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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 January 3

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January 3

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The use of the verb "drink" to automatically and assumably mean "drink alcohol [without specifying alcohol]"

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This also occurs in the Spanish language, with the verb "beber [to drink; I would think it would be related to the 'beverage']," as I used a form of "beber" in a sentence in a college Spanish class once (without specifying beverage), which, if literally tranlsated into English would assumed to be alcohol, and my professor, a native Spanish speaker, said I needed to specify which beverage, otherwise (just as in English), it would be presumed to be alcohol. So, I would guess this the usage of "to drink," without knowing what exactly, would probably exist throughout Western civilization-based languages.

Why is so?

Just a side note here: As I understand it, the usual verb for "to drink alcohol" is not beber but tomar (which I think literally means "to take"). --Trovatore (talk) 20:01, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure it's automatic in English; as with many verbs that have numerous meanings, it depends on context. That said, "drink" as a verb typically has an object. "We ran laps for an hour, then everyone collapsed and drank water." You could certainly say "collapsed and drank," and in the context of a school sports team, the reader or listener would assume a non-alcoholic beverage.
As a verb with no object, "drink" tends to imply alcohol, and the context can reinforce that assumption: "On weekends all the guys in my dorm do is drink [alcohol]." Specifying a beverage as your instructor suggests is a way of reducing ambiguity. --- OtherDave (talk) 01:27, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
See metonymy. This is not restricted to Western-civilization languages - it occurs in practically any culture with a strong drinking tradition (which is basically, any culture) 24.92.85.35 (talk) 01:35, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with this. In the same way that when discussing sex, it is often merely implied (e.g. "They did it.") rather than explicitly named. And yes, it's not restricted to western languages. The Filipino usage of the verb inum/inom (to drink) is practically identical to the English "drink". -- Obsidi♠n Soul 10:43, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"Beverage" is indeed cognate with the Spanish beber, from the Latin bebere. Curiously, "beverage" is typically taken to mean non-alcoholic in English, unless specified as "alcoholic beverage". In contrast, the word "imbibe", which comes from that same Latin root bebere, and which simply means "to drink" or "to drink in", is used as a variant or euphemism for "drinking" (alcohol) and likewise without the qualifier.[1] ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:28, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if the reason for this usage is that drinking a "soft" beverage is unremarkable, whereas drinking a "strong" drink carries a number of assumptions along with it. It's also worth pointing out that other forms of "drink", such as "drunk" and "drunkard", pertain either to alcohol explicitly or to something else metaphorically, e.g. "drunk with power". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:34, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
In any case, "drink" used this way goes back hundreds of years.[2] ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:36, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Minor nitpick, the Latin word would be bibere, not bebere -- Ferkelparade π 04:37, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I was actually about to correct that mistake. Thanks for fixing. :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
One usage that intrigues me is when drink is used in drink driving. Dunno how common that is around the English speaking world but around here it's the same as driving under the influence. HiLo48 (talk) 05:10, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The colloquial terms used in America are "drunk driving" or "drunken driving" or "drinking and driving". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:58, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
@HiLo, I vaguely suspect that that usage came out of the Transport Accident Commission's "bloody idiot" campaign. As I remember it (and as the article suggests) the campaign slogan starting in 1989 was actually "If you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot.". But since that is a little too long to comfortably fit on a billboard, it got shortened to just "Drink Drive, Bloody Idiot" originally for billboards, and then for the tagline on TV ads, etc. I could be wrong, but I don't really remember just "drink driving" being used before that. --jjron (talk) 12:00, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Drink driving is the standard term in the UK and has been in use here since well before 1989. I don't have access to the OED online here, but this article[3] from the Daily Telegraph states the OED first records the term being used (in the Telegraph) in 1964. (You have to follow the hyperlink on "251 words"). Valiantis (talk) 14:29, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I'd go for the '60s as a safer bet than the '80s, in Australia too. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 20:22, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It works the same way in Russian. And, on top of that, there are other related examples of metonymy. There are even jokes about it:
