensive concept.
As a key ingredient for most baked goods that is commonly used as a leavening agent in baking bread and bakery products.
Notice here that this definition begins with saying that the yeast is “a key ingredient”, or part of the category “baked goods”, then adds the differentiator for the part it plays “leavening agent”.
These are definitions that explain the actions or activities of the concept in relation to the more comprehensive concept.
An ingredient that is commonly used as a leavening agent in baking bread and bakery products.
This definition focuses on what yeast does within the baking process.
These are definitions that go beyond the requirements of definition. Not only do these types of definition provide the context and characteristics of the concept, they provide additional information about the concept as well.
As a key ingredient for most baked goods that is commonly used as a leavening agent in baking bread and bakery products, where it converts the fermentable sugars present in the dough’s gluten into carbon dioxide and ethanol, thus trapping the releasing bubbles of gas into the gluten and making the dough fill up like a balloon as it rises.
As with the partitive definition, this definition begins with saying that the yeast is “a key ingredient”, or part of the category “baked goods”, then adds the differentiator for the part it plays “leavening agent”. It then goes on to add how yeast works to make the dough rise as part of the definition. You don’t really need to know how yeast works to understand that it’s a leavening agent, unless you don’t know what a leavening agent is and don’t want to look it up.
A definition which is really a scientific hypothesis in disguise. It attempts to present an argument for a concept. Here’s a rare and I think erudite theoretical definition of a US scone that we found.
A scone in America is a derivative of the British scone with the following differences that have occurred because of time and mannerisms. The American scone has twice the butter-to-flour ratio as the British Scone. It is also normally chock-full of little-bits of lovely, such as currants, chocolate nibs, etc. This has occurred because of the incorrigible need for inclusiveness in the American persona. They tend to blend everything and include everything in everything. It seems more is better applies not just to their life, but to their baking world as well.
Notice in this definition that it begins with including the American scone in the category of British scone, and then add the differentiators of “butter-to-flour ratio” and being “chock-full of little-bits of lovely. ”. After the category and differentiator, the definition attempts to provide a theory of how the differentiation came to be. Useful? Who knows. Humorous, yes.
Then there are the very simplistic synonym definitions. These definitions use synonyms of the concept to describe the concept. These are normally used when you need to define instances of a concept in a simple fashion.
A British version of an American Cookie.
An American version of a British biscuit.
Types of Definitions Cheat Sheet
Okay, we’ve gone over all of the various types of definitions. You’ll want to keep this cheat sheet around so that you have a shortened version of what should go into each type of definition.
Intensional definitions (genus + differentia)
Begins with the category, or properties and features shared by other concepts or things like it.
Continues with what makes this concept or thing is different than the other members of its category.
Extensional definitions
Lists as many objects, properties, or features as necessary that represent the concept or thing being described.
Explains how those objects, properties, or features fit into a more generalized cate-gory.
Lexical definitions
Begins with the setting, how the term is used in the document(s) it is drawn from, or the audience it is aimed at.
Places that setting into the context of the category, or properties and features shared by other concepts or things like it.
Continues with what makes this concept or thing is different than the other members of its category.
Partitive definitions
Begins by describing this particular concept or thing as a part of a greater whole.
Continues with the category that greater whole fits into.
Adds what makes this concept or thing different than the other parts of the same greater whole.
Functional definitions
Begins by explaining what the concept or thing does.
Continues by explaining how that role fits into a larger category with properties and other functions like it.
Encyclopedic definitions
Begins with the category, or properties and features shared by other concepts or things like it.
Continues with what makes this concept or thing is different than the other members of its category.
Provides additional classification, history, etc. about the concept or thing for elucidation purposes.
Theoretical definitions
Begins with the category, or properties and features shared by other concepts or things like it.
Continues with what makes this concept or thing is different than the other members of its category.
Continues with the theory of why this concept or thing fits into the category or why the differentiators are important.
How to Test Existing Definitions
Searching Google for a definition will almost undoubtedly return multiple definitions for the same term. And it isn’t just Google returning too many definitions. Many organizations that create glossaries for their documents are very sloppy with their terms – even the US’ National Institute of Standards and Technology! Just because someone wrote a definition, that doesn’t mean its correct. Heck, if the United States’ own National Institute of Science and Technology can write some pretty bad definitions in their glossaries – anyone can write bad definitions in theirs.
The test forms
Here are some forms for you to use when examining various definitions. We’ll use these forms to examine a few terms below.
Intensional Definitions
Extensional Definitions
Lexical Definitions
Partitive Definitions
Functional Definitions
Encyclopedic Definitions
Theoretical Definitions
Testing terms
In researching terms relating to cybersecurity (a topic very close to our organization’s heart), we found that everyone agrees on what the definition of cyber means, there are two different definitions of security, and eight definitions of cybersecurity. So let’s go through the process of analyzing their definitions using the rules for testing the definitions that we listed above.
Testing Cyber
So we know that cyber works. The category works, the specifics work.
Testing dictionary v glossary definitions of security
We recently ran into two different definitions of security in two different glossaries. Both were much wordier than the dictionary definition of security. One, though wordy, was a good definition. The other, also wordy, had the wrong category altogether.
Testing definitions of cybersecurity
Much like the definition of security, we found multiple definitions of cybersecurity. It’s almost laughable that each and every glossary we encounter with cybersecurity in it, we encounter yet another different definition of the term. Let’s put the definitions to the test.
Analyzing definitions isn’t that hard. Look for the term to fit a general category. Look for the differentiators. Follow the other questions for each of the definition types. You’ll be fine.
How to Write Simple Definitions
There are three steps to follow for creating simple definitions.
Step 0 – Limit Your Definitions to a Single Concept
If you can’t define the term in your mind to a single concept, then split the concepts into separate definitions. Think of report as both the sound of gunfire and calling the police to tell them about the sound of gunfire. That’s two definitions. One is a noun (the sound) the other is a verb (the act of calling or reporting). You have to define one concept at a time.
Here’s the scenario, you are writing whatever document it is and you’ve determined that you want to create a definition in your document. But your organization doesn’t have a definition for that term that you can draw from. So your first step in how to write a definition is to see if there’s a definition readily available that you can leverage (and cite so you aren’t plagiarizing). The Unified Compliance team is in that predicament quite often. Where do we find the definitions, what methods do we use to look for them? Our methodology works its way down from the most authoritative sources to the least authoritative sources. From absolute definitions down to definitions you will have to build out yourself (following standards set forth by international committees).
Searching dictionaries for single words
You might have luck searching the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, or any other host of online dictionaries for single word terms.
Oxford English Dictionary
However, searching for phrases, especially technical phrases, won’t work really well with this list of dictionaries. For that you’ll need to follow a different set of practices.
Searching dictionaries for phrases
Here’s a couple of real world scenarios for you from a technical document we were working with, the bolded terms being the ones you’d need to search for.
Usesession lockwithpattern-hiding displaysto prevent access/viewing of data afterperiod of inactivity.
With these two sentences, we now have the following phrases:
Both Cambridge and Merriam-Webster found one of the terms listed above (remote access). However, none of them found the rest of the terms. Therefore, you’ll need to turn to searching more technical dictionaries and glossaries for technical phrases such as these.
Free Online Dictionary of Computing
The Law Dictionary
However, even when searching the technical dictionaries above, only one term was found in one dictionary – “remote access” in webopedia. This means that you’ll need to turn more broader search engines, about 90% of the time. We’ll cover how to use search engines next for now, if you were lucky enough to find the definition, save the URL. You will need to add it to the definition as the source of where the definition came from.
