Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 20/09/2005 16:13, Dr. Joel M. Hoffman wrote:

> > "A person whose liking for chocolate is jestingly likened to the
> > alcoholic's addictive craving for alcohol."
> >
> > Context, as I keep telling Vadim, is everything.
> >    
>
> Thank you.
>
> This seemingly off-topic disucssion of what "chocoholic" means is
> actually quite instructive.  Living in an English-speaking country I
> know that when native English speakers say "chocoholic" they mean
> "someone who really likes chocolate."  I know that they *do* *not*
> mean "someone who is addicted to chocolate."
>  

Joel, I live in another English-speaking country (UK) and know that when 
mother tongue English speakers here say "chocoholic" they mean to 
suggest that the person is addicted to chocolate, or at least that their 
liking for chocolate is unreasonably strong like that of an addict. They 
do not mean simply that the person likes chocolate. Maybe this is a 
matter of dialect difference - but then the American Heritage dictionary 
seems more on my side than yours, with "craves" rather than "likes".

> This agreed-upon usage of a word is what I refer to as "meaning," and
> it is this information about English that lets me understand what
> someone writing or speaking in English is trying to convey.
>
> Finding a Wikipedia entry that doesn't match how people use the word
> is not helpful. ...

I quoted Wikipedia and a dictionary to demonstrate that there is 
supporting evidence for my own mother tongue speaker intuition, which is 
of equal validity to yours.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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