Are There Such Things as Perfect Synonyms?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katya. I’m calling from San Diego.

Welcome. What’s going on, Katya? What can we do for you?

My question is about a word that my father used to use. He is, or was, rather, one of the most intelligent people I ever knew, and he would always help me with my essays. And we would spend hours arguing over commas and words. And one of the things he used to say was that words are not fungible, and we’d get into a discussion about which words to use in an essay. And that word fungible has always kind of confused me, and I spent many, many years trying to prove to him that there are certain words that are fungible, and I could never find a pair.

So I’m calling to ask you guys, what do you think about if words are fungible? I know that fungible means like interchangeable as far as I know. And is that really true, that words are not fungible? Fungible, F-U-N-G-I-B-L-E, fungible, right?

Right.

Yeah, from the Latin for to perform or enjoy.

Yeah, or to be in place or something.

Yeah, function.

Yeah, it’s related to function.

Yeah.

Yeah, so are words fungible? Are there shades of… Can words be perfect synonyms, in other words?

Exactly. And then that kind of leads to the question, you know, what is a synonym? Does that exist? Are words equal, or are they just similar? My dad’s perspective was that words can be similar, but they’re never exactly the same, that they have a different feeling to it. And I always thought that was really interesting. Word seems very kind of logical, left brain. But he says that, you know, each word has its own feeling in the body and emotion. And so that’s what makes them different.

This is the way that linguists think, exactly like your father. Most linguists today generally agree that there’s no such thing as a perfect synonym. And that word perfect is important. And I know before all the armchair linguists start hammering their queries into Google, we’re talking about synonymy that is overall for most people most of the time. Because we can always come up with these two-word pairs that work in a single sentence. But what you need those two words to do is work in all sentences, in all situations, and in all contexts and other things.

So what a linguist will look at is implicit meaning versus explicit meaning. So the explicit meaning, say, is what you see in the dictionary, the definition. The implicit meaning is the meaning that it gets. And this is what touches on what your father was saying by the company that it keeps, how it appears in a sentence. It’s collagations and collocations, the other words that it travels with and the circumstances in which it appears.

For example, we might be able to say that but and derriere are synonyms, B-U-T-T and derriere. But they have a different feel to them. Derriere is a little less crass, right? It’s something you might say in a little more refined situation. It might even be a little more joking, where but is a little more childish, a little more crass. And these contexts, these pragmatics, aren’t necessarily indicated in a dictionary. Dictionaries usually don’t tell you those kinds of things. You just pick them up as a native speaker.

So those characteristics are what make but and derriere synonyms, but not perfect synonyms.

Wow. You know, I’ve been on a journey trying to find these two words for years, words that are fungible. I’d always come to him with a pair, and he would explain it kind of like you just did. And it sounds like my search is futile, that words truly are not fungible in terms of being perfectly interchangeable.

That is the overall consensus among linguists today. When I was part of an editorial team putting together the first writer’s thesaurus for Oxford University Press, one of the things we came up with were word spectrums, where we took a bunch of related words, say words meaning pretty or beautiful, or words meaning ugly, or words meaning derriere, and we put them on a spectrum from left to right. Say, what is the spectrum on the left might be most useful to least useful, or most crass to least crass, or most refined to least refined, or some spectrum of that sort, or most common to least common. And anyway, in that way, you can compare a whole group of words instead of just two and maybe start to see as you’re moving things back and forth along this continuum, the gradations of meaning, of sentiment in each of these words are really kind of astonishing that you know this. And yet, if you were pressed to put it in print, you would have a really difficult time.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Thank you so much. I love that idea of the spectrum.

Thanks, Katya.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

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