Searching Google for phrases
The bad news is that over 90% of the terms you are going to have to add to the dictionary are phrases that don’t exist in any known glossary or dictionary entry. And as of this writing, most document authors fail to provide definitions for their key terms. Don’t worry yet, there’s one more search capability at your fingertips – searching Google’s definitions.
Here’s how to do it. You’ll want to enter terms in both singular and plural form, and if a term has a hyphen you’ll want to search for it with and without the hyphen. You want to use is and are because you are looking for definitions written within a document that aren’t in a glossary entry or definition of terms section. These definitions will be written within the context of the document’s content itself. Therefore, authors are most likely to state the terminology as saying, “X is this” or “many Ys are that”.
define “session lock is”
define “session locks are”
period of inactivity
define “period of inactivity is”
define “periods of inactivity are”
define “security-relevant information is”
define «security relevant information is»
As an example, searching define “session lock is” turns up uses of the term, but no real definition of the term as shown in the diagram that follows:
However, searching for “session locks are” finds the definition in the very first search result Google returned, as shown below:
with the following definition 
One of our researchers, Steven Murawski, adds that he has found some sticky definitions by typing «session lock» meaning or «session lock» definition. It works about 10% of the time, but it is worth noting if you can’t find anything else. If you found the definition, save the URL you will add it to the terminological entry as the source of where the definition came from.
This methodology works great for a few of the terms in our list. However, there wasn’t a single source that we searched for which had a solid definition for pattern-hiding display. So what do you do when you can’t find a source that specifically defines the term? You build the term’s definition following a well-defined international standard for doing so.
The first thing you need to do is to place your term into the proper context. If you are in a discussion and need to define your term, you’ll be thinking about the discussion you are having, and what types of concepts are being bandied about. If you are writing a document, you’ll probably need to narrow the concept down to one. We’ll stick with you writing a definition for a document, and we’ll use the term pattern-hiding display. The document you are working with will form the subject field for the broadest context you are going to work with. The citation, no doubt, falls within a section of that document. And sections are broken down into various contexts within the document. Within that section, the Citation will provide the most specific context you are dealing with.
Now let’s look at the phrase pattern-hiding display within the context of the document, the Section, and the Citation it was found in.
Information Security Policy
Using Access Controls
pattern-hiding displays protect information by preventing viewing of data
From this, we know that the context is about hiding information from view is a form of access control that protects information. Got it. We know from our document that pattern-hiding displays are covered in the section on access controls. So we are pretty certain that the general category for our term is going to be access control. But on looking up the definition for access control, we found that it can cover physical access, computer system access, and information access as well. So we have several subcategories of access control that exist.
So let’s start a worksheet for adding the term, the term’s possible category, and any possible subcategories that we know of. Then we’ll see if they fit.
In our context, neither computer system nor physical assets fit our genus. Therefore, we know that the context we have we are dealing with an information access control. But what type? That’s found in the attributes.
Identifying the attributes of the term
Now that you have the general category for the concept, you must examine the language for its attributes. When we talk about attributes in this document, we specifically mean the distinguishing features as derived from the words used and the context in which they are used.
Because you are going to be dealing with terms you’ve found in a Citation, the attributes are really the individual terms you are dealing with within the context of the document you are working with. If you have two words in a phrase, you have two attributes. In our scenario we have two words; pattern-hiding and display. Our attributes for this term are threefold:
We now need to search for each term in the various dictionaries and check to see if there are any definitions that fit our context of information access control that we are dealing with. Searching dictionaries for either pattern-hiding or pattern hiding produces nothing on its own. Searching the web for either one produces some rough definitions of algorithms and software methodologies to obscure numbers or images on a screen.
Searching for display gives us a bunch of definitions. One of which is a computer monitor, another of which is the process or facility of presenting data or images on a computer screen or other device. Within the context of the Citation and its section, we can conclude that the characteristic isn’t about the monitor per se, but about the ability to display data or images.
We now have a comprehensive view of what our concept is and one step closer to writing a good definition.
You need to start with the designation for the definition. You can’t define the concept unless you know what type of concept you are defining. Let’s put the research we’ve done into this section as a reference for our work here.
| Term | Category | Subcategory | Attribute |
| pattern-hiding display | access control | information | |
| pattern-hiding | session lock | Concealing information previously visible on a display. | |
| screen saver lock | The capability, when the computer is locked, to set the screen to black or display selected or random images or numbers. | ||
| display | computing | Process or facility of presenting data or images on a computer screen or other device. |
Choosing the definition designator
Designations are attributed to the concept you are defining, not the individual term. Designations for definitions fall into two categories: parts of speech designations and named entity designations. Parts of speech are noun, pronoun, adjective, determiner, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, or interjection. As we will discuss later, named entities can be any of those entities we’ve already named; asset, data contents, events, group, organization, organizational function, person, record example, role, or title. Or they can be additional named entities that you have defined. We will ignore named entities for now. From our research here, we know that this isn’t a verb. It’s a noun. Simple.
| Term | Designator |
| pattern-hiding display | noun |
Deciding on a definition type
Now its time to go back to the cheat sheet. We listed 7 different definition types. We are going to ignore all except the intensional definition because we are starting with simple definitions here. So we know that we’ll first be defining the genus of the term and then adding its differentia. We’ll do that in our worksheet for each of the attributes that we have.
| Term | Designator | Genus | Attribute |
| pattern-hiding display | noun | ||
| pattern-hiding | noun | session lock mechanism | conceals information previously visible on the display |
| noun | screen saver mechanism | sets the screen to black or displays selected or random images or numbers | |
| display | verb | computing | presenting data or images on a computer screen or other device |
Formatting your definition
This is really just a matter of putting everything together.
| Term | Designator | Genus | Attributes |
| pattern-hiding display | noun | A session lock or screen saver mechanism that | conceals information previously on the display by |
| setting the screen to black, or | |||
| displaying selected or random images or numbers. |
And there you have it, you have learned how to write a definition. A pattern-hiding display is a session lock or screen saver mechanism that conceals information previously on the display by setting the screen to black or displaying selected or random images or numbers.
How to Write Advanced Definitions
There are six steps to follow for creating advanced definitions. The first three steps are the same as creating simple definitions, so we’ll skip these steps in the documentation that follows.
We’ve already covered how to write definitions, the communication of the concept of an instance we see or think about. We’ve covered some pretty basic rules about definition types and what should and shouldn’t be in them. Now we have to cover a few rules about how to express the term itself. Why do we have to set rules? Because many people who create glossaries are just plain sloppy (they probably don’t even make their beds in the morning). They’ll have plural forms. Capitalization where none is called for. Unconventional spelling. And – most egregiously – they’ll also include acronyms as terms themselves. Ugh. In order for modern electronic glossaries and dictionaries to work with Natural Language Processing engines, the following rules for entering the term itself should be followed.
Enter terms as a base form only
If you aren’t aware, nouns and verbs have a base form and additional forms. Here they are:
| Base Form | Other Forms |
| Singular Non-Possessive Noun | Possessive |
| Plural | |
| Plural Possessive | |
| Simple Present Verb | Past |
| Past Participle | |
| Present Participle | |
| Third Person |
Here are the rules for both nouns and verbs.
Noun entry rules
Noun pluralization rules
Most nouns are pluralized by adding an –s to then end of a word. There are seven other pluralization rules that depend on what letter(s) the noun ends in.
Examples: cat – cats; car – cars; team – teams
Examples: church – churches; tax – taxes; pass – passes
Examples: elf – elves; loaf – loaves; thief – thieves
Examples: toy – toys; boy – boys; employ – employs
Examples: video – videos; studio – studios; zoo – zoos
Examples: baby – babies; country – countries; spy – spies
Examples: hero – heroes; potato – potatoes; volcano – volcanoes Irregular nouns follow none of these rules.
