Talk:Unsupported titles/:

RFV

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Rfv-sense: (Internet) Represents two eyes vertically aligned, in order to form emoticons.

We do not usually have such "part of" definitions. It'd need cites that show : used on its own to represent two eyes, without being part of a smiley. -- Liliana • 20:17, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

We have letters, Hangul components such as ㄱ and Chinese character components such as 扌. Why not emoticon components? --BenjaminBarrett12 (talk) 00:53, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Keep per BenjaminBarrett12. It's obviously used in forming a range of different emoticons: :-) :-P :-( :-/ :-D etc. (as well as versions without hyphens, and versions written right-to-left). Other marks are sometimes used for eyes as well, as in ;-) and 8-) , and of course other sets of emoticons have completely different conventions, as in ^_^ and -_- and so on, but in the type of emoticon that predominates in the anglophone world, a colon is the "unmarked" representation. Emoticons are not part of language — they're more like paralanguage — but we allow entries for them, so it makes sense to include some of the analogues-of-morphemes that compose them. —Ruakh_TALK 01:48, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Observation: slashes, brackets, colons, and many other characters are used in ASCII art as straight lines, curved lines, speckles, and so on. Equinox ◑ 01:51, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I think the key difference is Iconicity. Colon-for-eyes is obviously not fully conventionalized/arbitrary/iconic, but it's partly so. Compare the following:

Oops! My glasses must have thought it was Sunday. BP

Oops! My glasses must have thought it was Sunday. :P

Which emoticon do you find more decipherable? B is sometimes used for eyes, and it makes sense for someone wearing glasses, but : is the arbitrary conventional icon.

But, y'know what? This has really turned into an RFD discussion. Actually, for that matter, it really started as an RFD discussion: the existing sense, after all, is specifically for the use of colon-for-eyes as part of an emoticon, so it doesn't make sense to RFV it for evidence that it's used not as part of emoticon.

So: move to RFD.

—Ruakh_TALK 13:47, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

moved to RFD -- Liliana • 19:09, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Computing

Not sure whether it's dictionary-worthy, but the colon is also used in computing to separate a protocol name or drive letter from the rest of a resource path, e.g. c:/windows/media/, http://example.com, telnet:cpca4. Equinox ◑ 10:11, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

RFD

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion.

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Unsupported titles/Colon

This was at RFV previously, I'm going to copy the discussion wholesale due to its relevance here:

Unsupported titles/Colon

Rfv-sense: (Internet) Represents two eyes vertically aligned, in order to form emoticons.

We do not usually have such "part of" definitions. It'd need cites that show : used on its own to represent two eyes, without being part of a smiley. -- Liliana • 20:17, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

We have letters, Hangul components such as ㄱ and Chinese character components such as 扌. Why not emoticon components? --BenjaminBarrett12 (talk) 00:53, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Keep per BenjaminBarrett12. It's obviously used in forming a range of different emoticons: :-) :-P :-( :-/ :-D etc. (as well as versions without hyphens, and versions written right-to-left). Other marks are sometimes used for eyes as well, as in ;-) and 8-) , and of course other sets of emoticons have completely different conventions, as in ^_^ and -_- and so on, but in the type of emoticon that predominates in the anglophone world, a colon is the "unmarked" representation. Emoticons are not part of language — they're more like paralanguage — but we allow entries for them, so it makes sense to include some of the analogues-of-morphemes that compose them. —Ruakh_TALK 01:48, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Observation: slashes, brackets, colons, and many other characters are used in ASCII art as straight lines, curved lines, speckles, and so on. Equinox ◑ 01:51, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I think the key difference is Iconicity. Colon-for-eyes is obviously not fully conventionalized/arbitrary/iconic, but it's partly so. Compare the following:

Oops! My glasses must have thought it was Sunday. BP

Oops! My glasses must have thought it was Sunday. :P

Which emoticon do you find more decipherable? B is sometimes used for eyes, and it makes sense for someone wearing glasses, but : is the arbitrary conventional icon.

But, y'know what? This has really turned into an RFD discussion. Actually, for that matter, it really started as an RFD discussion: the existing sense, after all, is specifically for the use of colon-for-eyes as part of an emoticon, so it doesn't make sense to RFV it for evidence that it's used not as part of emoticon.

So: move to RFD.

—Ruakh_TALK 13:47, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

-- Liliana • 19:08, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Kept. No comments here, and RFV comments favoured keeping. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 05:14, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Translingual

These "translingual" examples are English. Not all languages might use the colon in all of these instances. There should be an English entry, and other languages would simply say "all uses" or they'd point out the uses they don't have and add additional ones.

Missing sense in astronomy, other sciences?

See the very end of this video: [1]. The academic says that the colon may be used to indicate that a measurement has no known margin of error (so rather than, say, 200 parsecs plus or minus 5, it's 200 parsecs and they don't know how accurate that is). He says this would be written with colon between number and unit, like "200 : parsecs". Equinox ◑ 23:23, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

RFV discussion: August 2020–January 2023

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Latin: Used to mark abbreviations. Tagged by Der Zeitmeister on 4 August 2020 with also the RFC template (“for more information as . is the usual abbreviation mark - although · does occur in inscriptions as word separator and abbreviation mark too (as in [2], [3])”), not listed.

I created this entry because I found it used in a painting and on a British coin but uses that meet the CFI better, to add as quotations, could probably be found easily. J3133 (talk) 04:45, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

It's common, and is the origin of the Medieval Latin ꝫ siglum (q: or q; are common in MSS. for -que). I don't see the issue with these citations meeting CFI and nobody has challenged them after 2 years, so RFV-passed, though I've also added a reference that mentions it in the medieval context. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:28, 20 January 2023 (UTC)