Essays

The many meanings of “hot” and other short words

I was ordering one of those new chicken-and-salad McWraps today, and I asked if the chicken were hot. I had to clarify I meant “hot as in temperature,” not “hot as in spicy.” It got me to thinking about how many meanings there are to the word hot:

  1. High-temperature
  2. Spicy
  3. Stolen
  4. Sexy
  5. Turned on (both sexually and, in the case of a microphone, electronically)
  6. Bright, neon color (like hot pink)
  7. Currently popular (like products that “are really hot right now” or a “hot topic”)
  8. Angry

Thinking about the many meanings of hot (or the “polysemy” of hot, if you will) got me to thinking about other words that are polysemic. Those that came to mind were all one-syllable words: on, cold, run, pan, out… It makes me wonder if it is natural for people to glom onto one-syllable words and load them with meanings so they can use them a lot. After all, it is quicker to use monosyllabic words; they have a punch to them (punch itself being both monosyllabic and polysemous). Polysyllabic words, like extemporaneous and entomological, don’t tend to be polysemic. I Googled “polysemous monosyllabic words” just now to see if linguists have recognized and written about this tendency in language, and I found this:

Because of the well know association between frequency and polysemy on the one hand and frequency and shortness on the other, polysemy should also be a frequent phenomenon in monosyllabic words. (Fenk-Oczlon & Fenk, 2008, p. 59)

So there. I’m not the only one who’s ever noticed this. :-)

How about you? Have you noticed this phenomenon?

References

Fenk-Oczlon, G. & Fenk, A. (2008). Complexity trade-offs between the subsystems of language. In M. Miestamo, K. Sinnemäki, & F. Karlsson (Eds.) Language complexity: Typology, contact, change, pp. 43-65. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

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Tweets

Tweeting the Oscars 2013

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Editorials

Police make us safer; vigilantes, not so much.

Perhaps you’ve seen this story about the woman who shot the man who ran into a movie theatre with a gun? According to this public Facebook post by Realtalk:

On Sunday December 17, 2012, 2 days after the CT shooting, a man went to a restaurant in San Antonio to kill his X-girlfriend. After he shot her, most of the people in the restaurant fled next door to a theater. The gunman followed them and entered the theater so he could shoot more people. He started shooting and people in the theater started running and screaming. It’s like the Aurora, CO theater story plus a restaurant!
Now aren’t you wondering why this isn’t a lead story in the national media along with the school shooting?
There was an off duty county deputy at the theater. SHE pulled out her gun and shot the man 4 times before he had a chance to kill anyone. So since this story makes the point that the best thing to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun, the media is treating it like it never happened.
Only the local media covered it. The city is giving her a medal next week.

There are a few inaccuracies in that story, according to this Snopes analysis. First, it was Sunday, December 16; there was no Sunday, December 17. Second, he didn’t shoot his ex-girlfriend. Third, it is offensive to say this is anything like the Aurora shooting because it was not premeditated and he did not go in with military grade weapons and ammunition to wipe out a whole theatre full of people. Fourth, there didn’t just happen to be an off duty county deputy at the theatre; on the contrary, the deputy sheriff was on duty as an armed guard employed by the theatre. She was doing her job, and she was thankful for the years of training she had received in using a firearm to disarm a perpetrator. This was not just a moviegoer with a gun.

The most important takeaway from this story, for me, is that the woman who shot the perpetrator was literally “on guard” and had years of training firing a gun. It seems the pro-gun people would like you to believe we would all be safer if everyone had a gun. It’s not that simple. See this video if you think all you need to do to protect yourself and others is to buy a gun and go to a shooting range once in a while:

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Editorials

GOP: Change or die

Personally, I don’t care if the Republican party dies, but if they want to live, they need to not just “reach out” to people of color; they have to abolish their policies that oppress people of color. They need to not just “speak better” about their policies that infuriate people; they need to abolish those policies. They have tried to “spin” their anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-middle-class, anti-intellectual platform. It didn’t work! They tried to be “the party of No” and make the President fail. It didn’t work! They tried to be the “pro-life” party, against women’s right to abortion even in the case of rape. It didn’t work! I think of the Republican party as anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-woman, pro-man, anti-color, pro-white, anti-worker, pro-millionaire… and that’s not just what I think they are. That’s what they are. If they want to be that, I hope the party dies. If not, I hope it reinvents itself from the platform up, not from the message down.

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