151–160 of 286 posts
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
What's ice cream then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rest of the article did a good job explaining that. I just think those were terrible examples for the introduction. I think "shut up", "good night", and "hot dog" would have really got the point across better, but those might already be in dictionaries.
'hot dog' belongs in a thesaurus, not a dictionary. It's just a type of sausage.
It's a term referring to a small set of types of sausages served in a specific small set of ways. In some places, a hot dog can be used as a synonym for the predominant type of sausage most common in hot dogs in that place, but the term is still more commonly referring to the assembly of a wiener or frankfurter wrapped in a bread of some sort.
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
What's ice cream then?
Ice cream is a shortened pronunciation.
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
I would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
I would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.
As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice.
So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
I would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.
Frozen water represents a state change and that different state commonly gets its own word: ice/water/steam equates to solid/liquid/gas
Boiling/freezing water represents the state of the liquid, not the transition. Its descriptive. Water boils away into steam, or freezes into ice.
Should we consider luke-warm water also singular? What about body-temperature water? cool water? It makes sense not to treat adjectives/descriptive words combined with the subject as singular because the definition already exists in the root of the words (meaning of adjective word + meaning of subject word). Blue clay is another example, why would that be a singular?
It really only makes sense to me in the rare cases where the combination words represent something different or non obvious than the combined meanings of the two words (i.e to 'give up')
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.
But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam. As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice. So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.
Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder.
But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals.
As far as my limited knowledge of linguistics goes, the technical term is actually "collocations." To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach. I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did! (Before an…
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Some other words that are sorely missing from dictionaries: "Warm water", "hot water", "cold water", "dirty water"
Depending on the context you got sewage, slush, runoff, murk, waste etc.