Verb entry rules
When adding verbs to the dictionary, ensure that you follow these rules:
Verb conjugation rules
Most verbs are conjugated by following these rules.
This rule excludes verbs ending in –ee. Verbs ending in –ee follow normal convention of adding –ing to the end.
Dealing with Irregular Verbs
| Verb | Past | Past participle |
| arise | arose | arisen |
| begin | began | begun |
| catch | caught | caught |
| do | did | done |
| fall | fell | fallen |
| go | went | gone |
| hide | hid | hidden |
| lay | laid | laid |
| lie | lay | lain |
There are great resources to learn more about irregular verbs online. One of them is here: http://speakspeak.com/resources/vocabulary-general-english/english-irregular-verbs The next step to writing advanced definitions is to add semantic relationships to the definiton.
Once you are finished with your definition you’ll need to place the new term into context with other terms. It allows your readers to see how terms interact with each other. It allows Natural Language Processing Engines to relate terms together. It is the core in pattern-matching for harmonizing regulatory structures to each other.
Basic semantic relationships
The following basic relationships have been taken from the Simple Knowledge Organization System’s (SKOS) Mapping Vocabulary Specification[1], as shown below.
They offer the ability to distinguish subtle relationships between two terms. As stated in the specification, “Many knowledge organization systems, such as thesauri, taxonomies, classification schemes and subject heading systems, share a similar structure, and are used in similar applications. SKOS captures much of this similarity and makes it explicit, to enable data and technology sharing across diverse applications.”
has-exact-match
If two concepts are an exact match, then the set of resources properly indexed against the first concept is identical to the set of resources properly indexed against the second. Therefore, the two concepts may be interchanged in queries and subject-based indexes. (Is inverse with itself.)
has-broad-match
If “concept A has-broad-match concept B,” then the set of resources properly indexed against concept A is a subset of the set of resources properly indexed against concept B. (Is inverse of has-narrow-match.)
has-narrow-match
If “concept A has-narrow-match concept B,” then the set of resources properly indexed against concept A is a superset of the set of resources properly indexed against concept B. (Is inverse of has-broad-match.)
has-major-match
If “concept A has-major-match concept B,” then the set of resources properly indexed against concept A shares more than 50% of its members with the set of resources properly indexed against concept B. (No inverse relation can be inferred.)
has-minor-match
If “concept A has-minor-match concept B,” then the set of resources properly indexed against concept A shares less than 50% but greater than 0 of its members with the set of resources properly indexed against concept B. (No inverse relation can be inferred.)
The limitations with basic semantic relationships based off the SKOS model
The problem in the SKOS model is relationships are limited to a single term or a single phrase. This model is great if you want to know that draft or chart is the same as map or not as broad as interpret. Basically, you are limited to three categories for practical purposes; broader, same, and narrower as shown in the diagram below.
What the SKOS and basic semantic relationship model doesn’t tell you is why interpret is a broader concept, or why scale is a narrower concept. What they don’t show are the linguistic relationships between the terms. To extend the relationships past broader, same, and narrower, you’ll need a more advanced semantic relationship system. It should consider real world relationships such as one concept being a category for another concept, or one concept enforcing another concept, or even one concept including another concept as a part of it (versus the parent being a category). The illustration that follows re-examines the semantic relationships of the term map, shown above, using a more advanced set of semantic relationships. These relationships provide a much more robust understanding of connecting terms than a simple broader, same as, and narrower model can provide. Advanced semantic relationships extend the model by adding linguistic and conceptual connections to each relationship.
Advanced Semantic Mappings
There are many more relationships you’ll need to put into place if you want to provide greater context for your readers or Natural Language Processing Engine. Here are a few more of the relationships you’ll need.
Synonyms and Antonyms instead of has-exact-match
Synonyms are broader than exact matches, as they extend the relationship to facts or states of having correlation, interrelation, materiality, conformity, and pertinence between concept A and concept B. And antonyms then have enough variability, incongruence, and disassociation to be their opposite. The antonym is the inverse of the synonym and vice versa.
Metonymy
Included in the type of synonyms is metonymy, the semantic relationship that exists between two words (or a word and an expression) in which one of the words is metaphorically used in place of the other word (or expression) in particular contexts to convey the same meaning. Included in the category of antonyms are complementary pairs, gradable pairs, and relational opposites[2].
Complementary pairs
Complementary pairs are antonyms in which the presence of one quality or state signifies the absence of the other and vice versa. A couple of samples are single/ married, not pregnant/pregnant. There are no intermediate states in complementary pairs.
Gradable pairs
Gradable pairs are antonyms which allow for a natural, gradual transition between two poles. A couple of examples are good/bad, hot/cold. It is possible to be a little cold or very cold, etc.
Relational opposites
Relational opposites are antonyms which share the same semantic features, only the focus, or direction, is reversed. A couple of examples are tied/untied, buy/sell, give/receive, teacher/pupil, father/son, and open/refrain from opening.
Non-standard forms of has-exact-match
A spigot and a faucet are two defined words that are exact matches, or synonyms, of each other. That’s an easy rule to implement. However, language is messy, and the uses of language within compliance documents is even messier. That’s why you must have advanced rules that go beyond synonyms for use cases such as a personal data request being called a request for personal data, an information request from the data controller, or even a request for information on the processing of personal data. To handle these types of use cases you must have a semantic rule that says “if the definition of a term-of-art matches the definition of a previously accepted dictionary term, the term-of-art should be considered an exact match and therefore be labelled a non-standard representation of the accepted term”.
Replacing the broad and narrow matches with more specific categorization
The major and minor relationships described in the SKOS model are limited to linguistic parents and their children (or half children as a minor match might be thought of). However, there are many relationships that are more specific that can and should be applied, especially when working with named entities and leveraging a Natural Language Processor’s named entity recognition engine. By replacing the simple broader and narrower matches with more specific categorization, you can achieve structures like those employed by the Compliance Dictionary, as shown below.
Questions for analyzing the relationships of your terms
As of this writing, there isn’t a computer system that will automatically analyze terms, even in their context within a document, and determine what the relationships should be. At best, they are running between 40-45% accurate[3]. This means you’ll want to manually ask yourself the questions, which isn’t really that hard[4]. Here’s our cheat sheet for you.
| Relation Type | Questions |
| Synonyms | Have you seen this term spelled differently? |
| Have you seen this term written completely different (Personally Identifiable Information/individual’s non-public data)? | |
| Is this a metaphor for another term? | |
| Are there metaphors for this term? | |
| Antonyms | Are there any qualities of this term that signify the absence of qualities of another term (single/married)? |
| Could this term be graded on a spectrum (hot/cold)? | |
| Is there an opposite relationship of this term (tied/untied)? | |
| Category of | What terms fall under this category? |
| Type of | Are there any other examples of this term? |
| Includes | What does this term include? |
| Part of | Is this term a part of a greater whole? |
| References | Does this term refer to other terms? |
| Is this term referenced by other terms? |
By creating semantic relationships to your definitions, the reader will be able to understand how the term works with other terms.
[1] https://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/mapping/spec/ and https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/
[2] “Linguistics 201: Study Sheet for Semantics.”
[3] Malaise, Zweigenbaum, and Bachimont, “Detecting Semantic Relations between Terms in Definitions.”
[4] Storey, “Understanding Semantic Relationships.”
