Talk:confectioner's

Deletion debate

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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A shop that sells confectionery. Analogous to all of its cousins, it is an anaphora for "confectioner's shop", "confectioner's place", or, for that matter, the confectioner's house, hat, car, or pastry bag. DCDuring TALK 00:17, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

These shop terms should probably go. We also have (deprecated template usage) grocer's. Equinox ◑ 00:59, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Not so fast, please. These terms are very common, and refer only to the shop. They need to be taught to ESL students because they are so specific and not as obvious as a native speaker assumes. Some are particularly obscure ... chemist's, ironmonger's, newsagent's, florist's, greengrocer's, for example. There are not so many of them, as only a few businesses are referred to in this way, so we're not talking about a huge number of entries. -- ALGRIF talk 11:53, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

It is a common phenomenon of the grammar of possessives that applies to the proper nouns that are occupational names and personal names and trade names of the same form. We are quickly evolving to redefine word to mean collocation - and not even always grammatical constitutents. I don't see why Wiktionary should be a repository of every attestable instance or even selected instances of every grammatical phenomenon of interest to language learners. We have to leave something for WikiGrammar. DCDuring TALK 12:27, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Actually I'm hard put to come up with a dozen of businesses that are commonly referred to as occupational / trade name + s. "You can buy a Z at any chemist's". How many X's can you find to occupy the "chemist's" slot? Possessives are very common. This usage is very restricted. That's why it should be here. IMHO. -- ALGRIF talk 12:51, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Here are fifteen trades/professions that multiply occur on COCA in this construction, with the understood noun being a place of business: doctor, dry cleaner, butcher, hairdresser, dentist, vet, barber, baker, blacksmith, jeweller, florist, stationer, tailor, bootlegger, undertaker. I'm sure you could find others at BNC.

Two other classes of fairly widely understood deixes: residences (neighbor, father, mother, parents, uncle, aunt, in-law, etc) and public restrooms (men's, boy's, and little boy's and the distaff's). In addition there are many local ones.

Perhaps student's should be direct to 's, which entry could possibly bear improvement of supplementation as by the growing number of other English grammatical appendixes and Wiktionary pages. DCDuring TALK 16:31, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

I can assure you that it's useful to keep them. Lmaltier 21:54, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

If you don't want to argue to in terms of CFI, please present some rationale, if you have one. Do you have any evidence or arguments as to why? What is the theory of wiktionary use that would give credence to your assurances? Is there a justification for the theory? DCDuring TALK 22:12, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

My first justification is my experience (I'm not anglophone). My second justification is that there is no reason to accept some shop names and to refuse other shop names only because of their etymology (leading to the 's in the name). Lmaltier 12:24, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, say no more. I don't have that qualification. Clearly none of the OneLook references and not Longmans DCE benefit from that perspective either as they fail to include that possessive.

I think we have also just discovered an area of superiority of book technology over ours. In a print dictionary, when one looks up "confectioner's", one finds "confectioner" immediately adjoining the location where "confectioner's" would be. When one looks up greengrocer's on Wiktionary, one gets a search page screen that does not necessarily contain greengrocer without a page down.

We could use redirects and appendices to address this grammatical phenomenon in a pedagogically useful way or can continue to perpetrate the "lexical illusion": We can mislead users into believing that there is something especially meaningful about terms like "confectioner's" as opposed to terms like "John's", "John Smith's", "the Smith's", "the neighbor's", "my next-door neighbor's", "my uncle's", "my other uncle's", or "the men's". DCDuring TALK 13:19, 24 January 2010 (UTC) See Appendix:Special uses of possessives in EnglishDCDuring TALK 16:02, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Actually there is the "finger index" in the left-hand pane, showing about 20 preceding and subsequent words. It's not right under the user's nose, though. Equinox ◑ 13:39, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Is that the default for unregistered users? DCDuring TALK 16:02, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Definitely Keep all. They are a mystery to non-English speakers. SemperBlotto 22:30, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

What about the approach of putting all the examples using common nouns into an appendix and using soft or hard redirects to the appendix? That way we could provide lexical access to the general rule instead of having learners believe that "greengrocer's" is a one-off. DCDuring TALK 23:28, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

See Appendix:Special uses of possessives in English

I believe that we need to discuss the availability of the Appendices, and to this end I will place a proposal in BP shortly. However, back this lexical group. An English L2 Wikt user looking at florist would see that s/he is a person who sells flowers. But then said user is left with the poser of what is meant by the term "florist's" in his reading text. Thank Wikt that he is not left in the dark for long, as here he discovers that it refers specifically to the shop (not just any old possession). If he only had his paper dicts, he would be in a quandary, for sure. -- ALGRIF talk 14:19, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Should we have entries at (deprecated template usage) Bob's and (deprecated template usage) Annabel's? "I went to Bob's, but he wasn't there. He was over at Annabel's." Equinox ◑ 14:33, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

