Help Me Win an Argument

Could also say Wolfram and Tungsten. 

Attorney and lawyer

The problem you'll get with this is a lot of adjectives are used in a hyperbolic / euphemistic (i.e. non-literal) way. So in some contexts, some adjectives might mean different things even if the literal usage is the same. The other problem is the nouns used in different dialects. Airplane / Aeroplane for example. They mean exactly the same thing, don't mean anything else (unlike Hood/Bonnet or Trunk/Boot), but they're used in different dialects.

The common name of an animal and the Latin species name. E.g. Beira antelope and Dorcatragus megalotis

Flammable and inflammable.

The real issue is what do you mean by "exact". What you're referring to is called synonyms. The words convey the same basic concept but they might have slightly different connotations or additional meanings. Yes, a bachelor is an unmarried man, but it comes from the Latin root baccalaureate which was used to describe a young man that finished their initial academic studies and the meaning eventually crept into meaning an unmarried man.

SO many words have the same meaning. There might be other meanings too, of course, but that doesn’t stop them from meaning the same thing. Your friend is just being pedantic // nitpicky and here it looks like they’re just focusing on another meaning of ‘bachelor’ just to be annoying // irritating. BUT if you want to really get them, here’s a couple of different words that have the EXACT same meaning: • Flammable and inflammable (easily set on fire) • Sofa and couch • Pick and choose

from your conversation: u and you  but your friend is equivocating the meanings of words to prove they are different when they are really coincidentally spelled the same

Depends on if you include context of use in what it means to be an exact synonym. There will always be some difference.

fungible exchangeable

Tell your friend to google “synonyms” for me. If they come back with something related to the feel of the word (I.e. fat vs big-boned have different *connotations*), I could interchange hot and cold in context without missing a beat. If you can’t understand how easily we do this with *literal polar opposites* in hot and cold, then you needn’t argue with your ignorant friend anymore. It isn’t your job to relieve them of their ignorance here, that job was assigned to their teachers. A huge amount of dictionary definitions are “word: this is a less common way to say this other word.” I.e *Indelible* meaning permanent, unable to be erased. Example sentence: my daughter’s marker made indelible streaks on my new white couch. Also, bachelor in a college degree is *denotatively* different than being an unmarried man. In regard to the context we were given to answer, that addition is beyond irrelevant.

Blue is correct. Just because they're not interchangeable on all definitions does not mean they can't share a definition. Also, the bachelor in bachelor degree DOES mean unmarried man: >In Latin, “bachelor” is *baccalaureus* (or *baccalarius*). Flattering themselves, medieval scholars thought it came from the phrase *bacca lauri*, which means “laurel berry,” since the bachelor’s degree was a mark of honor, just like the laurel wreath that crowned ancient athletes and poets, as in “poet laureate.” But the true etymology of the word is pretty much unknown; it may have something to do with cows (*vacca* in Latin, where that "v" can sound like "b" in some Romance languages) but that's very suspect. More probably it's related to a land measure in the early Middle Ages called a *baccalaria*, so the peasants who assisted in working it were *baccalarius/ia*. In later medieval use, “bachelor” meant, first, a young knight without land, then later a junior member of a guild. Its sense of “unmarried person” came from the notion that a bachelor was young and inexperienced, just starting out and not yet established, and therefore not apt to be married. In Latin, *universitas* and *collegium* simply meant any organized group; a guild of wool merchants or a guild of bakers could be called a *collegium* or *universitas*, which is why modern colleges and universities are names such; in fact, we still use the word for something like the US electoral college. So the medieval university was essentially a guild of master scholars and their apprentices. In the medieval university, those who gained the bachelor’s degree--a term first appearing in Paris in the 13th-C--were well enough educated to be apprentice teachers but not yet masters. But the origin of the word and its evolution are pretty hazy. EDIT: This explanation is from my old lecture notes, but you can get a more etymologically involved summary of the word from the Oxford English Dictionary entry for "bachelor," which most schools should have available online. Source: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/as5qpg/why\_is\_it\_called\_a\_bachelors\_degree/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/as5qpg/why_is_it_called_a_bachelors_degree/)

Tell your friend to look up "synonyms"

Words don’t have some inherent meaning, and dictionaries are not inherently prescriptive. Words have usages that humans ascribe to them, and dictionaries describe those common usages. In semiotics, words are “signs” that stand in place for some concept. Those referent concepts are arbitrary, so words essentially are whatever we in society agree to use them to mean.

thaw/unthaw is what everyone's been looking for

A bachelor’s degree, etymologically, literally means an unmarried man’s degree. So… In reality every synonym is going to have different connotations or uses even if the dictionary definition is the *exact* same. Like angry, furious, irate, livid. They all mean the same thing on paper, but in reality they convey varying intensities of anger and will evoke a certain sense of that intensity that is probably not exactly the same for everyone. One person might think “livid” is a stronger word than “irate”, and someone else might think the opposite. This is usually because of how the words were contextually learned for each person. That said there are many where the differences are virtually unexplainable. I’d like to see your friend actually explain how “angry” and “furious” don’t mean the same thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor The etymology and history tabs explain this

No, I would say that there is always a subtle distinction between each word, even if they are synonyms. Hell, even the different spellings “grey” vs “gray” carry information about the national origin of the writer.

Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing

fresh one i stole off some other reddit post : disclude and exclude. although the former is considered non-standard, borderline obsolete