[HN Gopher] 'Lukewarm' and 'lukecool' (2021)
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'Lukewarm' and 'lukecool' (2021)
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 33 points
Date : 2024-03-07 01:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.grammarphobia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.grammarphobia.com)
| saulpw wrote:
| I think "lukecool" hasn't become a word for the simple reason
| that it has a double-k sound that doesn't jive aurally--it either
| sounds like two words, or one of the k's is dropped, or a small
| vowel has to be inserted between them. So you end up with:
|
| - lou-cool
|
| - look cool
|
| - luka-cool
|
| So linguistically it's as unstable as a rural juror.
| ryanf wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree, since there's words like "bookkeeper"
| that work fine--people just add a stop in front of the k sound
| and don't really think about it.
| euroderf wrote:
| roommate. school loan.
| saulpw wrote:
| Those do not have hard stops in the middle.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Roommate does, people just don't use it.
| jhardy54 wrote:
| Then it doesn't.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I never hear people say "bookkeeper" in everyday language.
| It's usually shortened to "bookie"
| graemep wrote:
| bookie (maybe this is UK) is usually short for book maker,
| not bookkeeper.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Ah yeah you are right, TIL they are different
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Same in Australia!
| Izkata wrote:
| (US) A bookkeeper keeps formal records of finances. A
| bookie manages bets in gambling.
| schroeding wrote:
| I don't know - the word also exists in German as "lauwarm", but
| "laukalt" (lukecool), which does not share those problems, also
| does not exist (and AFAIK it's not a loan word from English,
| but a "normal" compound word from "lau" and "warm" / both
| derive from Common Germanic[1]).
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lukewarm and
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lauwarm#German - sorry, unable
| to find a better source on the spot
| pugworthy wrote:
| Not unlike roomate, which is really roommate.
| lgessler wrote:
| This might have something to it, but there are plenty of common
| expressions that have the same phonetic properties you're
| describing (IPA transcriptions provided):
|
| * fast track /faest traek/
|
| * swim meet /swIm mit/
|
| * Fat Tuesday /faet tuzdeI/
|
| * hat trick /haet trIk/
|
| * fake coin /feIk koIn/
|
| * drip pan /drIp paen/
|
| BTW, I don't know if your account of how the phonetics of such
| words works out is correct. The traditional account is that in
| situations like this where the same consonant appears on either
| side of a word boundary, English speakers actually hold the
| consonant for a "double length", which is called gemination.
| (This is in fact very common in some languages, such as
| Italian, e.g. "sette" 'seven' vs. "sete" 'thirst', but English
| only recognizes consonantal length contrasts in consonants in
| this limited sort of situation.) The Wikipedia page has a good
| discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemination#English
|
| You can verify this for yourself by comparing some minimal
| pairs. Consider:
|
| 1a. fast track /faest traek/
|
| 1b. fast rack /faest traek/
|
| 2a. fake coil /feIk koIl/
|
| 2b. fake oil /feIk oIl/
|
| In my personal English, each a-b pair differs only in the
| amount of time I produce the /t/ or /k/ closure for at my
| alveolar ridge or velum.
| lisper wrote:
| You left out "look cool" which is also in common use.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| There is a glottal stop between the sounds in "look cool".
| You couldn't do that to lukecool without it sounding like
| two words.
| lgessler wrote:
| I don't personally have a glottal stop in "look cool". I
| think it's the same as "lukecool" except for one vowel,
| at least in my English:
|
| * lukecool /luk kul/
|
| * look cool /lUk kul/
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| For me fast track is /faes traek/
|
| Realistically though context is sufficient to distinguish
| these so pronunciation doesn't have to be too distinct
| bombcar wrote:
| lukecool would be pronounced loocool which would be a bathroom
| air conditioner.
| pflenker wrote:
| I just realized it's the same in German - lukewarm is _lauwarm_,
| and there is no antonym for it.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| But in German you can just say "lau", right? Same as in
| Scandinavian languages where you have "ljum"/"lunken", or the
| French "tiede" - like "tepid" in English.
