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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean.

Some cases are basically impossible "Crash blossoms" you don't stand any chance without knowing why we call them that

Some are middling difficult, "Home Secretary" requires that you know every meaning for the two words and then you happen to pick the correct obscure meaning, a "Secretary" could be in charge, and "Home" could mean the entire country as distinct from everywhere else.

But "Hospital bills" doesn't seem even marginally difficult

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I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.

But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.

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)

I wonder where "sausage dog" fits into this lexicon

> But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger

Ginger ale is in fact, not an ale, it's a soft drink. It is distantly related to Ginger Beer and some variants of Ginger Beer are alcoholic like ales, but Ginger ale was conceived as a soft drink and today continues as a soft drink.

My (likely ignorant) understanding was that the non-alcoholic "ale"s and "beer"s were fermented like their traditional versions, but the process was stopped before the ethanol level became significant.

Mass-market ginger ales and root beers are not made that way today, of course.

In most English speaking countries it's a far from common phrase (ie. it's very USA-centric).

OK. But is the meaning any less literally-obvious than "grocery bills" or "electricity bills"?

Maybe you don't have "hospital bills". I don't have "landscaping bills", but I know exactly what they are.

Sure, but my main intent was to raise the question as to why it was singled out in the article/blog post as something that needs to be in the dictionary.

As you've pointed out, the word "bills" clarifies what it is. I don't see why every combination needs to be in a dictionary. The list would be incredibly long, eg. "phone bills" or "power bills", etc.

I think we agree then. I assumed you were arguing for inclusion in a dictionary because its meaning was not obvious.

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