Step 6 – Reviewing Your Definitions
Read your definition and make sure that it agrees with the word and the sense you are trying to define. Testing your definition on the format we wrote earlier. In math, the substitution principle refers to the useful practice of replacing instances of a variable with a different variable. In definitions, it should be possible to replace a word in a definition by that word’s own definition without obtaining an unsatisfactory result[1]. For instance, if we were to use the substitution principle to examine covered entity, we would take the simple definition below:
| Term | Definition |
| covered entity | Healthcare providers who transmit health information. |
and replace key terms, such as healthcare provider, transmit, and health information.
| Term | Definition |
| covered entity | Healthcare providers [individuals and organizations that provide healthcare services] who transmit [to send or cause something to pass on from one place or person to another] health information [Any information, including demographic information collected from an individual, that: (1) is created or received by a health care provider, health plan, employer, or health care clearinghouse; and (2) relates to the past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition of an individual; the provision of health care to an individual; or the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to an individual; and (i) that identifies the individual; or (ii) with respect to which there is a reasonable basis to believe the information can be used to identify the individual]. |
Verbose, but it works. The term doesn’t circle back on itself, begins with the category, and ends with the characteristics. It’s a good definition.
[1] Svensén, A Handbook of Lexicography.
How to Write Definitions for Specific Circumstances
We’ve established that in order to communicate clearly and effectively, we need to define our terms. Great. Got that out of the way. We’ve covered what a definition is, and generally how it is formatted with both category and differentiator content. Coolio (which means really great according to Dorian’s nieces and nephews). Now it’s time to look at how definitions are presented to people in writing. The scholars out there who talk about these things call all of these entries, collectively, terminological entries. And because we couldn’t think of anything easier to call them, that’s what we’ll call them too. We are going to divide terminological entries into three types, from the least formal to the most formal; conversational entries, glossary entries, and custom dictionary entries. Why custom dictionary entries? Simple. We, collectively, aren’t the editors of Webster’s or the Oxford English Dictionary. But we can be editors of other dictionaries, custom dictionaries.
What are Conversational Entries?
Conversational definitions are those definitions wherein you write the definition into the normal discourse. A quick search of Wordnik (https://www.wordnik.com), the world’s largest online dictionary (as measured by numbers of words) run by Erin McKean, shows how they pick up and enter definitions through conversational definitions.
Through what we see here, conversational definitions have two parts; the term and the definition, without formally introducing either one, and without any cataloging of the terms.
To write conversational entries, follow steps 1 through 3 of how to write definitions.
What are Snippet Entries?
Google takes conversational entries one step farther. These are fantastic if you want to drive a point home to the search universe as our team at Unified Compliance have done with the answer to “what is Unified Compliance”. When you search in Google with the phrase “what is/are XXX”, Google looks for either formal dictionary definitions of the term (first) and then if it can’t find one, will search for the most authoritative snippet of the term it can find. It then shows a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL as shown in the illustration below.
Here’s how the Unified Compliance team did it. We wrote a page that we specifically designed to be a definition page for the term Unified Compliance. We wrote above the definition “What is Unified Compliance?”, thus asking the question. We then answered the question in the form of a conversational definition. We supplied the term first “Unified Compliance”, followed by is (which acts as the separator between the term and the definition, and then followed that with the definition itself.
Like all good definitions, we began with the category into which the term fit, followed by the differentiators for the term. We even put bullet points in front of each differentiator for emphasis. The illustration above shows the page with the term and the definition called out.
To write snippet entries, follow steps 1 through 3 of how to write definitions.
How to Automate Glossary Creation
There is a new methodology for technical authors who do not want to equivocate about what they meant when writing whatever technical document it is they are writing. The Unified Compliance team have developed a verb and noun tagging and definition selection tool, shown below. The process is simple. When writing, the author tags the verbs and nouns they want to select definitions for, for that instance (knowing that terms such as report can mean many things, even within the same sentence).
Once the term has been tagged as either a verb or a noun, the system displays all of the definitions in the dictionary for that verb or that noun. Because the system is tied to an AI-based Natural Language Processing Engine, the system will automatically suggest the definition most used in the context of the sentence presented for tagging and matching. Once the terms have been tagged and the definitions selected, the tagging is hidden to readers but exposed to computer systems. This can generate pop-ups showing the definition for the term as it was tagged by the author. Or, as is the case with each document the Unified Compliance team manages, the system can automatically create a glossary of verbs and nouns for the document in question. Which, by the way, sometimes produces somewhat humorous results. One of our clients used the system to create a document written by multiple authors. The same term, only used six times in the document, had three different definitions selected. That’s because the different authors selected different definitions. Since that point we’ve changed the software so that once a definition has been selected in the document, it is a bit more insistent that the same definition be used in the same context. This is a great tool for technical documents, regulatory documents, etc. in that there is no equivocation about what the author meant for any verb or noun the author wishes to select a definition for. Each word is tagged. Each definition is assigned. No doubt about what was meant. And the tagging and definitions follow the electronic format of that document forever. For more information on using this tool, please contact the Unified Compliance team.
What are Dictionary Entries?
Dictionaries will always have the first three categories of content, just like glossaries. However, given that electronic dictionaries are no longer constrained by printed size, many will have additional content that includes the various types of definitions.
1. Term or lemma – This is the term that will be defined. Lemma is the fancy word lexicographers give the term. Dictionaries always list their terms following strict capitalization rules.
2. Pronunciation helpers – Some dictionaries will have a small speaker ( ) next to the term’s entry. When pressed, the term will be spoken out loud to assist the reader in understanding how to vocalize the term. Other dictionaries will have a syllable breakdown of the term entry, such as the breakdown for dictionary [dik-shuh-ner-ee]. This was the original pronunciation helper.
3. Preferred, nonstandard, and alternate spelling variants– Not many dictionaries, as of yet, contain these categories of data. Preferred terms are those terms normally found within a manual of style. The manual of style will list certain terms to use instead of other, like, terms. Nonstandard variants have entered the dictionary world as a part of analyzing various sets of corpora (the documents you are using and drawing terms from) and determining that the writers are using differing terms with the same definitions. The nonstandard variants are those outlying term uses that get added to dictionaries to let the Natural Language Processing engines know that personal data and individual’s information are the same thing. Alternate spelling variants are those versions where the US spells organization with a “z” and the UK spells organization with an “s”.
4. Acronym – Some dictionaries will place the acronym on a line below the term entry. Others will simply follow the term entry with the acronym in parentheses.
5. Designator and Definition – Dictionary definitions are more stringent than glossary definitions. Dictionary definitions will always begin with the definition’s designator. A designator is needed because some terms have multiple definitions, such as the term report (it is has multiple definitions for both noun and verb). All dictionaries will list whether the definition that follows is a noun, pronoun, adjective, determiner, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, or interjection. Custom dictionaries will take this concept farther and will list whether the definition fits any specific type of named entity (we cover those later).
6. Attribution – Many online dictionaries, such as Wordnik and Compliance Dictionary will include definitions from multiple sources. When including definitions from multiple sources, these dictionaries will include the source’s attribution along with the definition.
7. Related forms – Any electronic dictionary that is built with the intention of working with Natural Language Processing Engines will also include all of the other forms that the term can take. The most common being plurals and possessives for nouns and all of the various verb tenses.
8. Relationships – Most dictionaries will list each term’s synonyms and antonyms. Dictionaries that also blend in a thesaurus, will add additional terms related to the primary term. As of this writing, only Compliance Dictionary lists advanced semantic relationships such as category of, part of, used to enforce, references, manages, used to create, etc. These advanced semantic relationships are necessary for Natural Language Processing engines’ understanding of named entity relationships of terms.
9. Examples of use – Examples of use are wonderful. And with modern “document scraping” software, once a term has been identified, examples can be found in the dictionary’s corpus and brought to the forefront.
10. Reverse lookup – These are terms that the scraping engine of the dictionary has found that use the primary term in their definition.
11. Etymology – Some dictionaries will list the term’s origin, showing which parts of the term originated when and where and how the term has evolved.
