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> “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 "boi
by voidUpdate 7mo ago
> “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"
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- globular-toast 7mo agoYeah, but the nice thing about natural language is, it doesn't matter what you think. People talk because they want to communicate something. You can try to talk your pet language at other people, but you will fail at communicating. So things have a happy way of sorting themselves out.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- 9rx 7mo ago> I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that two words Which are the two words? ["water that's", "boiling"] ["water", "that's boiling"] ["water that", "s boiling"] Something else?
- Petersipoi 7mo agoI think the two words are ["stop being", "pedantic"]
- Supermancho 7mo agoThe point of this discussion is pedantry.
- jonplackett 7mo agoI’m so glad I’m not going insane. I don’t see any examples on that site that I agree are ‘one word’. Sure they’re singular concepts but so what? Are we going to have singular words to describe all adjective noun pairs now?
- kllrnohj 7mo agoReally? none are one word? How about "of course"?
- crote 7mo ago... which is in fact in both the OED and MW dictionaries.
- jonplackett 7mo agoI 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.
- kllrnohj 7mo agoWords 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 happened that way for milk shake, but didn't for icecream.
- jonplackett 7mo agoWhy 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?
- m-schuetz 7mo agoSome other words that are sorely missing from dictionaries: "Warm water", "hot water", "cold water", "dirty water"
- manarth 7mo agoAs an idiomatic expression, "Hot water" = "trouble". Are there idiomatic expressions for warm/cold/dirty water, which mean something other than a literal adjective describing the temperature or condition of water?
- jolmg 7mo ago> hot water - n. a difficult or dangerous situation https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hot%20water https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hot%20water > warm water - n. an ocean or sea not in the arctic or antarctic regions https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/warm%20water https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/warm%20water > cold water - n. depreciation of something as being ill-advised, unwarranted, or worthless. e.g. threw cold water on our hopes https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cold%20water https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cold%20water Seems that what makes sense to be in dictionaries is already there.
- epolanski 7mo ago> dirty water Depending on the context you got sewage, slush, runoff, murk, waste etc.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- kdheiwns 7mo agoYeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup? Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.
- ben_w 7mo ago> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. May I introduce you to the German language? We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).
- account42 7mo agoAnd we don't expect dictionaries to contain every compound word you could come up with in German either.
- ben_w 7mo agoNot the ones that someone could come up with, just the ones people do use.
- netsharc 7mo agoYour examples are ridiculous though.. The meaning of "[G]esundheitszeugnis" can be derived if you understand the 2 words. Meanwhile, a Bahnhof would be a "Yard/square of lanes" if one didn't get taught that it's "train station". Although I suppose anyone learning German will quickly learn that "Bahn" is something to do with trains. Unless it's Autobahn. Or Schwimmbahn.
- globular-toast 7mo agoYep, all of the following make perfect sense to me, they're just non-idiomatic: - Don't put your hand in water that's boiling, - Add the pasta to water that's boiling, - That saucepan is full of water that's boiling. If "boiling water" were a distinct word, all of these sentences would change meaning compare to their idiomatic counterparts.
- Ekaros 7mo agoBoiling water is mostly same as boiling anything. So I would just have "boiling". No need for "boiling water". I see no reason why boiling water could not just be covered by whatever general boiling entry covers.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- 9rx 7mo agoThe reason is the same reason for why the word "hot water" is found in the dictionary: Because it has picked up other meaning. The word "boiling water" is not currently found in the dictionary because the meaning has not been considered widespread or significant enough to justify inclusion. The article is pondering what line exactly defines widespread or significant.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- RiverCrochet 7mo agoWhat's ice cream then?
- adzm 7mo agoYeah, this article brings up a good point per se, but then defeats itself with nonsensical analysis and examples
- georgefrowny 7mo agoIt used to be iced cream, which is more descriptive. Ice cream is a shortened pronunciation.
- kllrnohj 7mo agoWhen was called it "iced cream"? The first published recipe for ice cream in 1718 called it "ice cream", not "iced cream". The first recorded mention in English at all was in 1671 and there, again, it was "ice cream", not "iced cream".
- georgefrowny 7mo agoNote that in the 1718 text it is not actually called "ice cream", but the recipe is titled "To ice cream". I.e. "ice" is used as a verb, the result presumably being "cream that has been iced". In the same work, there is also Chocolate-Cream so there was a choice not to write Ice-Cream there. There are some attestations to it from 1732 onwards: https://archive.org/search?tab=fulltext&query=%22iced+cream%22&sort=date https://archive.org/search?tab=fulltext&query=%22iced+cream%... The attestations for ice cream (or often ice-cream, as these open compound words used to often be hyphenated -- the loss of that hyphen eventually leading to articles like this one) are much, much more and much messier, not least because someone tagged every edition of The Gentleman's Magazine as being published in 1731 -- the Internet Archive is a fantastic resource but I wish they'd allow crowd sourcing corrections for metadata. Excuse the m-dashes. You may be right that it was mostly called ice cream at first and eventually at last. To be honest I took the Wiktionary etymology at its word.
