This is the way my brain works, and the kind of thing I amuse myself with. In the car on the way home, I was suddenly thinking about the fact that there are so many words for “not straight” and I wasn’t even referring to the ones that have to do with sexual preference. Have you ever realized that? English is SO good at hoarding synonyms. This was brought on, by the way, because I was listening to Christine & The Queens song Tilted.
slanted, aslant, tilted, leaning, diagonal, inclined, askew, sloping, offkilter, angled, canted, crooked, lopsided, unbalanced, warped, listing, akimbo (yes, really, it’s not just standing with your legs apart and your hands on your hips)
And that was just the ones I could come up with on the highway and the exit to Gårdstånga. By then I ended up behind an EPA-traktor going 30kph and the synonyms I was thinking were not appropriate out loud. One website I checked had over 800 synonyms for “leaning” but it included much more than something that was just standing crookedly. Leaning as in a tendency, an inclination, a preference, etc.
I think it’s fascinating how English grabs words from all over the place and if someone should say, “Hey wait a minute! We already HAVE a word for that”, English just shrugs and stuffs another one in its bag. Other languages have plenty of their own loanwords and some even have as many or more synonyms than English, but it seems like English has taken them and still takes them from all over the place. And because English is a sort of generic language used all over the globe, at least for business and tourism, it seems to attract a weird kind of scrutiny.
Looking to see how many Swedish words mean the same thing, I found these: lutande (leaning), böjelse (inclination), skev (crooked), krokig/krökt (crooked or bent), stödja sig (to lean) stå snett or sned or snedställd (to lean or sag), slutande (sloping)…I stopped there, but there were more.
I love going down language rabbit holes. The internet is great for providing them.
When I was in college we used to play synonym games but the only ones I remember were how many words and phrases there were that meant “to vomit” or “drunk” (hint: way too many).
I wonder if there are any words in English that DON’T have a synonym. According to Google’s AI overview, there aren’t many. It claims exact one-word synonyms are extremely rare in English, as most words have unique nuances that specific equivalents cannot fully capture. But the examples it gave mostly made me laugh because while they ARE used in English, they are SO very clearly loanwords from other languages that I almost feel they don’t count. Examples included schadenfreude, umami, subpeona, ennui, déjà vu. Most words have definite synonyms that are phrases, so it was more an argument that SINGLE word synonyms are much rarer. The words that don’t have specific synonyms were basic everyday nouns like dog or cat (specific animal species have related biological group names like canine or feline, but no direct single-word equivalent.) or orange (which, along with having no one-word specific synonym also has no rhyme).
Also, did you know Wikiepedia has a page of words in English with no rhyme? Because of course it does. Orange is, by far, not alone.
And you could say, “Hey wait a minute! I know lots of synonyms for DOG: hound, pooch, mutt, pup, just to name a few…” But most of them have fairly specific meanings that have to DO WITH DOGS. I say, a dog is a pooch is a pup. If it barks like a synonym and is a good boy like a synonym, then by DOG, it’s a dog. Hahahaha!
A Quora thread I found went into great detail about how even though people consider color names to be synonyms, such as the following for RED: carmine, ruby, cinnabar, blood-red, cordovan, crimson, garnet, etc., they can all be shown to be DIFFERENT (and therefore unique) SHADES of red. Semantics. Or hairsplitting, pedantry, quibbling (!) or logomachy.
Quibbling is a great word. I would like more opportunities to use it.
*Surplus, abundance, profusion, glut, surfeit, cornucopia
Mood: silly
Music: Hoobastank—A Thousand Words