12. Visuals – Some of the newer online dictionaries, like Wordnik, will also have pictures and illustrations of the term listed with the definitions. They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
Not every dictionary will have every item. Wordnik, for example, has most of these items, but doesn’t have the named entity recognition designators, or the advanced semantic relationships that go with them. ComplianceDictionary doesn’t have the reverse lookup, etymology, or visuals.
To write custom dictionary entries, follow steps 1 through 6 of how to write definitions.
Discussion Forum
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How to define variable regard to time dependent steps?
Posted 27 апр. 2013 г., 07:26 UTC 4 Replies
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I would say you need to define two global variables under model definition variables, by integrating over points, or better everaging over some boundary. Then you define your conductivity as a function depending on these two variables. Be sure your initial conditions are coherent though
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really appreciate your help
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there is one very common error when using COMSOL, it’s not noticing when one handle a field (function of x,y,z,t) and when one operate with a scalar (a number or at most a function of t time)
V is a dependent variable, it’s a scalar field as its normally to be written out as V(x,y,z,t) (in opposition to B the magnetic vector field that is = three scalar field (Bx(x,y,z,t), By(x,y,z,t), Bz(x,y,z,t)) combined to form a vector field)
So if you define a variable on a boundary or an edge and call it my_V = V (implicit V(x,y,z,t) ) then you are defining a field, and in this case it’s defined only along the boundary/edge and it’s value might vary along the edge/boundary depending on the (x,y,z,t) position in space and time.
But this variable is NOT defined outside the boundary / edge from where you have selected its definition.
To be fully GLOBAL, you must define a variable as an integration or an average over an entity (= domain, boundary edge or point) such that the variable passing through this integration or average OPERATOR looses its spatial dependence, and keeps at best the time dependency.
If you want to have a material element dx*dy*dz in a domain, depend someway on a variable V(x,y,z,t) defined on a boundary, you must use a PROJECTION operator to project the localisation of your dx*dy*dz of whatever coordinates, over to your edge/boundary, given a to be defined projection law, and then, that variable coming out of the projection operator will take the local coordinates of each dx*dy*dz and project it onto the boundar/ edge, and read out the voltage at that corresponding location.
It is then also obious that this «projection operator» must be defined such that it maps each point in the source entity (=domain, boundary, edge, point) to a single point in the destination entity
Hope it got it clear
This is what I guess you are doing wrong, but I too, might be wrong 😉
JPQL – How to Define Queries in JPA and Hibernate
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JPQL is a powerful query language that allows you to define database queries based on your entity model. Its structure and syntax are very similar to SQL. But there is an important difference that I want to point out before I walk you through the different parts of a JPQL query.
JPQL uses the entity object model instead of database tables to define a query. That makes it very comfortable for us Java developers, but you have to keep in mind that the database still uses SQL. Hibernate, or any other JPA implementation, has to transform the JPQL query into SQL. It is, therefore, a good practice to activate the logging of the SQL statements during development to check the generated SQL statements.
Entity Model
Before we dive into the details of JPQL, let’s have a quick look at the entity model I use for all examples.
It consists of an Author who has written one or more Publications. A Publication can be a Book or a BlogPost. A Book might have been published by one Publisher.
Selection – The FROM clause
The FROM clause defines from which entities the data gets selected. Hibernate, or any other JPA implementation, maps the entities to the according database tables.
The syntax of a JPQL FROM clause is similar to SQL but uses the entity model instead of table or column names. The following code snippet shows a simple JPQL query in which I select all Author entities.
As you can see, I reference the Author entity instead of the author table and assign the identification variable a to it. The identification variable is often called alias and is similar to a variable in your Java code. It is used in all other parts of the query to reference this entity.
Joining multiple entities
Inner Joins
If you want to select data from more than one entity, e.g., all authors and the books they’ve written, you have to join the entities in the FROM clause. The easiest way to do that is to use the defined associations of an entity like in the following code snippet.
The definition of the Author entity provides all information Hibernate needs to join it to the Book entity, and you don’t have to provide an additional ON statement. In this example, Hibernate uses the primary keys of the Author and Book entity to join them via the association table of the many-to-many association.
JOINs of unrelated entities are not supported by the JPA specification, but you can use a theta join which creates a cartesian product and restricts it in the WHERE clause to the records with matching foreign and primary keys. I use this approach in the following example to join the Book with the Publisher entities.
You can read more about this workaround and Hibernates proprietary support for JOINs of unrelated entities in How to join unrelated entities with JPA and Hibernate.
Left Outer Joins
INNER JOINs, like the one in the previous example, require that the selected entities fulfill the join condition. The query returned only the Author entities with associated Book entities but not the ones for which the database doesn’t contain a Book entity. If you want to include the authors without published books, you have to use a LEFT JOIN, like in the following code snippet.
Additional Join Conditions
The previous examples use the defined association to join the entities. But sometimes you only want to join the related entities which fulfill additional conditions. Since JPA 2.1, you can do this for INNER JOINs, and LEFT JOINs with an additional ON statement.
Path expressions or implicit joins
Path expressions create implicit joins and are one of the benefits provided by the entity model. You can use the ‘.’ operator to navigate to related entities as I do in the following code snippet.
As you can see, I use the ‘.’ operator to navigate via the publisher attribute of the Book entity b to the related Publisher entities. That creates an implicit join between the Book and Publisher entity which will be translated into an additional join statement in the SQL query.
Polymorphism and Downcasting
Polymorphism
When you choose an inheritance strategy that supports polymorphic queries, your query selects all instances of the specified class and its subclasses. With the model in the example for this blog post, you can, for example, select all Publication entities, which are either Book or BlogPost entities.
Or you can select a specific subtype of a Publication, like a BlogPost.
Downcasting
Since JPA 2.1, you can also use the TREAT operator for downcasting in FROM and WHERE clauses. I use that in the following code snippet to select all Author entities with their related Book entities. As you can see in the model, the publications association defines an association between the Author and the Publication entity. So without the TREAT operator, the query would return all Author entities with their associated Book or BlogPost entities.
ATTENTION: There are several issues with the implementation of TREAT in Hibernate 5.1. Based on my experiments, Hibernate 5.1 handles TREAT only, if it is written in lower case and used in the WHERE clause. The treat operator in this example is ignored by Hibernate 5.1.0.Final.
Restriction – The WHERE clause
The next important part of a JPQL query is the WHERE clause which you can use to restrict the selected entities to the ones you need for your use case. The syntax is very similar to SQL, but JPQL supports only a small subset of the SQL features. If you need more sophisticated features for your query, you can use a native SQL query.
JPQL supports a set of basic operators to define comparison expressions. Most of them are identical to the comparison operators supported by SQL, and you can combine them with the logical operators AND, OR and NOT into more complex expressions.
Operators for single-valued expressions:
You can use one or more of the operators to restrict your query result. The following query returns all Author entities with a firstName attribute that contains the String “and” and an id attribute greater or equal 20 and who have written at least 5 books.
Projection – The SELECT clause
The projection of your query defines which information you want to retrieve from the database. This part of the query is very different from SQL. In SQL, you specify a set of database columns and functions as your projection. You can do the same in JPQL by selecting a set of entity attributes or functions as scalar values, but you can also define entities or constructor calls as your projection. Hibernate, or any other JPA implementation, maps this information to a set of database columns and function calls to define the projection of the generated SQL statement.
Let’s have a look at the different options. You can use any combination of them in your queries.
Entities
Entities are the most common projection in JPQL queries. Hibernate uses the mapping information of the selected entities to determine the database columns it has to retrieve from the database. It then maps each row of the result set to the selected entities.
