The decision makers who are the target audience for these metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience with numbers bolted on.
All of academic publishing has fallen victim to Goodhart's law.
Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's career. They are destined to be gamed.
We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need totally different metrics for judging publications (which will probably need to evolve continuously).
I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.
"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.
They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.
Both metrics are supposedly binary but in reality have always depended heavily on surrounding context. Archival journals have existed all along. Publication is useful as an immutable entry in the public record made via a third party. Blog posts have a tendency to disappear over time.
"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.
Do you think this comes from a gradual internalization of a real linguistic concept? Or it more a familiarity with common (if unspoken) conventions of the puzzle makers?
I suspect the answer isn't binary, but it's interesting to think about.
This "sixth sense" phenomenon seems to pop up a lot. Crosswords are a great example. The sense some people are getting for detecting LLM output might be another.
More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?
Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?
It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.
In general, transparent compounds, i.e. those whose meaning can be derived from the elements, are not in the dictionary. Mushroom soup is transparent; Krankenhaus, which means hospital, but is literally sick-people home, isn't.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between this compound word concept and idioms. Both are largely atomic, defy analysis via individual word definition, and fairly language (and culture or dialect) specific.
Dictionaries are also language specific. We don't necessarily expect a 1:1 mapping of words between languages. I have personally always wondered if this subtley shapes thoughts in different languages as well.
I think it's more than overlap -- they are the same thing.
I.e. AFAICT, all compound words that defy literal interpretation are idioms. And it's that simple.
The argument then becomes that idioms should be in the dictionary. Some of them are of course, but idioms and slang are a) fast-moving, and b) often dismissed by the sorts of people who edit dictionaries.
I tend to agree. The definitions overlap perfectly.
At the same time, I am having intuitive issues seeing "hot dog" as an idiom, vs just an ordinary noun. It certainly seems to follow noun rules, and fit into speech as one.
I don't know for sure that it's NOT an idiom though. I could just be wrong here, and have intuition in need of calibration.
No, I think you're right -- "hot dog" started out as a colloquial name for a type of sausage (apparently as something of a joke, because dog meat was sometimes eaten in the area, and it was a low-quality product), and it is now the accepted name.
So it was an idiom, now it's canon.
Another good one might be "hot dish", which has an idiomatic meaning in the midwestern US, and is slowly spreading. Not sure if it's made it to the dictionary yet. (which dictionary becomes an important question -- I'd expect to see it in M-W before, say, OED)
This is a great comparison. We're arguing about the definition of "word", and attempting to expand it to include edge cases where two words with separate meanings have a different atomic meaning when combined.
We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.
Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.
I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.
The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed.
The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.
We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.
"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.
I disagree that "saturday night" ever means anything other than the literal meaning of the nighttime of the day of saturday.
You can argue that there's a connotative association with the phrase. Sure. Just like "beach weather", or "blizzard conditions". But that doesn't make "saturday night" special in any way.
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.
It's an evocative phrase. It definitely means different things to different people though. Teenager vs adult, single vs married, employed vs not.
Or how about "Sunday morning"? It's evocative for sure. But very differently for different groups.
Or "island breeze". Stirs up images and feelings. But the definition is literal and the connotations are somewhat personal.
I'd argue that none of these phrases belong in a dictionary. Possibly explicitly because the "missing" meanings are the associative connotations, but those vary for different people, so what's the canonical definition?
A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water.
It likely could apply to other liquids in the same mixed state, but would be assumed to refer to water (or solutions or colloidal mixtures primarily consisting of water) in common speech.
Water is extremely common, and has anonymously high heats of crystalization and vaporization, so it is the most common example of a mixed phase system and the only one most people encounter in everyday life.
qanik -- snow falling
aput -- snow on the ground
pukak -- crystalline powder snow (like salt)
aniuk -- snow used to make water
maujaq -- deep soft snow you sink into
piqsirpoq (verb) -- drifting snow / blowing snow
Central Alaskan Yup’ik
qanuk -- falling snow
aput -- snow on the ground
nevluk -- wet snow
aniu -- snow for drinking water
The decision makers who are the target audience for these metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience with numbers bolted on.
That's modern bureaucracy in a nutshell.
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