Well, if I had to give it any meaning I would probably choose the word with the smaller distance from the one that was computed (provided that a sensed scalar product exists here). Closure under linear combinations is not a problem if you separate the "word vector" from the actual word. With the same reasoning as above 0.999999king would still be king.

The fundamental problem is that linearity is probably not that accurate in representing words relationships, but I don't think this is the goal.