Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

Sure, but my main intent was to raise the question as to why it was singled out in the article/blog post as something that needs to be in the dictionary.

As you've pointed out, the word "bills" clarifies what it is. I don't see why every combination needs to be in a dictionary. The list would be incredibly long, eg. "phone bills" or "power bills", etc.

"Steam" is very definitely the gas phase of water. Water vapor is too. If we are talking about chemistry they are essentially synonyms.

If we are talking engineering, the term steam generally implies water vapor that is at or above the saturation temperature.

In every day usage they are usually drawing a distinction between visible and invisible water vapor, usually caused by the presence of liquid droplets, with "steam" being essentially "fog", but hotter.

Cool, going back over them I'm actually surprised at the strength of the substitution test, thus far I haven't really encountered one that strongly goes against the test if a suitable synonym is picked.

There are a few things for which English simply doesn't have anything to substitute and those are harder to assess. boiling is one but so would "blood" in "blood pressure", obviously replacing it with another liquid has basically the same meaning eg water pressure, oil pressure but as far as I can tell there's literally no synonym for blood.

I those cases I try to use a stand in from another language to see of the substitution works. for for example "sangre" in Spanish so "sangre pressure" which doesn't seem to affect it's meaning much so I'd argue it's exclusion.

Conversely "Red tape" cannot be "roja tape" and a "caliente dog" is one trapped in a car not a food.

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 white lights and very large-screen monitors suspended from ridiculously heavy-duty supports. Like, you could safely dangle four football players of your choice (gridiron, rugby or association, doesn't matter) from them.

A team of people will compile a bill for all of those services. The bill will be presented to the insurance company whose card I showed Friday morning. It will likely be less than a million dollars, but it could easily be more than a hundred thousand dollars. That's the right order of magnitude to consider: a good percentage of a house, maybe a very large nice house.

The insurance company will claim that some of these charges are too much. The hospital knows this, and there are three mechanisms in which they justify their prices. First, although the two Tums antacids have a street value of eighteen cents when you buy it over the counter in quantity fifty, the hospital buys them in blister-packs so to avoid cross-contamination until they reach the patient. Second, it is customary to pretend that only the services which a patient actually used can be charged for, so the in-house plumber, the gas plumbers, the cryogenic fluids specialists, the oxidizing gases technicians, the potable water testers, and the electricians among a cast of thousand all need to be paid for.

And third, there's emergency care for the uninsured.

The US is cruel, but not stupid. No, I lie, it is frequently both cruel and stupid, always to people already disadvantaged in some other way. As a matter of law, a hospital can't turn away or discharge a person who is likely to die without treatment, even if they can't pay. But the government doesn't provide money to pay for that.

Finally, most hospitals or hospital systems in the US are run by for-profit private companies. I won't mention organized crime in the same sentence, but one can reasonably presume that the two are interchangeable in terms of law-abidingness and willingness to trade down ethics for an increase in profits.

So, having created the bill and sent it to an insurance company, they will argue back and forth and finally some portion of the money will eventually be transferred and everyone will be more or less happy, right?

No. Because in the US, the standard for healthcare insurance is to avoid the moral hazard of people attempting to get too much healthcare by having the insurance company bill the patient.

Remember the bill that started out as the same scale as a house? 10% "coinsurance" is often considered generous. 20% is pretty normal. Some specific services will be called out with specific fees, and others may be "disallowed" -- and sent through entirely to the patient.

That's on top of the monthly payments that have already happened.

But I work for a tech company with an unusually enlightened attitude, so I expect that my family's fiscal impact from this bout of medical intervention will be limited to the parking fees that my wife paid when she came to visit me.

It's privilege, but I'd rather that the system be reformed so that everybody got it.

I am with you on the literal definition there.

I wonder if the connotative association is exactly what we are trying to capture here though, and if those other phrases also fit in at the "separate words but slightly special" end of the spectrum.

There is meaning being communicated in all of those phrases that would be obvious to most or all people who are embedded in the language and culture where they are used, and which transcends the definitions of the individual words themselves.

It seems that there are several axis here -- how explicit is meaning, how atomic, how literal, how substitutable are the individual words -- and all vary continuously.

That might all seem needlessly pedantic for the question of "should it warrant a dictionary entry", but if you are trying to extract all information encoded in a verbal exchange, they might be useful concepts.