Max Hauser wrote:Bob Ross wrote:I couldn't understand how a Realtor could sell me a "home" -- I thought we needed a "house" and it was up to Janet and me to create the "home." / Unfortunately for that rather romantic notion, the OED indicated that for over a thousand years English has used "home" to mean "house"...Bob Ross wrote:Peter, the OED suggests the word now has both meanings ... "[Home] In N. America and Australasia (and increasingly elsewhere), freq. used to designate a private house or residence merely as a building."
As a fan of word trivia (anyone for Trivial Pursuits? For money, of course.) I enjoy those dictionary excursions for their cultural value. The only issue I see with them here is their relevance to what they answered in the thread: "home" as commercial euphemism. Why, by whom, with what connotations. As Oliver and I raised. OED (like most dictionaries) says what the words denote, not what they connote. So why mention it, unless to make conversation?
Much as speculations on potato-cooking prehistory (salt-potatoes thread in kitchen forum) engage in their own right, but cloud the subject of a suggestive, fairly recent food-culture connection with unique circumstantial evidence. Why not try to see* what connection may exist there, rather than try not to?
Cheers -- Max
*(Both senses of "see")
Don't really disagree, Max, with the curious exception of your phrase "OED (like most dictionaries) says what the words denote, not what they connote."
I have wiled away many an hour in my collegiate youth lolling on the carpeted aisles of the university library randomly working my way through the OED. And it most definitely does include connotations within its pages. It is as much a history tract as anything; it merely uses words as its tracking points. Many's the word I've tracked through the ages and the changes, with OED describing in great detail the connotative meanings of the word through those ages. All words are freighted, loaded with meaning; and hearkening back to your excellent earlier post, it's that sedimentary stratification of meanings that accrete through the changes that make language so fascinating.
You are, as I, old enough to perhaps recall a superb column by the poet and translator John Ciardi in the Saturday Review wherein he convinced (quite convincingly) an aspiring poet not to give up his day job. And he did so by explaining that a poet, first, should be in love with words, and revel in their multiple meanings, and understand that in using a given word he was exploring multifaceted worlds and ideas all at the same time. And that, to me, is what the OED does so well.