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Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

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Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#261

Post by ilamont »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #230
ilamont wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait til you read Blood Meridian . The imagery he created with words, some of them his own creations, is just ... beyond compare. I'm reading The Road now, which comes from the same place. I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully. Another contemporary writer who worked with new words in a very creative way was Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun . Some…

>I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully. Absolutely. Similarly, I read the Tao Te Ching 4x annually, by reading the same single passage both before and after bed, daily. Both Laotzi's and McCarthy's density of construction is just soooooo human condition . [ Suttree book world] Harrington just found the eyeball in the junkyard vehicle — in a single para…

> My McCarthy readlist is structured so: Suttree (current); Blood Meridian; The Road — is this advisable?

If you've read Suttree you could do either one next.

If you were coming new to McCarthy, I would start with Blood Meridian, as there's nothing else like it (The Road invites comparisons with other post-Apocalyptic fiction).

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#262

Post by eszed »

boxed wrote: post #215
eszed wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Peanut butter" would be dealt with by including a reference under the "butter" entry. Something like: ' N, culinary. A paste made of ground up nuts, sometimes with additional oils and other ingredients. E.g. "peanut butter", "almond butter".' "Amusement park", same. Falls very much under the "place of recreation" definition of "park". "Black hole" is maybe a bit different, because it's a scientific term - and certai…

The word splitting in English is an accident of history, not a linguistic reality though. This is hilariously obvious to Swedish speakers :P

Well, it's a linguistic reality - all of which are accidents of history - which absolutely isn't to say it reflects anything definitive about reality reality. My point is that English has a straightforward way of dealing with this (admittedly arbitrary) case, which OP either ignores or doesn't understand, and instead adds unnecessary categorical complication.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#263

Post by Jblx2 »

dsr_ wrote: post #87
soperj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean?

At the moment, I'm in the hospital. I've been here since 0500 Friday morning. I should be released tomorrow, Tuesday. During those five days I've had services from doctors, nurses, technicians and [everybody else necessary to run a hospital]. There were multiple uses of CT scanners, ultrasounds and many machines which go Bing!. Also, a surgical operating suite, of which I remember about 60 seconds of very bright whit…

I wonder how many words there are in "out-of-pocket maximum".

https://www.google.com/search?q=out+of+pocket+maximum

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#264

Post by vivid242 »

OoooooooO wrote: post #250
Beijinger wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boiling water is not a word. The phrase contains two words. While German has no word for "boiling water", it uses two words too, an adjective and a noun, the German language has the principle of composite words. As a consequence, there is an infinite amount of German words. "Hackernewsleser" would be a word I just made up but every German can understand. A reader of Hackernews. Obviously this makes a dictionary trick…

I would write it Hackernews-Leser for better readability but both goes.

It would be wrong, though.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#265

Post by jonplackett »

kllrnohj wrote: post #259
jonplackett wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do see your point on that one, but phrases have an origin. Of course is like an abbreviation of something like ‘in the natural course of things’. Which has become more like just ‘yes’ over time. In the usage of ‘yes’ it’s easier to argue it could be one word.

Words also have origins and evolving meanings. Why should the preservation of the space be especially significant and load bearing? Why should "milkshake" be a word but "ice cream" isn't? Milkshakes were, after all, literally just milk shaken with ice. They had no resemblance to what we now call a milkshake, so at the time there would have been no particularly good reason to omit the space. Other than it just happene…

Why not just change the word to icecream if we want it to be its own word. Doesn’t having words with a space just dilute the meaning of the word word?

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#266

Post by OkayPhysicist »

9rx wrote: post #224
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #135

If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.

"Monkey wrench" is a word already found in the dictionary, so it wouldn't be a useful example. It already met the bar. The article is questioning why some words don't meet the bar for inclusion in the dictionary. The word "boiling water" is one such word that it sees as being on the fence. The comments here demonstrate exactly why it is on the fence, but it remains unclear exactly what would be necessary for it to ti…

It is objectively a phrase, and not a word, because you can substitute the water for literally any other liquid and form a perfectly coherent phrase. boiling oil, boiling syrup, boiling coca cola. "Boiling" in this context is just a participial adjective, modifying the noun "water". If "boiling water" is a word, so are "six men", "good idea", "large rock", "7 year old boy", "Californian trees", "metallic flooring", etc.