No. Why should we? Are they generic business names generally understood as not referring to any particular person? -- ALGRIF talk 14:56, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

I mean that the (deprecated template usage) 's refers to somebody's shop or house generally. If you bought your chocolate from a vending-machine in an unmanned factory, that wouldn't be a (deprecated template usage) confectioner's, would it? There has to be a confectioner who owns it. Equinox ◑ 16:10, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

The idea would be to have a version of Appendix:Special uses of possessives in English linked to by {{only in}} or to have a hard redirect to such an appendix. In such an appendix one could make or link to whatever fine distinctions one might want to make between anaphoric, deixic, and broad- and narrow-context-dependence. Putting the user into an appendix instead of entry enables the appropriate general points to be made instead of fostering the lexical illusion. (BTW, Longmans DCE has the relevant material all at their entry for 's.) DCDuring TALK 16:13, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

(keep) If it's just a possessive form, why don't we define it as # "possessive form of [ ]" and link the possive to the appendix. An example sentence or a usage note or two could then give actual usage in-entry as well. (I know CFI technically forbids this approach, but it seems to me to be a major inconsistency "exclude all apart from a few of one form of one language"). Conrad.Irwin 16:18, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

It must have something special, because the page was created, and some other dictionaries also choose to mention it (no dictionary would have considered John's as a word worth inclusion):

• www.thefreedictionary.com/confectioner
• http://dictionnaire.reverso.net/anglais-portugais/confectioner%27s%20%28shop%29
• http://www.wordmagicsoft.com/dictionary/en-es/confectioner%27s.php
• http://analogical-dictionary.sensagent.com/mf4952424/ML-en-ja/

Lmaltier 17:10, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

• Of course there's something special. They are places of business. When I walk down the street, I walk past (using the most commonly used words) the bank, the supermarket, the tobacconist's, the newsagent's, the travel agency, the greengrocer's, the florist's, the book shop, etc. I do not normally walk past the banker's, the supermarketeer's, the cigarette shop, the newspaper seller's, the travel agency, the greengrocery, the flower shop, the bookworm's, etc.
  The fact that they have apostrophe s should not automatically eliminate them. The fact that they refer to ONLY the place of business means they have a certain idiomatic status. For instance, if a book starts with "I was on my way to the greengrocer's when I met John for the first time." and without any further reference in the whole book, we know that the writer means the place of business of an unidentified greengrocer. NOT his house. NOT his car. NOT his place. NOT anything that is not his place of business, to whit, his shop.
  As for appendices, language learners would benefit from appendices in a completely different way. If you relegate these entries to an appendix, they will 1. be difficult to locate. 2. be difficult to understand in context. 3. give the learner the wrong idea about how these examples actually work. They are exceptional, so a general rule given in an appendix can be nothing more than additional information. -- ALGRIF talk 17:45, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

As I have repeatedly said, there is no question of relegation: the appendix should be the object of either redirects or {{only in}}s from as many of these terms as exist. Redirects have the advantage from a user point of view of being faster.

The use of 's in this way is productive. The limits are rather broad. There are many trade-denoting nouns suffixed with -ist, -monger, -ler, and similar or compounds using broker, agent, and similar, as well as proper nouns that form these. Historically, certainly, they always have referred to smallish operations (one-person, family-run, perhaps partners, perhaps a few employees). I wonder whether in the UK someone would refer to Boots as the "chemist's". In the US, independent pharmacies are a dying breed. Pharmacies operate as a limited-access area served by a pharmacist within stores that sell "health and beauty aids", housewares, greeting cards, convenience foods, greeting cards, etc. or in grocery stores. Terms like "pharmacist's" and "druggist's" are now rarely used. Similarly, the increasing presence of group practices and clinics in US healthcare seems to be making "[go] to the doctor's" (30 @ COCA) less common than "[go] to the doctor" (461 @ COCA).

This suggests to me that speakers are in aggregate fairly sensitive to the situation in which a doctor or other professional operates and are not "looking up" in their mental lexicon's the right word, but rather are constructing the word they need on the spot using a generic mechanism. I think that when such things are happening we do not serve learners well by denying them access to the construction. This is often difficult to do. In this case it is dead easy. DCDuring TALK 19:32, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes (to your question about Boots). It actually gets a mention at w:Dispensing chemist. Equinox ◑ 19:38, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Keep all, these are all words, no spaces in them. They are attestable, what's the problem here? Mglovesfun (talk) 04:30, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Kept per consensus --Rising Sun talk? 02:14, 16 February 2010 (UTC)