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I was amused by, and interested in, this little sign on a water dispenser in a
sandwich shop:

![water dispenser](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vn7aV.jpg)

The options are that you can have ice only, ice and water, or just water.

What intrigued me was that water, `水{みず}`, is preceeded by an honorific `お`,
but ice, `氷{こおり}`, is not.

Both are being served to a customer, so why not `お氷{こおり}`?
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2011-12-28T04:35:29.063
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2012-02-07T01:24:20.970
2011-12-29T16:32:30.320
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question
honorifics bikago
Why is water polite but ice not?
Just conjecturing but based on:

  * tendency for longer expressions to sound more polite

  * みず is two morae

  * こおり is three morae

`こおり` is "one mora more polite" than `みず`. `お` in `おみず` makes it three and so
it compensates for being short and abrupt.

* * *

Also it could just be a rather simple reason being that in isolation, `おみず`
has a higher occurrence than `みず` and `こおり` has a higher occurrence than
`おこおり`. The higher usage one takes precedence due to argumentum ad numerum.
I.e. everyone uses it because everyone uses it more often in the past. So by
extension everyone continues to use the one more commonly observed thereby
enforcing the dominant variation. (I lack the statistics to support this
claim. This is also a conjecture)

* * *

And also, so far **only** `氷とお水` has been considered in **a single** instance.
We are lacking information on:

  1. お氷とお水

  2. お氷と水

  3. 氷と水

I cannot make any definitive conclusion about `氷とお水`. Especially so if any of
the other patterns above are in reality more common than `氷とお水`.
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2011-12-28T12:51:06.907
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I've heard that rice (when cooked and not being used in a curry) has the
honorific ご in ごはん because it is an essential item, i.e. something you can't
live without. Perhaps the same is true of water.

Ice, on the other hand, is not an essential, and presumably wouldn't have had
enough time in the language to get any honorific prefix anyway.

**Edit:** I probably heard about this from
[お-Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese#Prefix_usage):

> There are some words which frequently or always take these prefixes,
> regardless of who is speaking and to whom; these are often ordinary items
> which may have particular cultural significance, such as tea (o-cha) and
> rice (go-han). The word meshi, the Japanese equivalent of Sino-Japanese go-
> han, is considered rough and masculine (男性語).
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2011-12-29T20:40:10.763
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answer
The reason is fairly simple, but probably not going to going to be as pattern
based as you would hope.

お[水]{みず} is an example of a segment of Japanese known as [美化語]{びかご}, this is
more or less means being more polite by using a nicer sounding word.

Some example of this are

[食]{た}べる instead of [食]{く}う

[美味]{おい}しい instead of [旨]{うま}い

お[昼]{ひる} instead of [昼]{ひる}

These words are all set, they don't really follow a set pattern other than
many of them start with お.

The source of your confusion probably comes from the fact that お～ is also used
a prefix to honor other people's things/actions. In the case of [美化語]{びかご} you
aren't honoring anything directly.

So to get back to question of 氷 is written as just 氷 because there is no
politer set alternative.
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2012-02-07T01:24:20.970
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