Better yet, you can take advantage of English's adjective ordering to demonstrate this point. Would I describe the water I'm currently boiling for the purpose of cooking "cooking boiling water", or "boiling cooking water". Since purpose tends to be the last adjective we use, any native speaker would choose the later.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#267

Post by wredcoll »

vunderba wrote: post #238
michaeld123 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Added a note: "'I love you' isn't opaque, but it's tight enough to put on a tile." The familiar end of the spectrum picks up collocations that are transparent but loaded — I'm not claiming they're words in the traditional sense, but they're useful vocabulary for word games, which is where I'm coming from.

> "'I love you' isn't opaque, but it's tight enough to put on a tile." The problem with introducing phrase/sentences into a word game (let's take Scrabble) is that you'd spend half the night with your friends arguing over what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency?

> what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency?

How do you suppose we determine acceptability now?

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#268

Post by OkayPhysicist »

dirtikiti wrote: post #239

No. This article shows a distinct lack of understanding of the basic building blocks of the English language. "Words" don't have "spaces." Phrases are made of words separated by spaces. "Boiling Water" is not a word. "Water" is a word. A noun, the subject. "Boiling" is a word. An adjective, in this case. Which modifies the subject. I don't know if you're trying to be clever, but you're not.

English has words with spaces. Boiling water isn't one of them, but in general, if you can't insert another adjective between an adjective-noun pair, it's linguistically a compound word that we happen to write with a space. "Fast food" is a good example. It's not simply an adjective-noun pair, as demonstrated by the fact that you sound like a crazy person if you try to insert literally anything between "fast" and "food" in "I eat too much fast food". The "fast food" can be modified all you like, as in "I eat too much lukewarm fast food", "I eat too much depressing fast food", but you can't treat "fast" as merely an adjective of "food", else "I eat too much fast, filling food" wouldn't strip the sentence of the implication I eat at McDonalds or whatever.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#269

Post by tolerance »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #260
tolerance wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You must learn the rules so you can properly break them.” Paraphrasing a similar remark, I think I pulled from "sed & awk” [1]: A reference can teach you the rules, but they don’t show you how to really use them. There's the difference between reading the rules of a sport and actually playing the game. Tangent: I’m beginning to question how broad the line is between a “rule breaker” and an acute student of traditi…

"You may beat the rap , but you won't beat the ride ..." [0] Copspeak for technically you're correct, but we're still going to fuck with you . [0] A cop actually said this to me (I asked him whether he was violating a 3rd-party's Fourth Amendment by questioning); handcuffed, he tucked a Miranda Card into my buttondown's shirtpocket, tapping condescendingly about my questioning his authority . And what a ride it was.

> “If the law is against you, talk about the evidence,” said a battered barrister “If the evidence is against you, talk about the law, and, since you ask me, if the law and the evidence are both against you, then pound on the table and yell like hell”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/04/legal-adage/

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#270

Post by 9rx »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #266
9rx wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Monkey wrench" is a word already found in the dictionary, so it wouldn't be a useful example. It already met the bar. The article is questioning why some words don't meet the bar for inclusion in the dictionary. The word "boiling water" is one such word that it sees as being on the fence. The comments here demonstrate exactly why it is on the fence, but it remains unclear exactly what would be necessary for it to ti…

It is objectively a phrase, and not a word, because you can substitute the water for literally any other liquid and form a perfectly coherent phrase. boiling oil, boiling syrup, boiling coca cola. "Boiling" in this context is just a participial adjective, modifying the noun "water". If "boiling water" is a word, so are "six men", "good idea", "large rock", "7 year old boy", "Californian trees", "metallic flooring", e…

I know "objectively" is completely made up just as much as the rest of English, so perhaps you are not using it as I recognize the word, but as I recognize it there is nothing objective about English. It is all just made up and used as one feels like. Obviously "boiling water" can be a word, just like "six men", "good idea", "large rock", etc. can be.

Simply put, "boiling water" is a word whenever someone uses it as a word. It is reasonable to say that it isn't commonly used as a word, but that's kind of the point of the article: Asking when a word becomes worthy of inclusion in the dictionary. The very similar "hot water" is a word that is found in the dictionary. Of course, it is a word used frequently, so the inclusion isn't suspiring.

But it remains unclear where the line is between worthy of inclusion and not worthy of inclusion. The article is asking where that line is.

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