Talk:Mona Lisa

RFV

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Mona Lisa

Rfv-sense: Any piece of art that is exceptional. In the example sentence It's a pretty picture, but it's no Mona Lisa., it seems to refer to the actual Mona Lisa, not a countable common noun. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:55, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Really? If it was referring to the actual Mona Lisa, surely the structure would be: it's not a Mona Lisa? ---> Tooironic 22:15, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

I would think "it's not a Mona Lisa" would be a clear example of "any piece of art that is exception", like *"she was speaking a German" is "she was speaking a German dialect or language, such as Plattdeutsch", whereas "he was speaking German" means he was speaking the actual language. I think the actual Mona Lisa would be "it's not the Mona Lisa", and I'm divided on whether "it's no Mona Lisa" genericises it or not. - -sche (discuss) 22:26, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

It's no Mona Lisa strikes me (a layman) as referring to the actual Mona Lisa. The construction exceedingly productive ("he's good at putting the right punctuation in his sentences, but he's no Victor Borge" etc.).​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:08, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

IMHO it seems to be in line with ..., but he's no Einstein. type of comment, which makes the current Mona Lisa entry OK for me. -- ALGRIF talk 12:06, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Can "Mona Lisa" be used in a positive sentence as synonym to "a piece of art that is exceptional", like saying: "Mark Rothko's No. 61 (Rust and Blue) is a Mona Lisa"? If it cannot, I'd suggest that the term to be defined is not really "Mona Lisa" but "not a Mona Lisa" or "no Mona Lisa", which mean "not an exceptional piece of art". --Hekaheka 23:37, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Btw, in Elton John's "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" Mona Lisa definitely means something else than "exceptional piece of art". --Hekaheka 16:55, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

{{look}}

Well, RFV-failed for now, because it's uncited. - -sche (discuss) 02:46, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

RFD

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I would keep the Mona Lisa if, as I suspect, much figurative usage of "Mona Lisa" can be found. ("Has [overly-acclaimed artist] painted another Mona Lisa?" is unlikely to be asking if the artist has made a copy of the old painting, it's likely asking if she has produced a work that shos comparable talent and is comparably valuable / culturally significant.) - -sche 22:18, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

• I would want to keep as translation targets all that have foreign names distinct from the English names (not counting mere transliterations into other writing systems). That appears to be all of these except Guerrillero Heroico. —Angr 22:15, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

  All of these except Guerrillero Heroico? "Mona Lisa" is "Mona Lisa", "Mona Liza", "Μόνα Λίζα", etc. (French also refers to it as "La Joconde", but does no more to make it a dictionary entry, IMO, than the various insulting nicknames Latin America has for George W. Bush do to make [[George W. Bush]] a dictionary entry.) - -sche (discuss) 19:50, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

  And Italian calls it La Gioconda. Sounds like dictionary-appropriate information to me. —Angr 20:10, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

  Italy has other names for Bush, too. Is [[George W. Bush]] dictionary-appropriate? - -sche (discuss) 20:17, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

  They have other nicknames for him, they don't have a different name for him. A better example would be [[John Paul II]] and [[Benedict XVI]], both of whom do have different names in different languages, though our entries [[John]], [[Paul]], and [[Benedict]] probably suffice for that. —Angr 20:47, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

I would want to delete the specific proper names of buildings and/or works (all already well detailed at Wikipedia): Arc de Triomphe, Chopsticks, Guerrillero Heroico, Hansel and Gretel, Jabberwocky (but keep the unnominated adjective jabberwocky, which is a generic word), Leaning Tower of Pisa, Mona Lisa, Romeo and Juliet, Star Trek, Venus de Milo. Equinox ◑ 21:56, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

• Keep as having translations that cannot be guessed from the English term: French: la Joconde, Italian: la Gioconda. Furthermore, the English pronunciation may be unclear, although that rationale may lend itself to including a vast number of names of works, which I am unsure is a good thing. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:04, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
• Keep: per Polansky Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 17:05, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Kept. bd2412 T 01:00, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

