Talk:KJV-onlyer

RFV discussion: April–May 2020

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KJV-onlyer

"Someone who asserts that the King James Version of the Bible is superior to all other English translations." Equinox ◑ 20:14, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I see some ghits for “KJV-onlier” and orthographic variants (no hyphen/lower case).^[1]  --Lambiam 06:20, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Cited from Usenet. – Einstein2 (talk) 21:16, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 21:35, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

RFD discussion: August 2020–May 2021

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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KJV-onlyer

The new relevant entry is at onlyer; Usenet evidence suggests there are many other couplings one could use with onlyer, such as "weekend-onlyer" meaning someone who does not do things on weekdays, "movie-onlyer" meaning someone who only watches movies as opposed to books or TV shows(?), and even "Quran onlyer" which is also a religious context. While "KJV-onlyer" seems to be the most common out of all of them, I still think we shouldn't keep it because it's SOP according to the new entry. PseudoSkull (talk) 23:00, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

• Delete. Given the definition of onlyer it is sum of parts. At onlyer the sole definition begins (by extension) which suggests something before it has been deleted. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 23:17, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
• Question. Is the suffix -onlyer attestably applied to other entities than the KJV?  --Lambiam 09:20, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

  Looks like KJV onlyer is the most frequent use of -onlyer, but I also found quran onlyers, analog onlyers, RVR-onlyers (in comparsion to KJV), pogo onlyers, anime-onlyers and others. Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 09:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

  Note that none of these uses meet our requirements for attestation.  --Lambiam 21:23, 6 August 2020 (UTC)}

• Keep. An attestable word, may well be the only word where the usage of -onlyer is attestable. Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 09:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

• Much as I hate to break up this party, I think everyone has the analysis wrong: -er may be attached to "only", but it's modifying the entire phrase. This can theoretically be done with any phrase, but in practice it would generally only work for phrases where [x] is the phrase and it can be plausibly substituted in the formula: "There are two kinds of people in the world, those who say '[x]' and those who don't." In other words, it has to be recognizable as a phrase associated with a known group or class of people. As an example, among RFDers one could say we have the SOPers squared off against the COALMINErs and set-phrasers.

I think the term onlyer should probably be deleted, because it's just a coincidence that some phrases with -er tacked on happen to end with "only". Yes, -er is part of the spelling of the last word in the phrase, but that's also true of -'s in "Fred and Doris' 29th anniversary". We're dealing with a clitic here, and dictionaries don't handle clitics very well. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:48, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Note: see also firster, which also suffers from the same mis-analysis. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:59, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

How does the "(KJV-only)-er" analysis, in your opinion, relate to the deletion request under discussion?  --Lambiam 21:27, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

The "onlyer" analysis was a convenient shortcut to proving this as SOP, but it's not the only way. Basically the clitic modifies the entire phrase, but it doesn't keep the phrase it modifies from being SOP. All the phrase has to do to be used in such a construction is summarize a particular viewpoint or school of thought in a memorable way, or be associated with the same by some accident of history- it's all very random and non-lexical. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:51, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

You make a thought-provoking point. Poking around, I also see a few hits for "faith-aloners", and for "second-amendmenters", "first amendmenters" and "fifth-amendmenters". OTOH, my initial feeling is that we should cover such things at "word" entries (i.e. not just at the suffix entry -er but at either onlyer or KJV-onlyer, and either "amendmenter" or "second-amendmenter", etc, depending on how many kinds of "onlyer", "amendmenter", etc there are), because... well, is there any other situation—aside from possessives, which are broken into recognizable parts by apostrophes (though see the BP re obsolete ones)—where we don't include an attested solidspelled (unspaced, unhyphenated) English word and instead expect readers to figure out to break it into parts on their own? - -sche (discuss) 07:45, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

If we analyze it as ending with -er then we keep it because not all the components have spaces or hyphens between them. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:51, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Weak delete if there are other attested kinds of "onlyer", which there seem to be (I see one citation on Citations:onlyer for bare "onlyer"), whereas if this is the only attested kind of onlyer, then weak keep. - -sche (discuss) 07:45, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

It appears that you are an on the fencer.  --Lambiam 12:12, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Keep, the other onlyers seem rare as hen's teeth and this may well be includible per the jiffy test. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 17:54, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

• Keep. An aside: Unless there's "ye" and "thou" in it, how can they even call it a bible? ;-) -- Dentonius (my politics | talk) 17:24, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Due to User:Chuck Entz's points above, I'm changing my vote to keep (even though he used the same reasoning to want the entry deleted). As it modifies the entire phrase, and onlyer cannot be separated as a lexical entity in this situation, you can't deduce the meaning of it unless you know of the suffix. KJV only is SOP, but KJV only + -er is not. PseudoSkull (talk) 03:08, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

One concern I have, which I'm not sure what to do about ( I'm not sure if this is an argument to delete these entries, or to keep them, or is immaterial), is that not only this but other suffixes function decently broadly, e.g. you can take a multi-word phrase and add "-ist" or "-ism" and form e.g. Donald Trumpist (but maybe that's an entry we want to consider idiomatic; we do have Donald Trumpian), google:"America Firstists" (compare America Firster, whereas Talk:Israel firster is no more), google:"Green New Dealism", etc, besides the examples I pointed to above of "faith-aloners", and for "second-amendmenters", "first amendmenters" and "fifth-amendmenters". Maybe all these are idiomatic and fine. I am, as I said above, more inclined to cover them on some word entry than to expect people to figure out to strip off -er. - -sche (discuss) 21:13, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

• Keep. Taking a step back, I would say this certainly satisfies the CFI golden rule. "A term should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means." I agree with Chuck that onlyer is based on an incorrect analysis, and should be deleted. Colin M (talk) 00:07, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Kept. bd2412 T 06:54, 14 May 2021 (UTC)