I too find this thread frustrating. So I just to try to answer your question.Stephen Hughes wrote: Does anyone know or have a way to know whether the action described by κακοῦν / κάκωσις refers to (a) brief or (b) protracted bouts of bad things happening?
I am hoping that someone has come to a conclusion about this point from their own way of discovering nuance and meaning can share their conclusion.![]()
Based on my instinct I would say that the lexemes themselves don't imply one or another. It's mainly about semantics / encyclopedic knowledge interface. Pure abstracted semantic meaning is always limited and the final understanding comes by attaching encyclopedic knowledge (knowledge about the real world, how things are, work and happen etc.) to it. I personally tend to underinterprete language rather than overinterprete. Therefore I would say that those actions mentioned are expressed just as happening, not as brief or protracted, but just that they happened. To fill in the gap between semantics and real world you have to know the real world. If you don't know something, you have to stick to what is expressed. You can't load words with semantics they don't have. You find out the semantics by the normal procedure: find examples where something is clearly part of the semantics, brought in by the lexeme itself, not context. So, do your have any unambiguous examples where the distinction between (a) and (b) must be semantic, not contextual? Or do lexicons imply such distinction?
(So you have here both my conclusion and reasoning.)
(EDIT: the questions can be taken to be rhetorical, nobody has to answer them.)