It’s comfortable to use entities as your projection. But you should always keep in mind that all entities are managed by the persistence context which creates overhead for read-only use cases. In these situations, it’s better to use scalar values or a constructor reference as a projection.
Scalar values
Scalar value projections are very similar to the projections you know from SQL. Instead of database columns, you select one or more entity attributes or the return value of a function call with your query.
Constructor references
Constructor references are a good projection for read-only use cases. They’re more comfortable to use than scalar value projections and avoid the overhead of managed entities.
JPQL allows you to define a constructor call in the SELECT clause. You can see an example of it in the following code snippet. You just need to provide the fully qualified class name and specify the constructor parameters of an existing constructor. Similar to the entity projection, Hibernate generates an SQL query which returns the required database columns and uses the constructor reference to instantiate a new object for each record in the result set.
Distinct query results
You probably know SQL’s DISTINCT operator which removes duplicates from a projection. JPQL supports this operator as well.
Functions
Functions are another powerful feature of JPQL that you probably know from SQL. It allows you to perform basic operations in the WHERE and SELECT clause. You can use the following functions in your query:
Grouping – The GROUP BY and HAVING clause
When you use aggregate functions, like count(), in your SELECT clause, you need to reference all entity attributes that are not part of the function in the GROUP BY clause.
The following code snippet shows an example that uses the aggregate function count() to count how often each last name occurs in the Author table.
The HAVING clause is similar to the WHERE clause and allows you to define additional restrictions for your query. The main difference is that the restrictions specified in a HAVING clause are applied to a group and not to a row.
I use it in the following example to select all last names that start with a ‘B’ and count how often each of them occurs in the Author table.
Ordering – The ORDER BY clause
You can define the order in which the database shall return your query results with an ORDER BY clause. Its definition in JPQL is similar to SQL. You can provide one or more entity attributes to the ORDER BY clause and specify an ascending (ASC) or a descending (DESC) order.
The following query selects all Author entities from the database in the ascending order of their lastName attributes. All Authors with the same lastName are returned in descending order of their firstName.
Subselects
A subselect is a query embedded into another query. It’s a powerful feature you probably know from SQL. Unfortunately, JPQL supports it only in the WHERE clause and not in the SELECT or FROM clause.
Subqueries can return one or multiple records and can use the aliases defined in the outer query. The following example shows a query that uses a subquery to count all Books written by an Author and returns only the Authors who’ve written more than 1 Book.
Summary
As you’ve seen, the syntax and structure of JPQL are pretty similar to SQL. This makes JPQL easy to learn when you’re already familiar with SQL. But you have to keep in mind that SQL supports a lot of advanced features that you can’t use with JPQL. If you need one or more of them for a specific use case, you should use a native SQL query.
Mark Manson
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Personal Values: How to Know Who You Really Are
What are your most important personal values? Do you actually value what you say you do, or are you lying to yourself? And just who the hell are you anyway?
F or the last few years, I’ve had an idea for a satirical self-help article called, “The Productivity Secrets of Adolf Hitler.” The article would feature all the popular self-help tropes—goals, visualizations, morning routines—except expressed through the exploits of Hitler.
“Hitler starts his day at 5 AM each morning with a quick round of yoga and five minutes of journaling. With these strategies, he’s able to focus his mind on his highly ambitious goals.”
“Hitler discovered his life purpose in a beer hall in his 20s and has since followed it relentlessly, thus infusing his life with passion and inspiring millions of others like himself.”
“Adolf is a strict vegetarian, and makes sure to find time in his busy schedule of genocide and world domination to explore his creative side: he sets aside a few hours each week to listen to opera and paint his favorite landscapes.”
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a) a bunch of people would get offended and devote themselves entirely to ruining my week with annoying emails and social media screeds, b) the satire would go over a bunch of people’s heads and they’d think that I was actually a Nazi, and c) some awful publication somewhere would run the headline, “Bestselling author outs himself as alt-right neo-Nazi” or some shit and my career would be over.
So, I’ve never written the article. Call me a coward. But it remains unwritten.
This bugs me a little bit because I think satirizing Hitler’s incredible productivity and influence perfectly embodies a point I’ve long made about the self-help world: achieving success in life is not nearly as important as our definition of success. If our definition of success is horrific—like, say, world domination and slaughtering millions—then working harder, setting and achieving goals, and disciplining our minds all become a bad thing.
If you remove the moral horrors from Hitler, on paper, he’s one of the most successful self-made people in world history. He went from being a broke, failed artist, to commandeering an entire country and the most powerful military in the world in a matter of two decades. He mobilized and inspired millions. He was tireless and shrewd and intensely focused on his goals. He arguably influenced world history as much as anyone who has ever lived.
But all of that work went toward demented, destructive aims. And tens of millions of people died horrifically due to his twisted, misguided values.
Personal values are the measuring sticks by which we determine what is a successful and meaningful life.
When somebody says, “I want to be good,” that definition of what is “good” is a reflection of what they value. Some will see “being good” as attaining money. Others will see it as building a family. Others will see it as having a lot of exciting experiences. Whatever it is, it is determined by our personal values.
Therefore, you cannot talk about self-improvement without also talking about values. It’s not enough to simply “grow” and become a “better person.” You must define what a better person is. You must decide in which direction you wish to grow. Because if you don’t, well, we might all be screwed.
A lot of people don’t realize this. A lot of people obsessively focus on being happy and feeling good all the time—not realizing that if their values suck, feeling good will hurt them more than help them. If your biggest value in the world is snorting Vicodin through a swirly straw, well, then feeling better is just going to make your life worse.
When I wrote my book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, pretty much the entire book was really just a sneaky way to get people to think about their values more clearly. There are a million self-help books out there that teach you how to better achieve your goals, but few actually question what goals you should have in the first place. My aim was to write a book that did just that.
In the book, I intentionally avoided getting too deep into what good/bad values are—what they look like, and why they work or don’t work—partly because I didn’t want to push my own values onto the reader. After all, the whole point of your values is that you adopt them yourself, not because some dude with an obnoxious orange book cover told you to. But if I’m being honest, I also didn’t get too deep into defining values because it’s an incredibly difficult topic to write about well.
So, this article is my attempt to finally do that. To talk about values. And not just what they are but why they are. Why we find certain things important, what the consequences of that importance are, and how we can go about finding and changing what we find important. It’s not a simple subject. And the article is quite long. So enough of me blabbing, let’s get on with it.
Table of Contents
You Do What You Value
Every moment of every day, whether you realize it or not, you are making a decision of how to spend your time, of what to pay attention to, of where to direct your energy.
Right now, you are choosing to read this article. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing, but right now, you are choosing to be here. Maybe in a minute, you decide you need to pee. Or maybe someone texts you and you stop reading. When those things happen, you are making a simple, value-laden decision: your phone (or your toilet) is more valuable to you than this article. And your behavior follows that valuation accordingly.
Our values are constantly reflected in the way we choose to behave.
This is critically important—because we all have a few things that we think and say we value, but we never back them up with our actions. I can tell people (and myself) until I’m blue in the face that I care about climate change or the dangers of social media, but if I spend my days driving around in a gas-guzzling SUV, constantly refreshing my newsfeeds, then my behaviors, my actions tell a different story.
The Great Value Disconnect
Many of us state values we wish we had as a way to cover up the values we actually have. In this way, aspiration can often become another form of avoidance. Instead of facing who we really are, we lose ourselves in who we wish to become.
Put another way: we lie to ourselves because we don’t like some of our own values, and we, therefore, don’t like a part of ourselves. We don’t want to admit we have certain values and that we wish we had other values, and it’s this discrepancy between self-perception and reality that usually gets us into all sorts of trouble.
