Talk:bottled water

This is very, very SOP but one might think that travellers may need this word on their journeys through unexplored terrain. --Hekaheka 04:16, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• I think anything borderline should simply face tighter scrutiny for good formatting-don't get me wrong I am not into adding full on sentences, ok?Acdcrocks 09:43, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

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bottled water

Sum of parts - water that has been bottled. SemperBlotto 15:20, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Fails WT:CFI#Idiomaticity, so delete. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:34, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Struck my comment. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:13, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• Keep. I completely disagree. If you filled a bunch of bottles with water from the toilet, it would be water that has been bottled, but it wouldn't be "bottled water" in the sense provided, and in the sense that people would expect. The term, "bottled water" is used to indicate that there is something different about the water itself that goes beyond the kind of container in which it is sold. See, e.g.:
  • 2008, Heather Hedrick Fink, Lisa Burgoon, Alan E. Mikesky, Practical Applications in Sports Nutrition, p. 225:

    The take-home message is that athletes should not assume that bottled water is better than what comes out of the tap.

  • 1998, Dorothy Merritts, Andrew De Wet, Kirsten Menking, Environmental Geology: An Earth System Science Approach, p. 226:

    The most common reasons that bottled water tastes slightly better are the dissolved minerals in bottled water obtained from springs and groundwater and the use of ozone as a disinfectant.

• Cheers! bd2412 T 15:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

keep, this seems very much idiomatic to me, since tap water filled into a bottle doesn't become bottled water. -- Liliana • 16:01, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

25% of bottled water is tap water filled into a bottle.--Prosfilaes 17:14, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Nevertheless, there are numerous citations to be found to surveys showing people prefer bottled water to tap water. The result may be purely psychological, but it proceeds from people believing that the definition of bottled water excludes tap water, irrespective of whether this is the case. bd2412 T 18:33, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• Delete; if you filled a bunch of bottles with water from the toilet, it would be bottled water. If you told people it was water that had been bottled, they would look at you funny, translate that into bottled water, and go okay. Just because people ascribe to bottled water this image of being pure and holy doesn't mean that it is, or that that's part of the definition of being bottled water.--Prosfilaes 17:14, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
  • • Would it be pink and carbonated? Ionized and mineralised?<<<<Idiomaticity is right there, I don't think those attributes could easily be deducedAcdcrocks 01:29, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. Clearly, not all water that is bottled is "bottled water". That there is a literal sense in addition the more specific sense is common, even normal for such idiomatic expressions. DCDuring TALK 17:29, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
• Comment. Bottled water is a commercial product. I usually re-use water bottles and fill them from the tap; that doesn't make them "bottled water". But if I were to take those re-filled bottles, re-label, and market and (try to) sell them, then I think they would be low-quality "bottled water". —Ruakh_TALK 17:38, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
  • However, the reason people would be willing to buy them is that they presume "bottled water" to mean water of a higher quality. Whether it is of a higher quality may be irrelevant, if people define the term to have that meaning, and then act on that understanding of the definition. bd2412 T 18:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
  • Is that any different from any other substance? Would bottled fruit juice include canned fruit juices poured into bottles? Is this not part of the definition of bottled, then?--Prosfilaes 18:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
    • If that were the case, then why do we have citations like this: "Bottled water or tap water? Debate still rages on which is better." Kevin Spear, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, May 2, 2011. Clearly this newspaper headline suggests that bottled water can not be tap water, or else there wouldn't be a choice between them to consider. The fact that people may be in error if they believe there is that much of a difference is irrelevent to a dictionary, because we are recording the meaning actually ascribed to the phrase, not the meaning we think it should have. We all know there's no actual Santa Claus, but we define Santa Claus in terms of the way the word is used. bd2412 T 19:45, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I think this term has become idiomatic because unbottled drinking water, aka tap water, is abundantly available and bottled water is a contrast, in some salient ways. Fruit juice is not differentiated the same way, though there is a similar differentiation between, say, orange juice and fresh/fresh-squeezed orange juice. In contrast to the situation with "bottled water" (in which not all water that is in a bottle is "bottled water" and ergo "bottled water" seems idiomatic), I think all orange juice that has been freshly squeezed from the fruit is "fresh/fresh-squeezed orange juice", thus making the comparable term SoP. DCDuring TALK 19:01, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

