hot water heater (was "pleonasms")

[Victoria Neufeldt]

I think that 'hot water heater' is simply synonymous with 'hot water tank',
the source of hot water for your home; that is, I don't believe that people
are thinking of the literal meaning of 'heater' at all when they utter or
hear this phrase.  From a practical point of view, the water in it is always
hot, unless you shut the thing off.

Which therefore means that I consider the phrase a pleonasm, I suppose . . .

Victoria

Victoria Neufeldt
1533 Early Drive
Saskatoon, Sask.
S7H 3K1
Canada
Tel: 306-955-8910

On Thursday, February 14, 2002 4:26 AM, Lynne Murphy wrote:

> I don't see how it being a resultative makes it necessarily not a
> pleonasm.
> Isn't the result conflated in 'heater' (i.e., something that makes thing
> hot(ter))?  My argument against it is the 'hot(ter)' bit in my analysis of
> 'heater'.  (I.e., 'heater' conflates the notion of 'hotter', not really of
> 'hot') 'Hot water heater' is only pleonastic if there could be no such
> thing as a 'Warm water heater'--i.e., describing something that
> heats water
> to be warm, not hot.
>
> But...(let me now change my mind!)..._hot_ is a bounded gradable
> adjective.
> I.e., _hotter_ usually presupposes that something was hot to begin with
> (unlike _warm_ which doesn't.  You can make a cold thing warmer, but can't
> make a cold thing hotter).  So, it seems like _heater_ decomposes into
> 'increase something's heat' rather than 'make it hotter'--because
> the water
> is not hot to begin with.  So, your resultative thing does work, Larry.
> Aren't you glad I wasted our time telling you so?
>
> Except that, I'm still not sure that _warm water heater_ makes sense, and
> it should if 'heater' doesn't conflate something like 'hot'.  It
> doesn't in
> other contexts (the heater on a doctor's exam table doesn't make it hot,
> but makes it warm or at least not-cold).  Is heater polysemous, with 'make
> not-cold' and 'make hot' senses?
>
> Puzzled,
> Lynne