You have discovered homonyms
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Homonyms should not exist, get a new sound. i am the #1 homophobe
Wait, not like that
🤯
This bothers me. I looked it up and it's right, but I want it to be wrong for words that have the same root meaning. It's not like skate (the fish) and skate (the activity). You're an alcoholic because your blood is alcoholic. They're so closely related.
Does this mean every second definition of a word in the dictionary is also a homonym? How different does it need to be?
I hate English.
Does this mean every second definition of a word in the dictionary is also a homonym? How different does it need to be?
"homonym" == "same-name", so, yes by definition. it has the same name as another definition.
You're an alcoholic because your blood is alcoholic.
This is false, that's not what the noun 'alcoholic' means.
Being an alcoholic is a negative trait; a Martini cannot beat his wife in drunken rage.
#NotAllAlcoholics 🍸
When a person is an ass, the word "ass" is a negative stigma. When an animal is an ass, it's just a donkey.
A person can also have a nice ass
Or my cat, where it gains affectionate connotations
Context matters. Go figure
Wine is an alcoholic beverage. Vodka is an alcoholic's beverage.
In Wisconsin “alcoholic” is only an adjective.
We don’t have alcoholics in the other sense here, just “professionals”.
Wow, look at the contrast between Nevada and its neighboring states Utah & Idaho. Imagine being an alcoholic in Nevada then crossing the border to a soda pop state. "I'm cured!" 🤣
West Virginia surprised me, Wisconsin didn't
You would think that a state with such a high rate of heavy drinking coupled with pretty lenient DUI penalties would be a very dangerous place to drive, and yet Wisconsin ranks 34th (out of 50) for drunk driving deaths per capita.
If you drink enough vodka, your blood becomes alcoholic.
If the adjective means, "has or pertaining to containing alcohol," then it's simply the chronic condition of a human choosing to be that way that draws the stigma.
In portuguese, we have a different word for alcoholic person (alcoolatra), which helps avoid this
And it's got "cool" right in the name!
"Damn it, Beer, you're alcoholic!"
It's also nearly impossible to defend alcohol consumption without sounding like an alcoholic.
I'll take a stab at it.
It's a safe drinking supply. That's a big part of why humans drank it for thousands of years.
The idea that people drank beer because it was safer than water is a myth. They drank for the exact same reason we do today…you get a buzz. A side benefit was that beer had calories in a drinkable form. The safety of the drink, as in not full of harmful microbes, was an indirect but not primary benefit.
Sure before modern civilized times when the water supply was filthy with human waste, that's why everyone had to drink alcohol. Because they polluted their own water supply with shit. Glad science figured things out and got us back to drinking water again.
One is a noun, the other an adjective, and as such they carry different meanings. For example, someone could eat a tart (baked good) that is not tart (sour).
Off a tart - pretty freakin' sweet
Dammit DaMonsterKnees, you have Lupis.
It's never lupus.
Are you kidding? For a lot of alcoholics, their only redeeming quality (to their friends) is the fact that they're an alcoholic. It's an identity for a lot of people without one.
Sad but probably true... I was gonna say "I wouldn't know" but then I recalled my army days, lol.