When I bumped into this, I thought and I still think it is as SoP as it ever gets. But, on the second thought, the translations may be extremely useful for travellers when they need something safe to drink. Perhaps this should fall into the category "kept for translation purposes only". --Hekaheka 18:52, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I think it is more idiomatic than that, as some dictionaries (Cambridge Advanced Learners, RHU, WordNet) do also. DCDuring TALK 19:01, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• Meh, delete per Prosfilaes. Ƿidsiþ 19:36, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. Implies a commercially produced product, not just a bottle filled with water.--Dmol 20:42, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. It's idiomatic. Much like spring water, mineral water, toilet water and so on. ---> Tooironic 21:43, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• Keep, as per Hekaheka, not 100% sure if it's idiomatic (perhaps it is) but definitely useful. --Anatoli 23:22, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• Keep. - -sche (discuss) 00:46, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
• Delete. (1) There are two claims of idiomaticity here: (a) Bottled water implies "on the market" or similar whereas bottled + water doesn't. But AFAICT it's the bottled that implies "on the market" or similar, as in bottled air. (Any empty bottle is bottled air, but it's only called that when offered for sale.) (b) Tap water is not included in the referent of bottled water. (That is, for some people. Obviously this is not true in generality, since much bottled water on the market is actually bottled tap water.) The evidence offered for this is citations contrasting bottled water with tap water. But, again, I think bottled there means "on the market", and tap water is free. True, tap water's not included in the referent of bottled water, but not because of idiomaticity of bottled water. (2) Arguing against idiomaticity of bottled water is the existence of phrases like "bottled sparkling water", "bottled spring water", and "bottled mineral water".​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:51, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

  But see also Google "sparkling bottled water" (Books • Groups • Scholar), some of the hits for which (in Books) suggest that "bottled water" and/or "sparkling bottled water" are regulatory terms. For other kinds of water apparently with US FDA definitions, see this book.DCDuring TALK 21:55, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

  I'm not seeing a standard of identity for bottled water (though there does seem to be such for some other similar terms). Bottled water is defined at 21 CFR 165.110(a), but that seems to be a definition for use within that section of the CFR rather a standard of identity, and so not inclusible under the rule we've developed for standard of identity (and not inclusible otherwise, either).​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:34, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Even bottled water that is predominantly tap water is rarely ever just a plastic bottle filled with tap water, it is generally, ionized, pasteurized, filtered, and mineralization to an extent. Raw sewer-tap-drinking water is not commonly just bottled and sold in that manner. And also most tap water that gets bottled is at least mixed with 10 or 5% real spring water so it can be marketed as such. WTF is bottled air? Wouldn't an analogy with a real consumer product make a lot more sense?Acdcrocks 03:08, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Bottled water is often not just tap water thrown into a bottle, true. (And sometimes it is.) But that doesn't detract from my argument. As for bottled air, see google:"bottled air". It's an apt analogue IMO: something normally free sold. True, it's sold in fiction more than in fact, but lexically who cares.​—msh210℠ (talk) 08:19, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Not to get too far afield, but I don't think that you could take empty bottles and sell them as "bottled air", nor could you sell bottled air that happened to be oxygen-free. As far as my experience goes, bottled air is always compressed, breathable air, sold in a cannister of some kind, not in a bottle with a cap, like a water bottle or juice bottle. bd2412 T 14:17, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Delete per msh210 (nice work). Mglovesfun (talk) 10:45, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

kept -- Liliana • 14:48, 31 October 2011 (UTC)