RFD discussion: June–October 2024

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Mona Lisa

Do we need artworks? Inqilābī 05:40, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Keep. The entry contains evidence of widespread figurative use. Plus, exceptionally, it meets WT:THUB. This, that and the other (talk) 09:21, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, keep for figurative uses and translations - A Mona Lisa smile. In any case, works of art can be used to illustrate senses. I did this with Erin. DonnanZ (talk) 11:29, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

If there are figurative senses, then these should be made explicit in the definitions. Mihia (talk) 14:20, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Delete unless/until figurative senses are added. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 07:54, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Delete unless at least one figurative sense is added. Also, the addition of such a figurative sense does not, in my view, justify the inclusion of any non-figurative sense—that should be mentioned in the etymology. — Sgconlaw (talk) 17:45, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

There are figurative senses already included in the quotations, which are probably what User:This, that and the other was referring to. DonnanZ (talk) 18:19, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

• Let me say also that allowing the pattern "the Mona Lisa of ~" as a qualifying "figurative" use does seem to open the door to large numbers of proper nouns and names of unique things that can be used in this pattern: "The Citizen Kane of video games", even "The Gettysburg Address of Baseball". Mihia (talk) 21:05, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, on reflection I may have been a bit generous to call these "figurative" uses. I'll try and add some other uses which justify keeping the sense. This, that and the other (talk) 23:46, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

  I've added a few quotes from texts which make an allusion to the Mona Lisa, specifically, the smile (but I am sure there is more out there). A number of them assume the reader knows what the Mona Lisa is and make no sense if you don't, such as:

  • 2020, Michael Shenk, Always A Brother, page 108:

    It was all enhanced by Melissa's thin smile as she continued working like a Mona Lisa on Red Bull.

    [the context is a car repair shop; no further reference to Mona Lisa in the text; if you didn't know what the Mona Lisa looked like, you wouldn't realise that the allusion was embellishing the description of Melissa's smile]

  • 1972, John Newton Chance, The dead tale-tellers, page 111:

    She let him take it and sat on, smiling very faintly. It was a Mona Lisa effort.

  • 1966, Paul Ritchie, The Protagonist, page 197:

    " […] but I'll take a guess and say you killed the animal in yerself a long time ago," and shrewdly he studied Honey's answering smile to see if it read contempt. But no. Its language for him had no meaning. He was a Mona-Lisa man.

  I find the general thrust of WT:Criteria for inclusion/Brand names useful here, even though this is not a brand name. This, that and the other (talk) 00:10, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

It is very difficult to know how and where to draw the line with these. I can find quotations mentioning "like Nelson's Column" that make no sense unless one knows that this is a tall monument. I can find references to "a Gerald Ratner moment" that make no sense unless one knows that he famously denigrated his own company. So should we have entries for Nelson's Column and Gerald Ratner too? Mihia (talk) 23:10, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

@Mihia Seems like we could have an entry for Gerald Ratner moment then, no? Having said that though, I take your point - the line needs to be drawn somewhere - but I believe we ought to figure out where to draw one, rather than just throwing up our hands and deleting potentially useful (and, may I add, very long-standing) content. This, that and the other (talk) 11:07, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, or any number of more and more obviously SOP strings, like if I say some food "made me react like George Bush in Tokyo", you don't know whether this means I reacted with childlike glee and delight, or horrible aversion, or what, unless you know the history of George Bush in Tokyo... but that doesn't mean we need an entry on George Bush in Tokyo. I am sceptical of accepting the citations which have currently been provided, since the number of works which occur in citations of that form seems very large. But perhaps I am being too exclusionary, and we should, in fact, have lots of work names. I can also find "the Harry Potter of the social sciences", "the Harry Potter of shows", "the Harry Potter of Rolling Stone movies", "her Harry Potter glasses" (then again, we do already have an entry on Harry Potter the fictional character and book, which seems like it should be RFDed, based on our tendency to delete both work titles and full names of people, even fictional people); "the Starship Troopers of Democratic Senate campaigns", "the Mein Kampf of the euthanasia movement", google books:"the Dante's Inferno of" ... - -sche (discuss) 00:41, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

The fundamental question is, where do we draw the line between words in the English lexicon and cultural knowledge? The quotes I gave above use the name in interesting and often quite subtle ways that are more like a word - a common noun - than a proper name. I see these as evidence that Mona Lisa - at least our current sense 2 - has "entered the lexicon" (to borrow a phrase from WT:BRAND).

