At some point,
You have to decide where one word ends and another begins. This can be especially tricky when the words look and sound exactly the same. To illustrate what I mean, look at these two sentences:
He's been away from home for two weeks.
They're trying to make a good home for their children.
Both sentences make use of the word home, but is it the same word? Kinda. In this case, I adapted both sentences from the fragments presented in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as examples of different definitions of home. The two definitions are, in order:
one's place of residence
the social unit formed by a family living together
Those are very different concepts. So, again, are they the same word? Kinda. Lexicographers look at the different meanings and how closely related they are and then determine if they are in fact, the same word. Among the many factors they consider are use cases, synonyms, antonyms, histories, and forms. And then they write the entry up in the dictionary1.
The trouble is, until very recently, dictionaries were printed books. Big books. Filled with very small type. But even then, squeezing every single use case for every single English word into a single dictionary was a monumental task and resulted in tomes like the Unabridged Oxford Dictionary which currently weighs in at 20 volumes and just under 21,000 pages2.
So they put all the different use cases of a single lexical form into a list and call those the definitions of that word, and just never mind that sometimes that the word defined in line one is totally different from the word defined in line 2.
And that is a huge challenge for students. Going back to our example of house and home, we can't just say that these two words are synonymous and hand over a dictionary, even a conveniently-sized electronic one. Instead, we need to help students understand that this specific, limited definition of home3 is a synonym for this specific, limited definition of house. In other words, when home means dwelling, it's a synonym for house. When house means a place of business, it is not a synonym for home4.
The ways in which teachers have addressed this problem are manifold, but, at the base level, it's mainly lots of reading and memorization.
But that's changing.
I come at this from a very practical standpoint. As much as I am a certified word-nerd and as much as I enjoy debating the tiniest, most fractional nuances of language usage, I've got a class to teach. And that means I need quick, practical solutions that are easy to understand for ESL/EFL learners and that do not take up a lot of class time. Naturally, I've turned to the robots for help.
Here's the question I asked Chat GPT:
In the sentence, "I want to go home and see my family," is the word home synonymous with the word house?
And here's the response:
In the sentence "I want to go home and see my family," the word "home" is not necessarily synonymous with the word "house."
It then gave a general overview of house and home before continuing:
In the given sentence, the speaker may be referring to a physical house as their home, but they could also be referring to a larger concept of "home" that includes their family, community, or sense of belonging.
That's...pretty good. But, more important than the actual work, I think the methodology is something to be examined and possibly implemented5. As discussed before, words like house and home are synonyms, mostly, depending on the specific use case. But looking them up in the dictionary is a static task. It leaves the learner with the monumental task of reading both entries and then determining if those entries align nearly enough to be able to substitute one word for the other. But, simply asking the computer if two words are interchangeable in a single use case? Talk about your time savers.
Next week we'll get into the last part of our discussion on house and home and why it matters that they're not as synonymous as we'd like to pretend. I hope you'll come along.
The Pitch
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What We’re Reading
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100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet
by Pamela Paul
I expected this book to irritate me. I expected a bunch of pablum and fluff about things that we’re better off without. Instead, much to my delight, I have found a solid collection of both shorter and longer essays about how much things have changed in the past few decades.
If you’re the kind of reader who remembers pacing around your living room or your kitchen, stretching the phone cord out as far as it will go for just a little more privacy, then this book is for you. For anyone over the age of 35, it is equal parts nostalgia and reflection on what it means to have grown up without the internet.
And, because linguists gonna linguist, we have words for these words - homographs, homophones, homonyms - that serve to tell us whether the two words in question sound the same or look the same and whether they have differing definitions.
To be very clear, I'm not dragging either dictionaries or lexicographers. Keeping up with English, or any language, is a Sisyphean task on the good days.
Home and house may not be the ideal words to illustrate this point as it's hard to imagine a scenario where confusing the two words leads to anything other than embarrassment. However, synonyms play a huge role in teaching learners to write in different registers.
Ideally, students would have the time and wherewithal to closely examine synonym pairs to determine which one had the specific nuance they wanted to convey. In reality, that's asking a lot from someone who just wants to get their homework done as quickly as possible.
The elephants in the a.i. room is, of course, whether we can trust the a.i. to give the correct answer and whether we can teach students to spot when the a.i. is bullshitting.