hot water heater (was "pleonasms")

[Donald M Lance]

I agree with Victoria.  We had heaters before we had hot-water-all-the-time
devices.  We had a heater in the living room and then we got a heating
device attached to a tank that would provide hot water for the household.
So we have a tautologous phrase or a phrase with redundancy, an instance of
pleonasm.

I grew up in the same general pen/pin-merger area as Bethany Dumas (South
Texas), and I don't recall our using the term "ink pen."  The putative
disambuguation role of "ink pen" may be regional.

Have any of you guys done a search of this word? -- you guys who are always
looking for early instances of interesting terms.

DMLance

on 2/14/02 10:06 AM, Victoria Neufeldt at vneufeldt at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM
wrote:

> 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
>