Talk:am I right or am I right

Deletion discussion

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am I right or am I right

(This discussion should not influence or be influenced by the discussion above.)

I believe this is a snowclone and should be moved to the appendix. Any adjective can be used: "Am I awesome or am I awesome?", "Am I hot or am I hot?", etc. --WikiTiki89 13:54, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

• Appendicize per WikiTiki. bd2412 T 14:30, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
• Keep. Unexpectedly common (google:"am I right or am I right", google books:"am I right or am I right"); peculiar to English, since we don't say this in Czech. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:54, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
• Keep: It's easily attestible. I'd also take issue with the assertion that any adjective is used this way; most adjectives either don't make sense when you do it, or aren't used that way often enough. Purplebackpack89 14:39, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
• Keep. Here are some counts: google books:"am i awesome or am i awesome" has 0 hits, google books:"am i hot or am i hot" has 7 hits, google books:"am i great or am i great" has 1 hit, google books:"am i wonderful or am i wonderful" has 1 hit, google books:"am i gorgeous or am i gorgeous" has 2 hits, google books:"am i smart or am i smart" has 8 hits, google books:"am i brilliant or am i brilliant" has 10 hits, google books:"am i wrong or am i wrong" has 7 hits, but one doesn't count. In contrast, the mother google books:"am i right or am i right" has 59,100 hits, including two book titles. So a snowclone appendix makes sense, but the primordial instance should not be buried. Choor monster (talk) 17:08, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

  To be fair, you chose some of the worst examples. google books:"am i good or am i good" gets 494 hits, for example. --WikiTiki89 17:23, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

  I see that some fave fallen for the Google-counts-are-good-enough-for-Wiktionary-work fallacy. Without looking at whether any of the books reported as containing the passage actually contain it, I counted the pages (30 books each in my setup) that have "am I right or am I right". There were 22, the last with fewer than 30. IOW, there are more likely fewer than 700 hits for "am I right or am I right". That takes much of the force away from the relative frequency argument. DCDuring TALK 18:09, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

  OTOH, "am I good or am I good" has 48 hits, a much smaller relative reduction, but very much fewer than "am I right or am I right". OTT(hird)H, Choo monsterr's count yields 35 more and aggregating all possible adjectives would probably yield more, perhaps getting the total above 100. DCDuring TALK 18:16, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

  That'd be 97 more than we need. Purplebackpack89 20:22, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

  We need three to show that a word exists, but the number of hits does not necessarily show idiomacity. A search for "the weather in London" and "your shoes are untied" get hundreds of hits each. bd2412 T 20:28, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

  I have not fallen for any fallacy here. I added numerous citations, so there is no question of WT:CFI as such. I think the SOP question, parallel to the "am I right" above discussion, is a non-starter. So the only question is what this thing is and where do we put it. Wikitiki has proposed that it should be recast as a snowclone. He is 100% correct that it is a snowclone, as the above hits I identified prove (and I did not just look at the numbers, I checked the texts). But the comparative Google Book hits just makes it seem obvious that the version with "right" stands out head and shoulders above the other versions, so it is not merely a snowclone, and belongs in main entry space. As a bonus, the quality of some of the cites is fantastic.

  My earlier hunt for "am I right" cites ran into numerous SOP non-rhetorical examples, and I had to rely on special tricks to find rhetorical cites. Choor monster (talk) 20:54, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

  @Purplebackpack89 This is an RfD discussion, not an RfV.

@Choor monster It is the relative-frequency argument that you made that I am addressing. You put the 59,100 raw Google Books number forward, to which I strongly object, it being off by a factor of about 85.

There are many snow-clone-type constructions that have similar characteristics with one set of occupants of the slot(s) being much more common than others. In this case there are three slots: 1., the adjective slot occupied by right, 2., the nominal slot occupied by I, and 3., the slot occupied by am. The last slot I'd be willing to stipulate is a copula, but could have a change of tense, while remaining in agreement with the nominal slot occupant. I believe that this expression exists with relatively high frequency in the past tense "Was I right or was I right" as well as with other nominals and some other adjectives. It just seems readily decodable in any of its forms and is far from being a set expression. It is, as the nom said, a snowclone or a construction. I'd be inclined to appendicize it. When I consider all the English entries that have no translations and all the glosses for FL terms that rely on highly polysemic words with no further gloss, I am surprised that folks find the the need to fill Wiktionary with this kind of entry. DCDuring TALK 03:44, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Because we do not rely on Google hit counts, I see no point in trying to figure out what the true number of unique hits is. I also take it for granted that we all know the numbers are inflated. So I completely miss what point you are making in regards to the hit count. "am I right or am I right" is much more common than a handful of variants, where "right" is altered. I take it for granted that we all agree with this, and the discussion is what do we do with this fact, and not try to actually quantify it.

