[quesera]

I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.

But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.

[tialaramex]

> But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger

Ginger ale is in fact, not an ale, it's a soft drink. It is distantly related to Ginger Beer and some variants of Ginger Beer are alcoholic like ales, but Ginger ale was conceived as a soft drink and today continues as a soft drink.

[quesera]

My (likely ignorant) understanding was that the non-alcoholic "ale"s and "beer"s were fermented like their traditional versions, but the process was stopped before the ethanol level became significant.

Mass-market ginger ales and root beers are not made that way today, of course.

[Wobbles42]

There seems to be a lot of overlap between this compound word concept and idioms. Both are largely atomic, defy analysis via individual word definition, and fairly language (and culture or dialect) specific.

Dictionaries are also language specific. We don't necessarily expect a 1:1 mapping of words between languages. I have personally always wondered if this subtley shapes thoughts in different languages as well.

[quesera]

I think it's more than overlap -- they are the same thing.

I.e. AFAICT, all compound words that defy literal interpretation are idioms. And it's that simple.

The argument then becomes that idioms should be in the dictionary. Some of them are of course, but idioms and slang are a) fast-moving, and b) often dismissed by the sorts of people who edit dictionaries.

[Wobbles42]

I tend to agree. The definitions overlap perfectly.

At the same time, I am having intuitive issues seeing "hot dog" as an idiom, vs just an ordinary noun. It certainly seems to follow noun rules, and fit into speech as one.

I don't know for sure that it's NOT an idiom though. I could just be wrong here, and have intuition in need of calibration.

[quesera]

No, I think you're right -- "hot dog" started out as a colloquial name for a type of sausage (apparently as something of a joke, because dog meat was sometimes eaten in the area, and it was a low-quality product), and it is now the accepted name.

So it was an idiom, now it's canon.

Another good one might be "hot dish", which has an idiomatic meaning in the midwestern US, and is slowly spreading. Not sure if it's made it to the dictionary yet. (which dictionary becomes an important question -- I'd expect to see it in M-W before, say, OED)

[manarth]

I wonder where "sausage dog" fits into this lexicon