Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 January 30

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January 30

Can "tincture" mean a bottle/phial?

I was reading a novella recently, and the author made several references to "tinctures". From the context, he seemed to be using the word to to mean a bottle or phial. I've only ever know the word to refer to a type of solution, not the bottle containing it. Is this a valid use? Or is this just a case of a writer deciding to use a fancy word without looking up what it actually means? Iapetus (talk) 09:51, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

You would need to quote the exact references in your novella. I suspect you may be misreading them. --Viennese Waltz 10:47, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Agreed that we need context. Would you refer to an empty shampoo bottle as "shampoo"? Maybe, depending on context and intended meaning, but in most cases it would be incorrect or misleading. It could also well be the case that the author misused the word. Matt Deres (talk) 14:26, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Could be, though it would be kind of strange. The standard usage of "tincture" has been around for hundreds of years.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:22, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Of its entry for tincture, the online OED says "This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1912)." But for what the article is worth, it gives an impressive variety of meanings of the word. None of them, even those marked obsolete, corresponds to a container of any kind. A look in the fiction section of COCA for "tinctures" brings several hits. Again, none seems to mean a container. Most appear to be of "genre" fiction, heavy on archaisms and gnomic utterances. (Sample: "... the race of humans almost died away from too much warfare pursued too courageously. With the climate change that the new age brought, the gutsia plant died off. And now it is to be found in only one place." "Tell me where that is," Azzie said. "It is on the back shelves of Supply," Hermes said, "where the remaining plants were dried and then put into tinctures of ichor for eternal preservation.") I fear that the drudges churning out this kind of thing have to rely so heavily on their thesauruses that they may occasionally lack the energy to look up their finds in dictionaries. So misuse, or should I say idiosyncratic use, of tincture wouldn't surprise me. More.coffy (talk) 05:30, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

I think it may be as much the reader misunderstanding the usage as the writer misusing the word. I could imagine saying that a character "threw a tincture of gobbledygook" at an opponent and that "it broke upon impact". That would look like the writer is saying that the tincture broke and a reader might misunderstand that as "tincture" being used for "vial". But consider the parallel: "during the bar fight, Jed threw a beer at Cletus, it broke upon impact". --Khajidha (talk) 16:44, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

It could well be. The OP only edits sporadically,[2] but the next time he edits he should quote the entire paragraph, and then maybe it will make sense. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:46, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Apologies for the sporadic nature of my replies - I've been quite busy, and don't have the book in question at hand. Hopefully I'll be able to find and quote from it later today. From memory though, the first few uses of the word were ambiguous enough that I didn't think anything was unusual about it, but subsequent ones seemed sufficiently "off" that I began to suspect (and later think) that the author was using it to mean the container rather than the contents. But yes, I'll need to actually quote it for anyone to properly judge. Iapetus (talk) 14:55, 1 February 2019 (UTC)