  • Only a Russian person can hear the expression "half a liter" without asking "half a liter of what?"
  • In Russia, if you ask ten random people "how much is ten times 100 grams", nine out of ten will answer "one liter". --Itinerant1 (talk) 05:14, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Whereas in the UK, 'half a liter' [sic] guarantees you mean 'half a litre of petrol'. We'd say 'a pint' (slightly more than half a litre) for everything else (except shots, which are measured in millilitres). And, Bugs, before you say you use gas in your cars and not petrol, we measure that in cubic centimetres. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:17, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why would anyone want to buy half a liter of petrol, I wonder? By the way, the second joke "works" because Russians measure vodka in grams up to half a liter, and in liters above that amount. It's just too cumbersome to say "milliliter" instead of "gram", especially after the first couple of 100-millilitergram servings of straight vodka.--Itinerant1 (talk) 07:27, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The same is in the Semitic languages (Ar., Heb., and maybe also Am. and Tig.). I don't see here a western influence, because words like "drunk" (i.e. drunkened, e.g. in Heb.) go back as far as BC times. 87.68.248.107 (talk) 11:35, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, same in Japanese. 'Nondeiru' means 'drinking', and on its own without an object would very often mean 'is drinking/has been drinking alcohol'. However, it does not mean 'drunk' necessarily, for which an entirely unrelated set of words is generally used. Interestingly, if we translate 'he was drunk' literally into Japanese, it would actually mean 'somebody else drank all his alcohol'. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:59, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if the joke from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy works in other languages?: "It's unpleasantly like being drunk", "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?", "Ask a glass of water". -- Arwel Parry (talk) 22:33, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No in western Austronesian languages due to the Austronesian-type morphosyntactic alignment. Instead of active or passive voices, verbs get affixes to form an agent -trigger or a patient-trigger, both of which make it clear if the subject is acting [the verb] upon or being acted upon [by the verb], in addition to tenses, etc.
In Filipino for example, from the root word inom (to drink), you can form agent-trigger uminom (prefix/infix -um-) and patient-trigger ininom (infix -in-). The phrase "like being drunk" would be translated as either parang uminom ("like having drunk [something]") or parang ininom ("like having been drunk [by something]"), with the former being the correct translation when used in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy context. It obviously will not work with the follow-up since it's clear that the speaker is referring to something drinking something, instead of something being drunk by something.
Like in Japanese, there is also an etymologically unrelated word used to describe a drunk (intoxicated) person that is primarily an adjective, lasing (Cebuano: hubog). It can be used (rarely) as an adjectival verb, e.g. linasing ("to get [someone] drunk [on alcohol]"). This word, in contrast to the previous inom, is used exclusively to mean getting drunk on alcohol (or rarely getting "high" on an emotion/feeling, cf. "drunk on power"). It can not be used to mean drinking alone, nor can it be used for a person who is drinking alcohol but is not intoxicated.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 05:00, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The joke does not work in Russian, either. There are too many suffixes and prefixes to denote all possible adjectives with the root "drink" (p'yushchiy "the person who drinks", vypivshiy "the person who just drank something", zapivshiy "the person who just drank some liquid with his food", napivshiysya "the person who just got really drunk", perepivshiy "the person who drank too much", vypityy "the beverage that got consumed"), and the two meanings of the word "drunk" in the joke end up translated slightly differently. Russian translations of the book just say "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" - "Hangover", which is, of course, not quite the intended meaning, but you can't do much better. --Itinerant1 (talk) 07:27, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Doesn't work in German either, again because of the prefixes. A person gets betrunken, a glass of water gets getrunken. Angr (talk) 07:25, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I read the Italian translation of Hitchhiker's Guide, and they translated it literally, as bevuto. I thought the translator had completely missed the point, because the usual Italian word for "drunk" (in the sense of "under the influence of alcohol") is ubriaco. But when I brought that up, my friends told me that bevuto is also possible. --Trovatore (talk) 07:29, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
In Russian пьяный 'drunken with alcohol, intoxicated' is a adjective from пить 'to drink'. So you can be simply пьяный (without any specification) that means 'drunken from alcohol or emotion (love, happiness)', but you cannot be drunken from non-alcoholic beverages (water, lemonade). Nevertheless you still can be напившийся (the past participle from напиться) 'drunk thoroughly' with water, lemonade, etc.--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 17:43, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Radicals vs phonetic components

