alt Hacker News> “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"
Replies
To 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.
> to me
Your "to me" is actually problematic, because it legitimizes this nonsensical idea and turns words and their meaning into something purely individualistic, which cannot end well for the current, but even more so for the next generation.
I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that two words, which are supposedly one word, definitely are not one word.
Boiling 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.
Some other words that are sorely missing from dictionaries: "Warm water", "hot water", "cold water", "dirty water"
Agree. 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".
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.
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.
Yep, 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.
I’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?
"a state of matter", no boiling water is not a "state of matter"
Yeah, 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.