The expression room temperature is ambiguous between a conventional reading (about 20°C) and an actual description of the surrounding environment. In the concordance for room temperature, reproduced below, can you find any lines in which this ambiguity is made explicit?
Concordance for room temperature
Read the concordance carefully, then click the button below.
Here is what we came up with:
1
bring red wine to room temperature i.e. maximum 18 C. Higher than 20 C is unacceptable
2
Most people serve red wines at actual room temperature, 21-24°C, which can make some red wines
3
(except Port), and a few light-bodied reds. 65ºF= (Room temperature) red wines and port.
Lines 1 and 3 suggest that the expression is being used in its conventional meaning, and that the author wants to make sure the reader understands this. Notice:
... room temperature i.e. maximum 18 C...
... 65ºF= (Room temperature)...
The author of line 2, on the other hand, does exactly the opposite, i.e. s/he uses the expression to mean "the surrounding temperature", and to make sure the reader understands this writes:
... actual room temperature, 21-24°C...
At this point, we hypothesise that "actual room temperature" could in fact be a synonym of ambient temperature, i.e. the latter could unambiguously designate the temperature of the surrounding environment; Unfortunately, we cannot investigate this point further using our corpus, as it only contains 2 occurrences of this phrase...
