'Lukewarm' and 'lukecool' (2021) | Hacker News Reader

'Lukewarm' and 'lukecool' (2021)

grammarphobia.com

51 pointstintinnabula55 comments

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

> 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?

Wait, but if one is hot, and one is medium, I'm obviously picking the medium one. Seems easy enough to do a comparison to me.

I think perhaps a stronger reframing of your argument is that if you want an antonym, you want to take what you have and flip around some middle point, e.g. happy gets flipped to sad because it's "flipped" around neutral, etc. But lukewarm pretty much is the middle point, so flipping it has no effect.

> Wait, but if one is hot, and one is medium, I'm obviously picking the medium one. Seems easy enough to do a comparison to me.

Ok, I can see how what I said was unclear. Maybe not unclear, but it could have been phrased more plainly. If one is lukewarm and the other is not, the comparison is easy. But if both are plausibly lukewarm and one is a little warmer than the other, which one is "more" lukewarm? That isn't really how the word works, y'know? I don't think you'd get a repeatable answer out of different people on that, whereas a bowl of lukewarm soup, and one which is not-lukewarm in either direction, there will be a strong consensus as to which is which.

Re: repeatability, if you presented a bunch of people with bowls of soup and asked them to label them as hot, warm, or lukewarm, you would not get perfect consensus. However, there would be some consensus.

The problem is that the word "warm" can mean a point on a temperature scale as well as a comparable quality. You can use it as a comparative adjective: this soup is warmer than the other soup. You can also use it as a label: this soup is warm. Lukewarm only works as a label and you would not say that the soup is more lukewarm than the other.

"Hot" is similar to "warm" in that regard, as it can be used to compare and to label.

There are other temperature-related words which are like lukewarm, and can be used to label but not to compare. Scalding is one that comes to mind, and it has antonyms such as frigid.

That depends where "medium" falls on the temperature scale. If we say that lukewarm is the medial point, then what you wrote makes sense. However, if we say that lukewarm is warmer than whatever the medial point is, then it makes sense to have a lukecold-like antonym.

I never thought about this and this is a delightful thought exercise. Sometimes I use lukewarm to mean medium, usually when describing the weather. Kind of like where it's neither cool nor warm. However, sometimes I use it to describe something that is warmer than the ambient medium point, usually when describing bathwater and tea temperature.

Re: antonyms, I see cold as an antonym of hot. Cool as an antonym of warm. Is lukewarm the midpoint between cool and warm? Sometimes, maybe, but probably it's a bit on the warmer side of neutral.

Plenty of adjectives describe fuzzy-but-narrowly-defined states and yet can both be compared (in the sense of "more X") and have serviceable antonyms. Examples: blue, happy, inflated, trivial.

You actually appear to be touching upon something different, which is that a word describing a state which is in the middle, between two extremes, could actually have two polar-opposite antonyms depending on context.

Context is key here and note that all the examples in the article provide that context, e.g. "the AC needs repairing as it's only lukecool". It is difficult talk about antonyms without context for this reason.

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

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.

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 /fæst træk/

* swim meet /swɪm mit/

* Fat Tuesday /fæt tuzdeɪ/

* hat trick /hæt trɪk/

* fake coin /feɪk kɔɪn/

* drip pan /drɪp pæn/

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 /fæst træk/

1b. fast rack /fæst træk/

2a. fake coil /feɪk kɔɪl/

2b. fake oil /feɪk ɔɪl/

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.

For me fast track is /fæs træk/

Realistically though context is sufficient to distinguish these so pronunciation doesn’t have to be too distinct

You left out “look cool” which is also in common use.

There is a glottal stop between the sounds in "look cool". You couldn't do that to lukecool without it sounding like two words.

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 /lʊk kul/

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

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.

I never hear people say "bookkeeper" in everyday language. It's usually shortened to "bookie"

(US) A bookkeeper keeps formal records of finances. A bookie manages bets in gambling.

bookie (maybe this is UK) is usually short for book maker, not bookkeeper.

Ah yeah you are right, TIL they are different

Same in Australia!

roommate. school loan.

Those do not have hard stops in the middle.

True. But in both cases, you can pronounce the first vowel open or you can close it.

Roommate does, people just don’t use it.

Then it doesn’t.

lukecool would be pronounced loocool which would be a bathroom air conditioner.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_aequi

Not unlike roomate, which is really roommate.

rural juror?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rural_Juror

"Roar her, gem her?"

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.

What comment section are you in? People here love +0 and -0!

And that's why they are arguing for bringing back "lukewarm" and "lukecool" :-P

I just realized it’s the same in German - lukewarm is _lauwarm_, and there is no antonym for it.

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".

You can say „lau“ but it either refers to lukewarm water or to mild/agreeably warm weather outside.

laukalt sounds better than lukecool, so let's invent it as an alternative to kühl. laukalt also rhymes with saukalt. then you can have a sequence: saukalt -> laukalt -> lauwarm -> sauwarm -> sauheiss.

Oddly no mention of "chilly", which is what I might reach for.

And lukecool sounds like a netflix CGI remake of Cool Hand Luke.

Wow, they didn't mention chilly. What we've got here is failure to communicate.

What dialect is that? For me, growing up in California, "chilly" is a synonym of "cold". Or at least it's colder than I would expect "lukecool" to be.

I grew up in the northeast US, and "chilly" is used to describe exactly the same temperature as it is in coastal California, and it's exactly the temperature I would expect "lukecool" to be.

that's because people living in california don't know what cold can really mean. i have lived in southern california. chilly is the coldest it ever gets there. cold is different.

Grew up in midwest and same here

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.

What temperature is that, then?

I would think that a finger, being an extremity, would be cooler than core body temperature - and not by a precise amount, either. "Lukewarm" by this definition would be cooler on a cold day, and vary depending on whether your hand was in your pocket prior to measurement.

If you had your hand in the pocket or have been outside in freezing temperatures you usually cannot determine any lukewarm temperature in a precise way. It wouldn't make sense to use the term lukewarm or lukecool in those cases IMHO.

  Oxford says the Middle English term luke appears to be derived from hléow, 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

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.

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 0°.

You could say “chilled water”

Chilled sounds pleasant. The utility of lukecold is you're saying it's cold but not cold enough.

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.

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 :)

that ain't cool man.

i'd think that luke being cool is preferable to luke being warm. unless you don't approve of lukewarm either. i'd respect that.

I don't like lukewarm either!

But it's okay, there are bigger problems to worry about

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