On 10/07/2020 11.25, Paul Allen wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jul 2020 at 15:41, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
On 10/07/2020 09.32, Paul Allen wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jul 2020 at 14:10, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
barren is horrible as it can be easily interpreted as including also
paved surfaces,
Ummm, not really. Not in British English. I'd never describe paved
surfaces as barren. Technically, I suppose they are, but they don't
fit my mental category of barren.
As someone who desperately wishes his gravel driveway *was* barren, I'm
afraid I'm inclined to agree with Mateusz Konieczny :-).
How about the roof of your house? Unless there's moss growing on it,
is it barren? The road your house is on, is that barren?
My earthen roof might be barren, yes :-). (Okay, *I* don't have such a
roof, but some people do!)
The car park in town, is that barren?
If it's well maintained, hopefully it is. If it's crumbling, it might
not be! My previous residence had a paved driveway that, strictly
speaking, was not barren.
It's true that such surfaces are often *implied* to be barren, and we
may not think of typically labeling them as such, but strictly speaking,
"barrenness" is a property that they *can*, and *don't necessarily* possess.
I think the real reason we don't typically think of roads as "barren" is
because we think of them as existing at a different level, if that makes
any sense. We don't think of a field with a large rock in it as "an area
of bare rock surrounded by meadow", we think of it as "meadow, with a
[large] rock in it". Roads and rivers are similar. By contrast, I
*could* easily see describing a sufficient expanse of paved ground as
"barren".
--
Matthew
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