Noncompositional

It’s lexicography time! First, a follow-up to the responsible topic I raised in the last post, along with some other words of interest.

Next, two lexicographic/lexical semantic items that came up during my day-to-day work. First, there are two main senses of transitive boil: to bring some liquid to the boiling point (boil water), and to cook or heat by placing in a boiling liquid (boil potatoes (in water/broth)). Consider the second use, which is often about cooking. Since it involves cooking, you can use domain-specific phrases like over high heat or on medium flame, as in boil the beans over high heat. (note the incongruity of *I burned my hand over high heat, unless you’re planning on doing some self-consumption)

But if you think about it, when you boil something (in water), it’ll always be at basically the same temperature (unless my high school physics has failed me), or at least above a certain temperature, so it doesn’t really matter what you set the heat source to. So I can think of at least two reasons to specify the range setting when in the frame of [boil food]: (1) you don’t want the temperature of the liquid to drop too far, so keeping it on high would bring it back to boiling quicker (only the setting “high” really makes sense for this version), or (2) you actually mean that the food should be placed in the water at room temperature and then brought to a boil at the specified setting. An example of (2) would be boil the rice on medium-low, which (I think) could mean “place the rice in room temperature water, and bring water to boil over medium-low heat.” However, I haven’t found anything like this (however, there are plenty of cases of bring [food] to a boil over…).

(and while we’re on the topic of boiling food and argument structure, how about this lovely specimen: boil the sugar out of the beets)

Next up: adverbial weapons of mass destruction.