Well, this may come as a surprise to many but if your vitamin sirup is expired, you can actually pour it into your plants. True; such sirups with vitamins serve as the best fertilizers. I do that. However, I'm not here to prove this point. My question is related to the English language.
I know 'water' as a verb.
Water the plants
But then, I want to instruct my daughter about giving water to some and sirup to others. How do I say that?
Water the first two plants with water and rest with sirups?
I mean…"Water the plant with water" -does it work? If not, what are the other way to address my concern?
Best Answer
Your first guess:
is perfect (except you need "the" before "rest").
As a verb, "to water plants" can stretch to refer to substances other than water.
Another example of the same thing is that you might say "Let's go out for coffee" when you have no intention of drinking coffee. Maybe you'll get tea, maybe some weird new drink they're selling, or maybe even just a cup of water along with a sandwich. "Coffee" is good enough to suggest the location: probably a coffeehouse.
ODO, American Heritage, Macmillan, Collins, and Wiktionary don't list the possibility of using "water" as a verb for substances other than water. This is because dictionaries can't give much idea of how far is reasonable to stretch a word from its primary meaning. One important reason why "to water plants" can stretch so easily to cover other substances is because there isn't any competing verb with a closer meaning.
Here are a few examples from gardening books.
On the other hand, this sounds weird:
Since the primary meaning of "to water plants" is to give them water, this sounds redundant in a way that suggests that there might be a misunderstanding. For this sentence to make sense, there needs to be some context that establishes that watering the plants with something other than water is an idea up for discussion. The first sentence has that: it distinguishes between watering with water and watering with syrup.
By the way, I wrote "syrup" because it's more standard in American English (my native language), so I feel more comfortable with that spelling, but "sirup" is well represented in dictionaries, too.