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Comment on How do you call a word that is so rudimentary that it can't be defined without being redundant?

When Bob comes up with the word “squee-bear”, he knows a squee-bear when he sees one, but he might not yet have worked out exactly what makes it a squee-bear to him. He might not yet be able to offer a definition. And if Bob talks about squee-bears to Alice and Charlie, they might start using the word in slightly different ways from Bob.

This sort of thing happens in the history of science, for instance. People start talking about “planets” (originally meaning “wandering stars”) or “atoms” (“indivisible units”) and then only later does a community of speakers nail down exactly what they mean by “planet” or “atom” and it turns out that planets aren’t stars and atoms aren’t indivisible.

For people, language use is axiomatic — and messy. We talk about things even when we don’t know what they are; we talk about things even when we’re not 100% sure what we mean.

Definitions come later.

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Toast@lemmy.film ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m not disagreeing that it can sometimes happen as you’ve illustrated above. I am saying that it often does happen that coiners of new words know just what they mean by them. The person who came up with ‘electrocute’ knew exactly what he meant by it - to kill with electricity (notice how the word is a portmanteau of electricity and execute). That the word has started to be used by some as a word to mean something less specific is to me unfortunate, but is a good example of how words change over time. At any rate, it seems obvious that sometimes the definitions of words arrive fully formed at their birth, though not always so

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- FredericChopin_@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Does electrocute mean that though?
  
  I’ve been electrocuted and I’m here and alive.
  
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  - Toast@lemmy.film ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well, it certainly did, and that is the way I use it. I have heard people use it in other ways
    
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    FredericChopin_@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    From the Oxford English Dictionary.
    
    Electrocute (verb)
    
    to injure or kill someone by passing electricity through their body
    
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Hadriscus@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Excellent write up !

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