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Comment by ben_w

3 months ago

Was thinking about oddities of language recently (happens a lot since moving to Germany), specifically how "toothpaste" isn't made from teeth and "tomato paste" isn't something you rub onto a tomato.

So anyway, should we be calling this "hairpaste for teeth", or "toothpaste from hair"?

27 comments

ben_w

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mcswell  3 months ago

This semantic variability in the relation between the two nouns of a compound is pretty common in compound nouns: "Y made of X", like "tomato paste", "Y used (somehow) for X" (like "toothpaste", "paintbrush", "electrical outlet"--here an adjective, but still a lexicalized phrase), "Y in X" ("treehouse"), "Y for X" ("doghouse"), "Y containing X" ("paint can"), not to mention metaphorical uses, with some etymological relation between X and Y ("moon shot", "crapshoot", "greenhouse"), and so on. Not to mention multi-word compounds, like "greenhouse gas"--but I'm sure you've seen lots of those in Germany :).

  • Birch-san  3 months ago

    “Windows Subsystem for Linux” is probably the most confusing example of this (an environment subsystem which provides a Linux userspace to a Windows NT kernel). more intuitive would be to call it a Linux Subsystem for Windows, but presumably for branding purposes they wanted Windows in front.

    • 1718627440  3 months ago

      That one isn't an example of this. It is actually a Windows Subsystem (at least WSL1) that exposes Linux syscalls, so is for Linux userspace programs. There is also the Windows Subsystem for Win32 and there used to be a Windows Subsystem for Unix.

      Linux Subsystem would be completely wrong, because it is a Subsystem of Windows not of Linux.

      9 replies →

nkrisc  3 months ago

“Toothpaste” is the commonly accepted English word (in most English dialects, as far as I’m aware) for that paste which we use to clean our teeth with a brush. So I expect we’ll call it “toothpaste” regardless of the exact chemical composition.

If keratin is the active ingredient, I would suspect the exact source doesn’t really matter.

  • swores  3 months ago

    I agree that the source won't be a reason for not calling it toothpaste, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not called toothpaste anyway - that's a term they're using now as it makes it easy for people to imagine what they're talking about, but dentists don't call every type of gel/stuff that they apply to teeth "toothpaste", and as this will be about targeting repair rather than daily cleaning I suspect it will get a new name.

boothby  3 months ago

Thanks for this, I'll be calling it toothhairpaste regardless of what the marketing department comes up with.