For the record, google books:"was i right or was i right" returned 5560 hits, the first two were prominent authors (Lawrence Block, Nick Hornby). google books:"is he right or is he right" returned 3 hits, one of which is no good, and google books:"was he right or was he right" returned 5 hits, including, interestingly enough, a 1944 hit, 30 years before the earliest "am I right or am I right" hit that I found.

I am totally mystified by your concern about this kind of entry. We're documenting what twists and turns language has taken, with constraints regarding SOP and durability. Object to this entry on such grounds. Most of the snowclones, by the way, are clearly SOP. "To X or not to X", "I'm an X, not a Y", "you had me at X". Cuteness isn't grounds for inclusion: the instances of "we're off to sue the wizard" and "we're off to see the lizard" I've seen have all been SOP. But "am I right or am I right?" has an extra rhetorical non-SOP edge: despite appearances, it's a bald assertion, not an actual query. Choor monster (talk) 12:47, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Google counts are relatively accurate for small numbers of hits, but increasingly inaccurate for larger raw counts. For intermediate counts (like 56K) it is not too tedious to get an improved count. Clearly you are making arguments based on relative frequency, so quantitative estimates that are roughly right, though not precise, matter. My mind has not been made up, so I was actually trying to get facts that were not being provided by all those who have made up their minds. If one form of a construction/snowclone is overwhelmingly more common, some tend call it a "set phrase", thereby justifying its inclusion. That is the import of the relative-frequency argument concerning the individual slots in the construction.

I suppose that we are gradually moving toward a practice of including protypical snowclones, no matter how transparent they are. I like to try to be explicit, transparent about such emerging policies, instead of relying on assumptions about implicit premises. Assumptions, at least those that I make, are often wrong. I'm not at all sure that this is a good idea.

This construction's transparency is based on the simple semantics of the logic of being given what is obviously not a real choice by the speaker. The implication is perfectly obvious to anyone past childhood. Delete. DCDuring TALK 14:53, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

• Although it has just been closed as kept, I want to add a point that has just occurred to me, as it may be about what's actually going on. All our definitions of or, and those in other dictionaries I've looked up, assume the two disjuncts are distinct. The most common word I've seen in several dictionaries involves the presentation of an alternative. Only mathematicians and their close friends mormally allow the two disjuncts to be identical.
• In other words, as everybody defines "or", the phrase "am I right or am I right" literally makes no sense, like the Chomsky classic "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Yet we all know what it means. We would have no trouble understanding the following dialogue: "Come on, wake up!" "Mmmffmmmf" "Wakey wakey!" "Bbbpbbp" "Are you sleeping in this morning or are you sleeping in this morning?" "Rrrrk" The "or" here is a parody of the usual "or", a marker of sarcasm.
• The issue is really what to make of the tautological "or", compounded by the fact that in English, it's close to non-existent outside of "am I right or am I right". Choor monster (talk) 19:13, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

  The point has been made that this intentional misuse of "or" is not unique to this phrase. It's kind of like heads I win, tails you lose. However, the community has more or less spoken, so the point it moot. bd2412 T 19:56, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

  I think the definitions of or are technically wrong to make such an implication (don't forget that definitions are approximations of the true meaning, rather than the other way around). However, I think it is ok to sacrifice technical correctness for practical clarity. --WikiTiki89 20:54, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

  I'm not saying change existing definitions of "or", but perhaps there should be a new one, marked as sarcastic/rhetorical? I'm not too comfortable with that if the only examples are "am I right or am I right" and its close variations. Choor monster (talk) 21:05, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

  Just about any word can be used sarcastically in context - for example, saying "great singing" to someone who is obviously tone deaf and screechy. bd2412 T 21:13, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

  Of course. But this sarcastic/tautological "or" is highly unusual in that the non-sarcastic reading literally makes no sense. Choor monster (talk) 21:40, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 16:00, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I just heard another of the (rare?) cases that support a snowclone interpretation: "Are we calm or are we calm?" (in Fargo S1E8). Equinox ◑ 03:38, 25 May 2018 (UTC)