That’s because our values are extensions of ourselves. They are what define us. When something good happens to something or someone you value, you feel good. When your mom gets a new car or your husband gets a raise or your favorite sports team wins a championship, you feel good—as though these things happened to yourself.
The opposite is true as well. If you don’t value something, you will feel good when something bad happens to it. People took to the streets cheering when Osama Bin Laden was killed. People threw a party outside the prison where the serial killer Ted Bundy was executed. The destruction of someone perceived as evil felt like some great moral victory in the hearts of millions. 1
Optional Gray Box of Doom: Why People Who Hate Themselves Hurt Themselves
Just as we either value or devalue anything in our lives, we can value or devalue ourselves. And much like people celebrating when Ted Bundy got fried, if we hate ourselves as much as people hated Ted Bundy, then we will celebrate our own destruction.
This is what people who don’t loathe themselves don’t understand about people who do: that self-destruction feels good in some deep, dark way. The person who loathes themselves feels that they are morally inferior, that they deserve some awful thing to compensate for their own wretchedness. And whether it’s through drugs or alcohol or self-harm or even harming others, there’s an ugly part of themselves that seeks out this destruction to justify all of the pain and misery they have felt.
Much of the work of the self-esteem movement in the 70s and 80s was to take people from self-loathing to self-loving. People who love themselves don’t get any satisfaction from harming themselves. Rather, they get satisfaction from taking care of themselves and improving themselves.
This love for self is crucially important. 4 But it is also not sufficient in and of itself. Because if we only love ourselves, then we become self-absorbed twats and indifferent to the suffering or issues of others.
Ultimately, we all need to value ourselves but also something above ourselves. 5 Whether it’s God or Allah or some moral code or cause, we need to value something above ourselves to make our lives feel as though they have meaning.
And no one wants that…
You Are What You Value
We all know that story of the middle-class, educated person with a decent job who has a mini “freak out” and decides to take a week or ten days (or ten months) and cut all contact with the outside world, run to some remote and obscure part of the globe, and proceed to “find themselves.”
Hell, maybe this has been you at some point. I know it’s been me in the past.
Here’s what people mean when they say they need to “find themselves”: they’re finding new values. Our identity—that is, the thing that we perceive and understand as the “self”—is the aggregation of everything we value. So when you run away to be alone somewhere, what you’re really doing is running away somewhere to re-evaluate your values.
Here’s how it usually plays out:
This whole process—whether done on a secluded island, a cruise ship, out in the woods somewhere, or at a raucous self-help seminar—is essentially just an escapade in adjusting one’s values.
You leave, get perspective on what in your life matters to you, what should matter more, what should matter less, and then (ideally) return and get on with it. By returning and changing your priorities, you change your values, and you come back “a new person.”
Values are the fundamental component of our psychological make-up and our identity. 8 We are defined by what we choose to find important in our lives. We are defined by our prioritizations. If money matters more than anything, then that will come to define who we are. If getting laid and smoking J’s is the most important thing in our life, that will come to define who we are. And if we feel like shit about ourselves and believe we don’t deserve love, success, or intimacy, then that will also come to define who we are—through our actions, our words, and our decisions.
Any change in self is a change in the configuration of our values. When something tragic happens, it devastates us because not only do we feel sadness, but because we lose something we value. And when we lose enough of what we value, we begin to question the value of life itself. We valued our partner and now they’re gone. And that crushes us. It calls into question who we are, our value as a human, and what we know about the world. It throws us into an existential crisis, an identity crisis, because we don’t know what to believe, feel, or do anymore. So, instead, we sit at home with our new girlfriend, a.k.a., a bag of Oreos.
This change in identity composition is true for positive events as well though. When something incredible happens, we don’t just experience the joy of winning or achieving some goal, we also go through a change in valuation for ourselves—we come to see ourselves as more valuable, as more deserving. Meaning is added to the world. Our life vibrates with increased intensity. And that is what is so powerful.
Why Some Personal Values Are Better Than Others
Before we get into exactly how to define and (if necessary) change our personal values, let’s talk about which values are healthy and which values are harmful. In my book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I defined good and bad values in the following way:
Good values are:
Evidence-Based vs Emotion-Based Values
If you’ve paid any attention to this website over the past five years, you’ve seen a constant theme: overly relying on our emotions is unreliable at best and damaging at worst. 9 Unfortunately, most of us rely too much on our emotions without even realizing it.
People who lead their lives based on how they feel will find themselves perpetually on a treadmill, constantly needing more, more, more. And the only way to step off that treadmill is to decide that something matters more than your own feelings—that some cause, some goal, some person, is worth occasionally getting hurt for.
That “cause” is often what we refer to as our “purpose” and finding it is one of the most important endeavors we can take to enhance our health and well-being. But our purpose should be sought not merely through what feels good. It must be considered and reasoned. We must accumulate evidence supporting it. Otherwise, we’ll spend our lives chasing a mirage.
Constructive vs Destructive Values
This one sounds simple, but will start to scramble your brain if you think about it enough.
We don’t want to value things that harm ourselves or others. We do want to value things that enhance ourselves and others.
There’s a blurry line between growth and harm. And they often appear as two sides of the same coin. This is why what you value is often not as important as why you value it. If you value martial arts because you enjoy hurting people, then that’s a bad value. But if you value it because you are in the military and want to learn to protect yourself and others—that’s a good value. Same exercise, different values. Ultimately, it’s the intention that matters most in deciding which way the scale falls.
Controllable vs Uncontrollable Values
When you value things that are outside your control, you essentially give up your life to that thing.
The most classic example of this is money. Yes, you have some control over how much money you make, but not total control. Economies collapse, companies go under, entire professions get automated away by technology. If everything you do is for the sake of money, and then tragedy strikes and all of that money is eaten up by hospital bills, you will lose much more than a loved one—you will lose your perceived purpose for living as well.
Money is a bad value because you can’t always control it. Creativity or industriousness or a strong work ethic are good values because you CAN control them—and doing them well will ultimately generate money as a side effect.
We need values we can control, otherwise our values control us. And that’s no bueno.
Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, building something new, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.
Defining Your Values and Finding Yourself
In the same way you don’t notice your breathing until you’re asked to focus on it, we don’t generally notice the values that guide our day-to-day actions until some jackass on the internet starts yapping about how Hitler’s got messed up values and now you’re wondering if you’re also headed down a path of mass destruction.
Some of us may have run away and “found ourselves” in the remote corners of the world, literally and metaphorically. But most of us are likely still caught in the hamster wheel of life, forever running, too busy to stop and wonder what the hell it’s all for.
Well, now that I’ve got your attention, let me ask you a series of questions to help you define your values and “find yourself.”
First question: as our personal values are simply the measuring sticks by which we determine what is a successful and meaningful life, ask yourself:
What does a successful and meaningful life look like to you?
Did you grow up wanting to be a pilot? Do you dream of having a family with five kids? When you close your eyes, do you see yourself waltzing down the red carpet in your designer gown, your path lit by a hundred camera flashes?
It’s important at this stage to not judge the vision you see of yourself. (There will be a time for that.) Whatever it looks like, take it as it is. What’s important is that it’s the life you genuinely want for yourself.
Once you’re clear on what that life looks like, ask yourself:
What is it that I want from this life?
Do you want to be a pilot because it’s cool? Or because you want to be rich? To make the ladies go weak at the sight of your sexy captain’s uniform? Or are you simply fascinated by the marvel of human technology and want to master the skill of flying an aircraft?
Asking yourself why you want what you want will help you uncover the values that underlie the life you’ve imagined for yourself. Yes, you want the life of a pilot. But is the value you’re really after appearances, money, sexual prowess, or mastery of skill?
