Mule vs Tractable - What's the difference?
mule | tractable |
A generally sterile male or female hybrid offspring of a male donkey and a female horse.
A generally sterile hybrid offspring of any two species of animals.
A hybrid plant.
(informal) A stubborn person.
(slang) A person paid to smuggle drugs.
(numismatics) A coin or medal minted with obverse and reverse designs not normally seen on the same piece, either intentionally or in error.
(gaming) A character on an MMORPG used mainly to store extra inventory of the owner's primary character.
* 2007 , David L. McClard, Verotopia Online: The MMORPG of the Century , Xlibris (2007), ISBN 9781425772895,
*
Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile; manageable; governable.
* 1792 , , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , ch. 13:
* 1839 , Nicholas Nickleby , ch. 61:
* 1909 , , The Bronze Bell , ch. 18:
* 2008 , , Shadows Return , ISBN 9780553590081,
Capable of being shaped; malleable.
* 1866 , P. Le Neve Foster, "
(obsolete) Capable of being handled or touched; palpable; practicable; feasible; serviceable.
* 1707 , , "Moll Quarles's Answer to Mother Creswell of Famous Memory" in The Second Volume of the Works of Mr. Tho. Brown, containing Letters from the Dead to the Living both Serious and Comical , part three, page 184:
(mathematics) Sufficiently operationalizable or useful to allow a mathematical calculation to proceed toward a solution.
* 1987 , Ira Horowitz, "Market Structure Implications of Export-Price Uncertainty," Managerial and Decision Economics , vol. 8, no. 2, p. 134:
(computer science) Of a decision problem, algorithmically solvable fast enough to be practically relevant, typically in polynomial time.
As a noun mule
is mouth.As an adjective tractable is
capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile; manageable; governable.mule
English
(wikipedia mule) {, style="float: right; clear:right;" , , , }Etymology 1
From Middle English (reinforced by (etyl) mul (masculine), mule (feminine)), from (etyl) 'he-ass').Noun
(en noun)page 89:
- He was in the middle of organizing his massive stash of rare and exquisite bounty, all kept safely in the inventory cache of a mule , an entirely separate character which he paid a monthly fee to maintain exclusively for that purpose.
Synonyms
* See alsoDerived terms
* muling * mulish * kick like a mule * stubborn as a muleSee also
* ass * donkey * hinny (male horse X female donkey) * horseEtymology 2
From (etyl) .tractable
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness.
- Of all the tractable , equal-tempered, attached, and faithful beings that ever lived, I believe he was the most so.
- [T]his matter of the vanishing bridge must have been arranged in order to put him in a properly subdued and tractable frame of mind.
p. 96:
- Some masters can be quite kind if you're meek and tractable .
Report on the Art-Workmanship Prizes", reprinted in Journal of the Society of Arts , March 2, 1966:
- I need not point out the advantages of modelling in a material as durable as stone. . . . Mixed up with just enough water to form a stiff paste, it accommodates itself to the touch of the modelling tool. . . . There are two inherent difficulties in using it—one, it is not so tractable as clay. . . .
- At lea?t five Hundred of the?e reforming Vultures are daily plundering our Pockets, and ran?acking our Hou?es, leaving me ?ometimes not one pair of Tractable Buttocks in my Vaulting-School to provide for my Family, or earn me ?o much as a Pudding for my next Sundays Dinner : [...]
- This assumption is in the Raiffa and Schlaifer (1961, p. 72) spirit of using ‘a little ingenuity. . . to find a tractable function’ to quantify risk-preferences and probability judgments so as to make the analysis feasible.