|
| Those are all examples where there naturally is no antonym,
| it's just "between".
| pflenker wrote:
| You can say ,,lau" but it either refers to lukewarm water or
| to mild/agreeably warm weather outside.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Because it came to mean an undesirable compromise in between hot
| and cold already, so there is little value indicating if it's
| slightly toward hot or cold. It's a bit like +0 and -0, they
| exist, but we just say 0, and in most contexts don't bother
| differentiating between them.
| jkoudys wrote:
| What comment section are you in? People here love +0 and -0!
| rdtsc wrote:
| And that's why they are arguing for bringing back "lukewarm"
| and "lukecool" :-P
| whirlwin wrote:
| It's easy to precisely define what lukewarm is, especially in
| cooking, because it implies that fluid should be body
| temperature. I.e. that you cannot feel any temperature difference
| when putting your finger in it.
|
| Lukecool on the other hand would be hard to define precisely.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Beyond the most literal temperature definition: if "lukewarm"
| denotes a lack of sensation or excitement, shouldn't its antonym
| be "exhilarating"?
|
| And as for temperature, where it means "no discernable
| temperature", it has two "antonyms": freezing and scalding.
| samatman wrote:
| Lukewarm isn't a good candidate for an antonym, because it
| describes a specific temperature. Not an _exact_ specific
| temperature, one can 't mark "lukewarm" on a thermometer, but
| consider being presented with two bowls of soup and asked which
| is "more lukewarm". Either neither is, one is and the other
| isn't, or both are, lukewarm. In the last case, how do you decide
| which is more so? Is it the slightly warmer one, or the slightly
| cooler one?
|
| It's like with cooking steak: you could say well-done is the
| antonym of rare, I'd agree[+] with that as a premise. But medium
| doesn't have an antonym, and it makes less sense to describe the
| antonym of medium-rare as medium-well, they aren't opposites.
|
| [+] If you would prefer "blue" or even "raw" for maximum
| contrast, that's fine by me, both cool and cold are antonyms[++]
| of warm, same principle.
|
| [++]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/warm
| utexaspunk wrote:
| I'd say it's kind of like room temperature. Lukewarm may be a
| little above room temp. The antonym would be any other
| temperature
| binarymax wrote:
| Oddly no mention of "chilly", which is what I might reach for.
|
| And lukecool sounds like a netflix CGI remake of Cool Hand Luke.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Wow, they didn't mention chilly. What we've got here is failure
| to communicate.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Cool or room temperature is the opposite of lukewarm. The range
| of day to day useful cold temperatures for water is really
| narrow. 72 F is room temp. 32 F is frozen. Cold is usually below
| 40. Cool is the stuff in between. There are many more useful
| temperatures between 72 F and 212 F. Having more words to
| describe those makes sense.
| eartheaterrr wrote:
| My name is Luke, and I do not approve of "Lukecool"
|
| Nb: this is a shitpost, although I suspect other Luke's would
| feel the same way :)
| jkoudys wrote:
| Lukecool is perfect for my wife. She gets acid reflux very easily
| and needs to drink ice cold water always. Needing to describe an
| offending glass of water as "not ice cold" is clumsy and
| inaccurate, but saying it's lukewarm is inaccurate. Lukecool
| works for that range where it's definitely cool, but you could
| put your finger in it and reliably tell that it's well above
| 0deg.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| You could say "chilled water"
| andy99 wrote:
| Oxford says the Middle English term luke appears to be derived
| from hleow, an Old English adjective meaning warm, sunny, or
| sheltered. The Old English word is the source of lew, a Middle
| English adjective that meant lukewarm and later appeared in the
| phrase lew-warm, which survives in dialectal English.
|
| I could be wrong but it sounds like the same root at lee/leeward?
| Logically being in the lee of something would be associated with
| warmth.
|
| Edit: yes https://www.etymonline.com/word/lee
|
| Edit 2: if the opposite of leeward is windward, the opposite of
| lukewarm would be windcool
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