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I recognized in the process of writing this clause,

Resulting in the discretion of death as we know it

That the “discretion of death” could encompass a range of semantic vectors depending on how one reads it in the context provided. If read from the point of view of death itself, the discretion takes on a different quality than if read from the point of view of those affected by death. In my efforts, I attempted to head ‘discretion’ with the awkward phrase ‘holistically representational,’ wishing to grapple the multidirectional nature of the ideally situated word I’m looking for.

Is there a single-word adjective that better, more accurately captures this sort of lexical ambiguity?

Auri
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  • Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking. – Community Jan 12 '23 at 11:36
  • Welcome to ELU. Your quoted clause sentence appears to imply a rather esoteric meaning for discretion, and the paragraph below it is not clear at all. You know what you're talking about: please try to explain it to people who do not have the advantage of your prior work. – Andrew Leach Jan 12 '23 at 11:45
  • It seems to me any "lexical ambiguity" in respect of "discretion of death" simply arises from the fact that it's not an established collocation with a known/agreed meaning. Is that an inherent part of what you're asking about? By which I mean - are you asking for a word to describe a "new permutation" of words that some people think has *multiple meanings?* And does it make any difference if some other people think the new permutation has *no meanings at all?* – FumbleFingers Jan 12 '23 at 11:45
  • @FumbleFingers It’s rather that I’m asking for a word to describe the multiple meanings some people receive from a permutation of words that has clearly derived linchpins in different branches of thought. I see that the fact of this collocation being my own construction, and not well-known hinders the accessibility of my question to potential responders. Thank you for the quick comments, I’ll try to correct the issues promptly – Auri Jan 12 '23 at 12:11
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    I'm not necessarily suggesting any of these are duplicates (mainly because I don't understand this question! :) but you might want to look at Regular vs Irregular polysemy and Describing a concept as exhibiting polysemy. And perhaps Single word to mean 'having more than one meaning', even though your question concerns multi-word combinations. – FumbleFingers Jan 12 '23 at 12:35

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