Sue de Groot thinks not - different words mean different things to different people When he is not compiling general-knowledge quizzes, my friend Tom (known to Sunday Times readers as Trivia Tom) works for a data analytics company that does a lot of useful stuff and some fun stuff.One of the fun things involves an algorithm that matches words with sentiments such as anticipation, trust, joy, fear, surprise and so on. The analyst feeds a speech or article into the program, which then spits out a series of graphs and pie charts indicating the writer's balance of emotions.As an experiment, Tom's team took 50 Pedant Class columns and subjected them to this analysis. The results took me by surprise - although "surprise" was one of the lowest-scoring subjects on my emotional report. The feelings expressed most frequently, said the machine, were anger, fear, sadness and disgust.story_article_left1This made me sad and afraid. Am I really an angry person prone to fits of revulsion? Tom tells me that the algorithm falls down in its inability to grasp irony, but even beyond that it seems inherently flawed, because different words mean different things to different people.I frothed and fumed and insisted on finding out how the foul thing works. A glance through the "emotion lexicon" employed by the program made me feel slightly better. One of the words associated with sadness is "abuse".I may have mentioned the abuse of language in this column once or twice, so that might help explain things. Another "sad" word is "abscess", which I would have put with pus, lice and semolina pudding in the "disgust" category.I was appalled by how highly I scored on disgust, because very few things disgust me. Maggots, and the misuse of the apostrophe, and artificial meat grown in laboratories, but not much else. Certainly not vomit. If you have two cats who hate the colour of your carpet you are bound to be vomit-tolerant."Vomit" is an interesting word. It comes from Latin, but the popular belief that a "vomitorium" was where the ancient Romans went at discreet intervals during an eating orgy in order to spew out half-digested chunks of peacock-and-caviar casserole so that they would have room for the garlic-and-mouse layer cake is a myth.A vomitorium was a passageway connected to an amphitheatre, into or out of which the spectators would pour. To Romans like Caligula this might have looked as though the building was regurgitating a stream of human waste, but either way the upchuck-room did not exist.Speaking of things emetic, the expression "yuck", which many people say when stepping barefoot into a pool of vomit, comes from Canadian slang.story_article_right2Those who lost their lunch in the Rockies were said to have "yucked it all up". Before that, "yuck" was a British word for itchy skin conditions such as mange and scabies.As for "barf", the Americans began using it as a synonym for puke in the 1960s. Its origins are baffling, but there is a theory that it derives from baf, an expression of disgust common in France in the 16th century.The Australians say "chunder", which has a certain ring to it, as though a person were vomiting with great gusto. Speaking of gusto, it comes from the Latin gustare, meaning to taste (usually with enjoyment). "Dis" is a prefix meaning "lack of", therefore disgust is a lack of taste, or a lack of enjoyment.It should follow that "gust" would be a pleasurable emotion. Instead it is an unpleasant squall of wind. English is, as I may have said before, a disgustingly difficult language.Learning it is hard enough; subjecting it to computer analysis is impossible.E-mail your observations on words and language to Sue de Groot on degroots@sundaytimes.co.za or follow her on Twitter @deGrootS1..