I must admit I was surprised not to get more support on this. It
seems ambiguity is not to be tolerated. I'll have to recode some of
our user tools :(

It's sad though. I can see that results from ambiguous queries can
on rare occasions be unpredictable, but most of the time they will
run fine. Intolerance of all ambiguities makes the engine more
accurate, but considerably more stupid.