In its purest form, to disambiguate (v) is to remove ambiguity. In English there is an abundance of material with more than one meaning, however in most cases one meaning is normally more appropriate given the context of what one is saying. Other words may sometimes cause us to find our own context or even to doubt which of the definitions is really meant which can give rise to comic elements.
When we think of disambiguation one or two immediate suggestions come to mind. “Memory” and “traffic”. In the simplest sense, traffic can be vehicles on the road, or particularly significant nowadays we have online traffic which occurs when bandwidth increases for any particular website. With memory for us there are two main possibilities. Computer memory, such as physical disk drives, and short or long term memory where you might remember perhaps a recipe or a childhood activity or holiday. So if we stick to the facts there could be certain advantages if we could disambiguate the meanings of the two aforementioned descriptions. Unless someone is purposely trying to be funny, the intonation and inflexion of the voice is often enough to disambiguate successfully. A more permanent solution could be achieved by recognising and documenting a new word so that the two definitions are delineated and disambiguation would be unnecessary. I say that recognising a new word is part of the procedure because in a sense that new word could be similar to a mini rennaisance or a paradigm shift and the recognition could occur across an entire district of like-minded individuals.
On the other hand, here's another simple suggestion. If you have a fond memory of something you actually did or a recollection of some event, and it is a happy one, perhaps you could mention it in terms of your endorphins. Generally, the vast majority of people prefer to recall the good memories and using that word in terms of endorphins implies that you are talking about an actual train of thought previous to the here and now. In my experience endorphins can be activated by certain activities such as listening to music.
The use of the word, 'memory' by any software engineering teams would or perhaps should be interpreted as colloquial. On the other hand, when talking about memory, particularly from within the family, photos and nostalgia come to mind, and all sorts of past experiences can be refreshed, including short term or long term memories. In the past, perhaps we would not have thought about a computer hard disk drive in this way. The picture below is for descriptive purposes.
If we were to describe this image as 'music', then certainly one could disambiguate. You could point to a speaker set and say 'music', however you could also point to a speaker set and say, 'speaker set'. You could put some staff notation on your music stand and say, 'music' even without any other sound. The way we all use language to convey our intention is filled with uncertainties like this, so how does anything get done ? It is often said that females are more talkative than males, and it is difficult to say whether this is contributable to the chromosomes we are each born with, so we'll leave you with this thought. When you need conciseness, try not to let anyone misinterpret what you say, and if someone is persistently reading you wrong, this word comes into its own and you can tell them what you mean by 'disambiguating' for their benefit.
