Talk:bad-looking

RFD discussion: October 2019–April 2020

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

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bad-looking

SOP. See also Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/June § bad-looking. Canonicalization (talk) 13:15, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

My only objection with deleting this entry is that the bad in bad-looking really only ever refers to one specific sense of bad apart from all of the others--the one being "unfavourable, not good" as it pertains to appearance. Thus bad-looking means "not good-looking/unattractive". It never means "appearing as though one would be mischievous or inclined to misbehave (i.e. "be bad")" as in "I don't want to adopt that child...that child is bad-looking" (= that child looks as though he/she would never listen to me, i.e. that child looks like they're always going to act like a bad kid). Nor does it ever mean "appearing evil" as in "yeah, that guy is a really bad-looking guy" (= that guy looks as though he would do you harm due to his hateful or evil nature); same with bad-looking food, it's not food that is evidently unhealthy to the eye, it's food that is simply unattractive and unappealing. So although bad-looking is technically SoP, one wouldn't know instinctively which sense of bad is meant, and thus would not know the meaning without the entry to expound on it. We need to keep it for that reason alone imo. Leasnam (talk) 07:17, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Yes, keep, although I looked askance at it. DonnanZ (talk) 10:46, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

• RFD-kept: no consensus to delete. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:22, 18 April 2020 (UTC)