@-sche, I'd actually argue for having dictionary entries for many of the names you point to - these are major, culturally significant works of literature that are often used as common points of reference and comparison, and if the use of the names in this way can be backed up by evidence, it would be clear that the names of these works have entered the lexicon. One argument in favour of this is that encyclopedia articles on these works give much more detail than is needed to understand the meaning the author is conveying. (I had never heard of "Starship Troopers" until now, and the opening paragraphs of the Wikipedia article do nothing to help me understand the pertinent characteristic of the Senate campaign.) We can do much better with succinct dictionary entries. This, that and the other (talk) 01:47, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, having seen Starship Troopers, I did not understand what the cite was saying about the Senate campaign either — staffers bonded while campaigning, and killed bugs? — until I read the Wikipedia article, from which I infer (based also on the surrounding text in the cite) it's saying the campaign was a flop and was seen as endorsing fascism. - -sche (discuss) 03:38, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

The number and variety of possible cultural references is huge, almost amounting to full encyclopedic knowledge. It seems to me that there is a tendency for people to want to include especially famous or important entities, such as the Mona Lisa, while excluding less known entities, for which, nevertheless, it may be possible to find exactly the same kind of citations. To explain this, it seems to me that some kind of notability criterion is needed, which, as far as I know, does not presently exist anywhere in Wiktionary, beyond the three citations requirement. We include rare and obscure general words, and yet presumably not proper names supported by obscure cultural references? Mihia (talk) 09:08, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Tentatively I would suggest looking for three (or maybe six, if three is not felt to be enough) cites where the entity's name is used metaphorically ("an X moment" etc), not as a straightforward simile ("like X") or comparison ("the X of..."), and with no explanation of the metaphor (so not "her Mona Lisa smile was enigmatic as ever") or immediate contextual clues (use of "Mona Lisa" in a text on art or Italian history would not count). Too low a bar to clear? This, that and the other (talk) 11:07, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Even "an X moment" seems worryingly ubiquitous. I can easily find "a Ronald Reagan moment", "a David Beckham moment", "a Frank Sinatra moment" etc. etc., seemingly for almost any figure that one has heard of. Mihia (talk) 14:32, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

It's worth noting that "the X of" type citations are explicitly given at Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion/Fictional universes as an example of usable citations in that context. That page, which was voted on, says that a citation using the phrase "the Darth Vader of Japanese baseball" is a valid use of Darth Vader for CFI purposes, even though it originates in a fictional universe which is subject to WT:FICTION. It would be a perverse outcome to delete Mona Lisa, a real entity, but keep Darth Vader, a fictional one. This, that and the other (talk) 08:52, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Keep. This the accepted name of a famous painting, so "Mona Lisa" counts as a real term. For comparison, there is the Wiktionary article "Stone Mountain", a name which may refer to a carving or Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. Solomonfromfinland (talk) 18:13, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

There is no doubt that it is "real term". No one would say otherwise. The question here is whether it is a dictionary term or just an encyclopedic term. Mihia (talk) 18:54, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

@Solomonfromfinland: also, the comparison with Stone Mountain is not a very good one, because we have a specific policy dealing with place names which permits such entries. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:05, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

• Since there are still no actual figurative definitions, Delete. Mihia (talk) 20:36, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

• Kept with {{rfdef}}. Denazz (talk) 18:01, 11 October 2024 (UTC)