Can anyone explain synonyms to me?

[Bkwrm]

Came up in discussion the other day with a friend and realised I don't understand what these are in a KS2 context.

According to a friend's daughter (and her school books from last year that she showed me as "proof"), pour and drizzle are synonyms. Admittedly GCSE English was a while ago but I would have said that they meant totally different things! Maybe that both were synonyms of rain but not of each other.

Another example was torn and frayed. These aren't the same thing, surely?

Can any kind mumsnetter explain it to me?

The torn edge/the frayed edge
Pour maple syrup over the pancake/drizzle maple syrup over the pancake

I guess they are not brilliant examples as it could be argued that they mean different things.

They are words that basically mean the same in a particular context. If you looked at a piece of cloth you might describe it as having a torn edge or a frayed edge. They don't have to be strictly identical, just that they can be used in the same way (i.e. pouring icing or drizzling icing).

In a cooking/paint context pour and drizzle could be synonyms.

The words don't have to mean exactly the same thing, just give the gist.

Torn/frayed might be good synonyms if you want only one word to describe an old/distressed pair or jeans. Or you could use both, to highlight the particular pattern of wear.

Synonyms are words that loosely mean the same thing. Of course each individual word has its own nuisanced meaning, but synonyms are more broad, e.g. Angry/furious/livid/fuming

I guess it was just overly loose to me - the distinction between those words would matter to me. Indiana's angry words I would agree meant roughly the same thing. Possibly/ probably not everyone would agree on which ones were close enough in meaning though and I may be in a minority here. Now I just need to think of a way to explain it to my rules loving son.

Just tell him they are words meaning similar things. Similar doesn't need to be exactly the same. Get him to swap the words around and if the sentence is still saying the basically same thing he's used a synonym.

Or let his teacher explain it on school...

Synonyms are words that mean the same. Antonyms are words that have opposite meanings.

Pour and drizzle would very rarely be synonyms, but it is certainly possible, however I think they're a poor example.

Pour normally has suggestion of a significant amount of quantity, or at least a stream of it. Whereas drizzle has the exact opposite, pouring and drizzling are common discriminators in types of rain, which wouldn't be understood if they were synonyms.

So very rarely, and only really in a sense where the amount of the thing you were pouring was known - so it would work in a recipe perhaps. Pour the limoncello over the cake - drizzle the limoncello of the cake, but I can't see it working elsewhere.

Anyway, the discussion on how synonyms can fail will be good way of discussing it with your rules based son, I'm sure he'll enjoy finding ways that the rules are broken.

It really depends on context the words are being used

Pour
1flow rapidly - in this case drizzle would not be a synonym
2cause a liquid to flow from a container - in this case drizzle would be a synonym
3 express feelings in an unrestrained manner - clearly drizzle isn't a synonym

Mmm, yes ok. Think I more or less get it - a good way to get DS using the dictionary more maybe! Thanks guys.

A good thesaurus perhaps?

Pour and drizzle is a poor example IMO.