Perfect cup

I recently came to the store and saw: there were plastic jars with gum pads on the shelf (40 pads in a jar - these are convenient to keep in the glove compartment of the car), and under the jars there is a price tag on which, in accordance with modern syntactic customs, it says: “ Orbit juicy watermelon bottle", price, barcode. And then, as my colleague columnist Carrie Bradshaw says, I started thinking. I wondered why I could be so frightened that I could call obvious and undeniable jars bottles. Is it because you have to shake the gum out through a hole in the lid?

In general, there is an interesting story about bottle jars. If you ask how, in fact, a can differs from a bottle, everyone first answers: “Well, it’s very simple, the shape is different.” And it begins:

— The bottle always has a long neck.

- Yes? What about Riga balsam? Remember those brown ceramic ones? No one can doubt that they are bottles, but their necks are short, shorter than those of many cans.

- Well, the bottle has a narrow neck.

— Riga balsam or Zhuravli vodka, and even a standard vodka bottle, of course. But let's remember the old-style milk bottles. Not the modern ones made from Mozhaisk milk, but the ones with silver foil lids. And the kefir lids were so emerald. And there was something, fermented baked milk or something, with yellow stripes. Those bottles had a wide neck. Actually, even now all kinds of kefirs and drinking yoghurts are sold in wide-necked bottles, only plastic ones. What about kefirs? The neck of Paul Masson wine bottles generally expands. These are convenient for storing cereals.

- Well, the bottle itself is tall, stretched upward, that’s for sure!

- But it’s not necessary. There are also bottles that are pot-bellied, even flattened. In fact, all these signs are there, but not all of them are always presented at once.

The bottle of Riga balsam has a short neck, but it is narrow and the bottle itself is tall. So does the milk bottle and Paul Masson. But low, flattened bottles have a narrow neck and usually quite long.

And there is another interesting feature - the main purpose. Of course, juice is still often sold in three-liter jars; of course, hikers use a funnel to pour cereal into plastic bottles. Even if the kayak capsizes, the buckwheat will not be harmed. But in general, it is obvious that bottles are for liquids, and jars are for other substances.

Now let's do a thought experiment. There are jars, about 600 ml each, in which pickled mushrooms and other snacks are sold - they are very tall and almost cylindrical. Let’s mentally take such a jar and peel off the label from it. Let's look at her. This is, of course, a can, anyone can tell. Now let’s imagine that the diameter of the bottom remained the same (seven centimeters), but the height doubled, i.e. became about 35 cm. This vessel will obviously no longer be called a jar, but a bottle. It will look like a bottle of Celsius vodka or Chinese plum wine (it’s even less elongated). And if you increase the height gradually, at what point will the vessel stop being called a jar and start being called a bottle? This is where you can do research. It’s also worth seeing whether the choice of nomination will be affected if you stick a label on the vessel - either “Marinated Butter” or “Dessert Wine”.

You can have fun and construct a multifactorial definition of a bottle by building a hierarchy of features and indicating the rules by which the boundary is drawn, beyond which the vessel ceases to be called a bottle. In modern linguistics, the concept of a prototype is usually used for this case: a prototypical object or situation with which a given word is correlated is described, and some of the features of the object or situation turn out to be “weak”, and some are necessary and invariant. A striking example of such a description of specific vocabulary is presented in the classic work of the remarkable linguist Anna Wierzbicka on cups and mugs. The point is that, for example, a cup has invariant features (it is made for drinking hot liquids, and it is small enough for a person to lift it to the mouth with one hand), but the prototypical - “ideal” - cup has more features: so, she has a saucer, a pen, etc. I am especially pleased to mention Anna Wierzbicka here, because this gives me a reason to congratulate her on receiving the Dobrushin Prize.

Let's look at another pair of the simplest words: eat and drink. It would seem much clearer. However, let's try to formulate it. The first thing that comes to mind is eating solids and drinking liquids. What about broth or jelly? They drink them straight from a cup, but if they use a spoon, no one will say that they are drinking, they will say that they are eating. True, if you spoon-feed a patient water, he still drinks and does not eat. Let's try to build a definition on the suction movements characteristic of drinking. Again it won’t work - not only because you can suck in the noodles. If a person sucks the juice from a marrow bone or an artichoke, no one will tell what he is drinking. To drink, the liquid must be prepared in advance, and the person swallows it in sips. By the way, does the baby eat or drink milk? If from a bottle, then either way, but from the breast, he eats. Of course, here we can talk about the fact that all such oppositions are most likely not universal, that in different languages ​​and at different times reality is divided differently. You can remember the phrase “Meal is served” and the combination Eat coffee: the verb to eat in the language of the 19th century was clearly structured differently than the modern verb to eat. But I'm talking about something else.

Even the simplest person has no difficulty in using the words eat and drink, can and bottle (that’s why the store price tag with which I started is a complete mystery to me). Meanwhile, as we have seen, in order to use these words correctly, one must operate with a rather complex system of semantic features, which are sometimes very difficult to formalize. These examples illustrate very well what linguistics is largely concerned with: exteriorization, explication, modeling of linguistic competence. A person usually does not think about how he chooses words, just as he does not think about why the water, when drained from the bathtub, swirls into the funnel - and in which direction, why a drop of water that falls on a hot frying pan behaves so strangely. But if you think about it, it turns out that you need a whole science to explain this.

And if someone liked solving semantic problems, I suggest that they formulate how cookies differ from cakes. Just don’t rush to shout that it’s very simple. Well? Consistency? Size? Serving and packaging? A?