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Are there any Chinese characters where the radical component is also the phonetic component? If so, what are some examples? 98.113.158.92 (talk) 03:52, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Radicals can be semantic or phonetic; thus, most two-radical characters have both a semantic and a phonetic radical. (For instance, 摸 has the semantic radical 扌(手) and the phonetic radical 莫.) rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:10, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I meant more like the index radicals you'd use to look up a character in a dictionary. 98.113.158.92 (talk) 04:30, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
A bunch of examples are listed at Radical (Chinese character) (text starting "There are also instances of section headers which play a phonetic and not a semantic role in those characters...") 86.176.210.154 (talk) 04:36, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Alvarado

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What is the meaning and etymology of the Spanish surname "Alvarado"? Am I correct in thinking it means "the beached" (cf Wiktionary:varado), or is a simple dictionary lookup misleading me? -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 11:17, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably derived from the first name Álvaro, which our article says is Germanic and means "all guard". Pais (talk) 12:17, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

According to http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Alvarado, "It derives from a place called Alvarado, which translates as 'the place on the hot plain' or similar." Looie496 (talk) 15:53, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It seams to be from a Spanish place name Alvarado, though its etymology can be from Spanish varado or varar as well as from Arabic (al-). It does not look for me to be from Germanic 'all guard' as Germanic w- became usually gu- in Spanish, and also it does not explain why -d- were dropped (all guard > Álvaro > Alvarado) or why -a- were inserted between -r- and -d- (all guard > Alvarado) because in Spanish there are still such words as guarda.--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 18:20, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

English names that sound like prostitutes' names

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Once I named one of the girls in my Spanish class "Estrella", and my Spanish teacher later told me that it rather sounded like a prostitute's name. What will be the English equivalents? --121.134.141.253 (talk) 19:13, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There's a joke, that does seem to hold, that if you take the name of your pet and add the street you live on, you get your "hooker name". So you end up with something like "Smokey Alvarado" or "Fluffy Showers" or something (I used to live on Showers Drive; it works perfectly for this). http://www.strippernames.net/ generates some credible sounding ones too. I don't think Estrella sounds like a hooker; it sounds like a beer. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 19:30, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
One of the names the site has generated for me is "Chardonnay", so apparently the names of alcoholic beverages are not that far away from the hooker names. --121.134.141.253 (talk) 19:35, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sometimes. Sherry or Champagne or Chardonnay or Whiskey are credible stripper names; Vodka, Gin, Lager, or Buckfast Tonic Wine aren't. I can't give you a rational explanation of why. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 19:42, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Naming your daughter Chastity is definitely tempting fate. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 19:53, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Or it might work, and they might have no interest in sex with men. StuRat (talk) 19:58, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That doesn't mean s/he's chaste, though. Angr (talk) 23:24, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No, but it affects who gets chased. :-) StuRat (talk) 15:25, 4 January 2012 (UTC) [reply]
I always thought a name that sounds like a female body part or sex act was rather ill-advised, like Regina and Phylicia. Then there's something you might want to eat, like a Candy or a Bunny. StuRat (talk) 20:03, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder (given the alcohol names above, and the names from the stripper-name-generator) whether there's something of a synesthetic bouba/kiki effect going on. That is, the womens' stripper names sound especially soft and voluptuous (bouba names), but with a soupçon of kiki for spice. There's probably a Ph.D in linguistics to be had in comparing stripper names (mostly bouba with a little kiki) with roller derby names (mostly kiki but feminised with a little bouba). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:12, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The OP is asking for hooker names, but in my experience (American English) it seems we tend to talk about something being a "stripper name" rather than a "hooker name" (and I see some of the other posters above mention stripper names rather than hooker names). One that pops into my mind is Candy (I once had a Chinese classmate who used that as her English name and I remember trying to explain that that's a stripper name). Then again, there are also some normal names that some people consider stripper names (I can't think of them off the top of my head, but I remember once my sister-in-law complaining about some girl and bringing up the fact that "she even has a stripper name", I think it started with M). rʨanaɢ (talk) 23:42, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I am not surprised some Asian girls name themselves Candy, for it is the name of the heroine of a famous Japanese anime. --BorgQueen (talk) 01:33, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say there'd be a few generalisations, some outlined above - Finlay's soft sounding alcoholic beverages, Stu's things edible and/or cute, but again they need that soft sound (bunnys, candys, etc). Just had a look at List of prostitutes and courtesans to see if there were any obvious patterns but can't see that much - that would almost indicate that these supposed "prostitute names" are in fact completely based on preconceptions or popular use, rather than having any link to reality (those ones from fiction are closer to our biases, but some of them would undoubtedly have been chosen because they are those names). However I'd suspect also if a name had been strongly enough linked with prostitution, stripping, or just general promiscuity or some related pursuit through popular culture it would also be regarded in similar light, especially if not common. For example you don't get many girls called Jezebel or Lolita for example, and most people would be offended if you referred to them as that for some reason, even though if you could remove the names from their cultural context they would be (IMO) quite nice names (not that they were necessarily of English origin or names in general, but they could be used). --jjron (talk) 09:37, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It might vary from country to country. My American wife told me that "Chantelle", which is perfectly acceptable in the UK would be seen as a stripper name in the USA. -- Q Chris (talk) 09:46, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The archetypical supposed prostitute was Mary Magdalene, yet curiously this has never stopped large numbers of (mainly European and overwhelmingly Christian) women being named Magdalena, or its variants such as Madeleine, or short version Magda (one of the loveliest female names in existence, imo).
I say "supposed" because there is zero biblical evidence for her engaging in the profession in which she is traditionally said to have engaged before coming under Jesus's influence. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 09:55, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I always confuse that one with Chanterelle. To my mind, it's a mushroom name.  Card Zero  (talk) 17:50, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
In Italy, they name the nice, edible things after the prostitutes: spaghetti alla puttanesca.  Card Zero  (talk) 17:58, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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