Now is the time to judge and ask: “Are the values you just defined good or bad values?” Are they evidence-based or emotion-based? Constructive or destructive? Controllable or uncontrollable? Are you happy to let those values guide your entire life? From now to eternity?
If yes, then good for you, you may proceed as you always have. If not, then it’s time to reinvent yourself and find better values.
More on that later. But not yet, I’m not done with you here.
If you’ve been honest with yourself in answering the first two questions, you will have uncovered your true values. But as we have seen, most of us are incredibly adept at telling ourselves what we wish to be true, rather than what is true.
You may say you want to be a pilot. You can vividly see yourself in that uniform, almost feel the weight of the cap on your crown. But if you’ve spent the past fifteen years climbing the corporate ladder, then your actions contradict what you’re saying. There is a value disconnect.
Remember that one key thing about values? They are constantly reflected in the way we choose to behave. When it comes to values, what you do matters a hell lot more than what you say.
You may say you want a family with five kids. You can shout from the rooftop until your voice goes hoarse that you value family and relationships above all else. But if you always find an excuse to not go on a second date, then it’s very likely that’s not what you value at all.
So, ask yourself those two questions, then do a reality check. Does the value you say you have match what you do? Is there a disconnect? And if there is, what is it that you truly value?
If you’ve never done such an exercise before, it may be difficult to define what values underlie your life vision or actions. So I’ve put together a list of personal values to help you, grouped by categories. 18 If you want more guidance, you can check out my Find Your Purpose Course in The Subtle Art School. A lot of members have written to tell me how much the value-finding exercises in that course have helped them live a more meaningful life. If you want, you can watch the first video lesson from the course for free on my YouTube channel here. You’re welcome.
A List of Personal Values
Grounding
Our most basic, fundamental views of the world.
Family
Our fundamental relationships to ourselves and to others.
Management
Establishing and maintaining stability in our lives.
Relational Awareness
Individual responsibility for developing yourself and determining the quality of relationships with others.
Systems Awareness
How you interact within the context of groups and society at large.
Expansion
Future-oriented aspirations and goals.
Reinventing Yourself
Below is perhaps one of the most inspiring TED Talks I’ve ever come across. It’s not filled with mind-blowing ideas. You’re not going to get huge takeaways that you can immediately run off and implement in your own life. The guy isn’t even that great of a speaker.
But what he describes is absolutely profound:
Daryl Davis is a black musician who has traveled and played blues shows all over the US south. In his career, he’s inevitably run into a number of white supremacists. And rather than fight them or argue with them, he chose to do something unexpected: he befriended them.
This might sound insane. And maybe it is. But here’s what’s more insane: he’s convinced over 200 KKK members to give up their robes. 19
Here’s what most people don’t get about value change: you can’t argue someone out of their values. You can’t shame them into valuing something different (shaming them actually often has the opposite effect—they double down). 20
Nope, value change is far more subtle than that. And perhaps without even realizing it, Daryl Davis appears to be a master at it.
Step 1: The Value Must Fail
Davis intuitively understood something that almost all of us do not: values are based on experience. You cannot argue someone out of their values. You cannot threaten them to let go of their most deeply-held beliefs. That just makes them defensive and even more resistant to changing themselves. Instead, you must approach them with empathy.
The only way to change someone’s values is by presenting them with an experience contrary to their value. The KKK members held deeply racist values and instead of attacking them and approaching them as an adversary—in a way that would reflect their values back to them—Davis chose to approach them in the completely opposite way: as a friend. And that friendliness and respect caused the KKK members to call everything they knew into question.
Other times, a value is contradicted by the real world. Many KKK members that met Davis had never known a black person, much less one they respected. So, he simply met them and then earned their respect.
Step 2: Have the Self-Awareness to Recognize That Our Values Have Failed
When our values fail, it’s terrifying. There’s a grief process that takes place. Since our values constitute our identity and our understanding of who we are, losing a value feels as though we’re losing a part of ourselves.
Therefore, we resist that failure. We explain it away and deny it. We come up with rationalizations. 21 Davis said that for months, his KKK friends would struggle to justify their friendship with him. They would say things like, “Well, you’re different Daryl,” or create elaborate justifications for why they respected him.
When our values fail, we have two knee-jerk justifications: 1) the world sucks, or 2) we suck.
Let’s say you spend your entire life chasing money. And then, in your 40s, you accumulate a good amount. But instead of diving and swimming in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, this money doesn’t bring you happiness, it brings you more stress. You have to figure out how to invest it. You have to pay taxes on seemingly everything. Friends and family members continuously approach you looking for help or handouts.
But instead of considering that the value sucks, that maybe you should care about something more than money, most people instead blame the world around them. It’s the government’s fault because they punish wealth and success. The world is full of moochers and lazy people who just want a handout. The stock market is a racket and impossible to win.
Others blame themselves. They think, “I should be able to handle this, therefore I just need to make even more money and everything will be alright.” They get caught on a treadmill of constantly pursuing their value more and more until they become a sort of extremist.
Few people stop to consider that the value itself is at fault. That valuing money got you into this situation, therefore there’s no way it can get you out.
Step 3: Question the Value and Brainstorm What Values Could Do a Better Job
In a previous post, I described how the process of maturity is replacing low-level, material values, with higher-level, abstract values. So instead of chasing money all the time, you could chase freedom. Instead of trying to be liked by everyone, you could value developing intimacy with a few. Instead of trying to win everything, you could focus on merely giving your best effort.
These higher-level, abstract values are better because they produce better problems. If your primary value in life is how much money you have, then you will always need more money. But if your primary value is personal freedom, then you will need more money for a while, but there might be some situations where you need less money. Or, where money is completely irrelevant. You’ll still have problems, that’s inevitable, but the insatiable need for more money won’t be one of them.
Ultimately, abstract values are values you can control. You cannot control if people like you. But you can always control whether you’re being honest or not. You can’t always control if and when you win or not. You can always control whether you’re giving your best effort. In a career, you can’t always control how much you’ll get paid. But you can always control if you’re doing something you find meaningful.
Living the Good Life
So, here’s the catch: sitting around thinking about better values to have is nice. But nothing will solidify until you go out and embody that new value. Values are won and lost through life experience. Not through logic or feelings or even beliefs. They have to be lived and experienced to stick.
We do the same thing in our own lives all the time. It’s easy to want authentic relationships. But it’s hard to live them. It’s scary. We avoid it. We come up with excuses for why we have to wait, or we’ll do it next time. But the “next time” inevitably ends up being another failure and another pain.
A Four-Step Guide to Living Your Values
Pick the next value and repeat.
These four steps are simple, but they’re not easy. They’ll likely require you to step out of your comfort zone, do something you’ve never done before, maybe abandon a career you’ve spent half your life building or even piss off a few people you care about.
But if you don’t do them, there’s simply no point finding or reinventing yourself. You might as well continue to live on autopilot, chasing that happiness that forever eludes you because you know what you should want but are too scared to pursue it.
When you do summon the courage to live out your new values, something crazy happens: it feels good. You experience the benefits. And once you experience those benefits, not only does it become easier to continue living the new value, but it sounds insane that you didn’t do this sooner.
Like jumping into a cold pool, the terror and shock passes and you’re left with a wonderful sense of relief, and a newer, deeper understanding of who you really are.
If you value this article, you will probably value my book, Everything Is Fucked: A Book About Hope. Values are one of the core themes of the book and I go much deeper in explaining them and how our psychology is constructed around them. You can order the book here.
How to Know Who You Really Are
It’s sometimes hard to know where we fit into such a complicated world and who we are in it. I’ve put together a 49-page ebook that will help you dig down to the core of who you are by exploring your personal values.
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