- deleted 7mo ago
- gcanyon 7mo agoI 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.
- NiloCK 7mo agoSteam?
- dghf 7mo agoBut 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.
- epolanski 7mo agoFreezing water is already at or below 0, it doesn't need to get "colder" to turn into ice, it simply needs to exchange the energy with the environment and rearrange in crystals. 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.
- Someone 7mo ago> 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 Water at freezing temperature can get much colder without freezing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling: “Water normally freezes at 273.15 K (0.0 °C; 32 °F), but it can be "supercooled" at standard pressure down to its crystal homogeneous nucleation at almost 224.8 K (−48.3 °C; −55.0 °F).”
- 7mo ago
- RHSeeger 7mo agoTo me it boils down to (pun intended) > Traditional dictionaries skip almost all such phrases, because they contain spaces. Yes, because they're phrases, not words. I don't even understand what's surprising about this. Sure, the entire article talks about how dictionaries contain _some_ phrases; but it's clear it's not many of them. Dictionaries are for words, not phrases.
- win311fwg 7mo agoTechnically they are both phrases and words. You can call them lexemes if you want to avoid confusing the computer programmers who do not understand that life isn't binary.
- RHSeeger 7mo agoWhile this is certainly outside my wheelhouse, what I see in various locations is that (at least for English) - A multi-word phrase is a phrase, not a word - A lexeme is a basic unit of meaning in a language, like a word (and it's forms [1]) or phrase. - Every place I was able to find described a lexeme as a "word _OR_ phrase", making it clear those two are different things. - Dictionaries, in general, focus on words. Many do include phrases also. This point is less definitive; and just my understanding from looking at dictionaries and how they describe themselves. That being said, every source I can find that discussed something close to the topic seems to support this [1] A word with all it's forms, in that "walk", "walked", and "walks" are all a single lexeme (with each form being a distinct word) OR a phrase Side note: I'm not looking to "correct" anyone; just pointing out what information I'm able to find on the topic. I'm open to being corrected, but that correction would need to include reasonable sources.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- win311fwg 7mo agoWhile not all phrases are words, the specific phrases we are talking about are a type of word known as an open compound word.
- Beijinger 7mo ago"a state of matter", no boiling water is not a "state of matter"
- georgefrowny 7mo agoIt's a state that matter can be in. Which is not the same as the technical compound word "state of matter". Which is why "state of matter" is, itself, often in the dictionary, possibly to the dismay of the Team Single Word in this comment section.
- Beijinger 7mo agoI never heard about "boiling water" as a state of matter. Boiling water has two states of matter. Liquid and Gas, including a phase change. There are many of states of matter. I, as a chemist, would not be able to tell you most of them out of my head. Bose-Einstein condensate being one of them. Boiling water is not a state of matter. It may be a description of water, like cold water, flavoured water, carbonated water.
- georgefrowny 7mo agoThat's exactly the point. It's a state (that of being boiling) that matter (some water) is in. Which is not the same as "state of matter", the compound word that is in the dictionary. In talking about the validity of the suggested compound word "boiling water", an example of exactly what the article is talking about arises: when exactly does a sequence of invididual words (state, of, matter) become more than the sum of its parts? A further question raised by your comment is does the existence of a compound word with a specific meaning then rule out use of the same words in a less specific manner? Perhaps for maximum clarity of expression, it's confusing, but is it wrong? It's an interesting point because if you didn't know the special meaning of the compound word "state of matter" then there is a word out there that is, completely unknown to you, invalidating your writing which would otherwise be correct both syntactically and semantically. The general consensus among the HN crowd here seems to be quite vehement that "boiling water" has not reached the point where it "deserves" a dictionary entry. But there are words in many dictionaries like "cherry blossom" that I would say are little more deserving.
- vunderba 7mo agoAgree. You can of course treat "Boiling water" in its gerund form where it functions as a noun: "Boiling water should be performed in a metal pot". > It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter All of these are ancillary and depend on context, but in every one of these downstream cases the same underlying process is happening: the water is boiling.
- 8bitsrule 7mo ago> the water is boiling. Not necessarily. It might refer to heating water to bring it to a boil. Q. What are you doing over there? A. Oh, just boiling water.
- vunderba 7mo agoThat's using it as a [verb] [noun], not a gerund. If you are using it as a open compound word (or a gerund) - the "boiling water" IS in a boiling state.
- adamauckland 7mo agoThe kettle was boiling water. The chef was out the back, boiling water. The chef was out the back. Boiling water had spilled everywhere. The seas had turned to boiling water. I dunno, could be down to interpretation.