Talk:brick

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brick

Verb senses. --Connel MacKenzie 21:46, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

• bricking it is certainly used in the UK. I'm not certain that its used in other tenses though ("I'm bricking it" / "I was bricking it") Thryduulf 22:03, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Meaning "to enclose a building with bricks?" Or one of the ones given? --Connel MacKenzie 00:57, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
    • No, the meaning is the current second verb definition "(slang) To be a high state of anxiety: "Bricking it"". I think this should be at "bricking it", not "brick" though. I wouldn't be surprised if its origin is a euphemism for "shitting it". It might also be related to "shit a brick". Thryduulf 12:46, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

• Well, to brick up means to block an opening with brickwork. The other senses are unknown to me. SemperBlotto 08:26, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

The third definition was recently used in a Homestar cartoon, and I have definitely heard it elsewhere. --Bran 04:20, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

• "to render non-functional, and usually non-repairable": --kop 04:36, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
  • http://groups.google.com/group/24hoursupport.helpdesk/browse_thread/thread/3c9f76e5f922e29e/de047d04065f84c0?lnk=st&q=bricked+flash+group%3Acomp.*#de047d04065f84c0
  • http://www.linux.com/feature/122786
  • http://www.applegazette.com/iphone/apple-is-looking-for-a-iphone-flash-file-system-engineer-flash-on-iphone-confirmed/ (See comment #5)

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brick

Maning: "a term of endearment for someone who did you a favor". At the least it require some tag, but I have no idea whatsoever which one. Circeus 18:44, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

That is correct, searching for "you're a brick" should bring citable results (I'll look momentarily). As for the tag, it's certainly {{informal}} and {{dated}}, I don't know whether it needs a {{UK}} as well though? Thryduulf 19:09, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Correct, and quite old. --Dmol 21:24, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

That's enough for me, thank you people. Circeus 01:56, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

RfV February 2013

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Sense: "To be in a high state of anxiety or fright." That regional slang tag is so useful I was going to take it to the tea room, but decided that either it can be cited (which would help us put a region there) or it can't, and we should just delete it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:49, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

That's brick it (as the sense line states): it shouldn't be at brick. Equinox ◑ 00:31, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Sense deleted. bd2412 T 19:22, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Brick quasi-cite

1. • 2012 According to [the title of] a published article (found via a link from a footnote of the Wikipedia article about IMEIs),, the transitive verb to "brick" something (such as a stolen mobile phone) is sometimes used (as of 2012) to mean something that is done intentionally, by or on behalf of the owner, in cases where the phone is (or might have been) stolen.

Missing sense from cycling?

Glossary of cycling says that a brick is "a rider who is a slow climber but an efficient descender". Equinox ◑ 16:22, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

RFD discussion: August–November 2018

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brick

Adjective sense 1: "Made of brick(s)"; a brick chimney, a brick wall. Standard attributive use of the noun. Per utramque cavernam 08:32, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Agreed, delete that sense (or refer users to the noun), leaving the "extremely cold" sense. The translations can be moved to the noun. DonnanZ (talk) 09:46, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Delete sense. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 14:25, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Comment. I think these "substance" words are among the most difficult to judge. Collins Dictionary gives adjective senses "built or paved with brick" and "like brick", but it seems to contradict itself as it also gives "a brick house" as an example of noun modifier use. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language lists an adjective sense but gives no definition or examples. Chambers Dictionary is perhaps the clearest: "adj 1 made of brick or of bricks • a brick wall. 2 (also brick-red) having the dull brownish-red colour of ordinary bricks." Several other dictionaries that I looked at do not list a separate adjective sense. For my part, I wonder how e.g. "this house is brick" is explained if "brick" is not an adjective. Mihia (talk) 20:15, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

I'd say "brick" is definitely an adjective in "this house is brick" (in which case the section should be kept and completed), but is that sentence grammatical? Per utramque cavernam 20:20, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it's grammatical. Well it certainly is to me, anyway. See also GBS [2].

Not sure I agree. What about "this house is pure brick", or "this house is 18th-century brick"? For me, "this house is brick" seems to be using an uncountable noun. Equinox ◑ 22:14, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

If I have some water in a glass, for example, then I can say "this is water". It actually is water. I question whether a house actually is brick in the uncountable noun sense. I think it is of brick, or made of brick, in the uncountable noun sense. However, this can be a hair-splitting point. Mihia (talk) 00:17, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

But you can't say "the glass [of water] is water" (which would the equivalent of "the house is brick"). Maybe "my wedding ring is gold" would be a better example: I don't know how we would choose how to analyse "gold" there, but again because it could be "pure gold", "fake gold", or "18th-century gold" I'd go for the noun. Equinox ◑ 00:38, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

I think this is explicable by a conflation of predicate adjectives and grammatical ellipsis. On one hand, we have predicate adjectives: "The wedding ring is gold[en]", "The house is brick[en]." (I've added the endings for clarity.)

On the other hand the semantic content is parsible as "The house is [of] brick", "the wedding ring is [of] gold", with textbook ellipsis allowing us to drop words we don't need, where the terms "brick" and "gold" are part of an understood prepositional phrase. When we say "The house is brick" or "The ring is gold", it seems to me that we are in effect using both of the above syntactic understands, and that the words "gold" and "brick" are simultaneously and ambiguously both adjectives and nouns. The addition of other parts to the sentence (e.g. "The house is pure brick") tips the scale one way or another where it is no longer so ambiguous. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 01:09, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Does that mean (I'm asking this neutrally, not as a passive-aggressive contradiction) that you would support adjective senses for things like rubidium, polyvinyl chloride, and polyester (lol already got polyester)? Equinox ◑ 01:21, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

I believe you are correct that "The ring is gold" is interpretable either as saying the ring is a substance or that the ring is made of a substance. However, I find "The house is brick" harder to interpret in the first way, because of the "more complicated" nature of its construction. Mihia (talk) 11:11, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Well, you could say: "this glass is water, and this glass is vodka". As for brick, you can say "the houses in her neighborhood are red brick". Here in California, one is more likely to see brick referred to as unreinforced masonry, which is a Very Bad Thing if you're standing next to it during an earthquake. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:19, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

I notice we have an adjective section at fire: "That shit is fire, yo!". Now that I've read Equinox's comments above, I'm not so sure either that or "The house is brick" are sufficient proof that we're dealing with adjectives (could we say "That shit is pure fire, yo!"?). Per utramque cavernam 08:55, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Delete. Fay Freak (talk) 22:34, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

• Keep per WT:LEMMING: “brick”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.; as adj in AHD[3], Collins[4]; Mihia tells us above it is in Chambers. On the substance itself, "this house is brick" does not seem to be a noun use to me, whereas "brick wall" appears to be a run-of-the-mill attributive use of a noun. For interest: house is brick, brick house at the Google Books Ngram Viewer.. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:04, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

possible origin of electronics sense

I remember from an early job that brick was a term for a large, bulky cellphone of the style commonly used in the 1990s, so big and heavy that you generally stood it upright on a table, as contrasted with the then new TV-remote-like style that could fit in your purse or in a hip holster. It may not have acquired the sense of a nonfunctional device until people stopped seeing "bricks" that still worked. See this YouTube channel for an example of this older usage. Arguably we could even list it with a separate sense definition but I dont know how we handle things like that .... e.g. if there is a label "1990s technology" etc. —Soap— 13:44, 19 August 2020 (UTC)