Talk:e-

Deletion discussions

The discussions below were moved from the requests for deletion page.

E-business

• E-business. Flurry of nonsense from several anon IPs. --Connel MacKenzie 23:08, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I left non-e for the time being, redirected e-business to e-commerce (which needs some work) and deleted the others. SemperBlotto 23:18, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

<Jun-Dai 22:53, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)> It should probably be done from scratch, but e-business needs its own entry; it is distinct from e-commerce.

My point in nominating this for deletion is that e-whatever and iwhatever are lower (in terms of acceptability) than "leet" terms. If anything, people should be warned that using such terms will lower people's opinion (of the intellegence of the person using the term.) We certainly shouldn't be encouraging these perversions of the language. Obviously, that is my POV opinion. --Connel MacKenzie 06:51, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Text added to Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion:

There is occasionally concern that adding an entry for a particular term will lead to entries for a large number of similar terms. This is not a problem, as each term is considered on its own, based on whether it is in wide use, not on whether it is similar to some term in wide use. Some examples:

• Any word in any language might be borrowed into English, but only a few actually are. Including spaghetti does not imply that ricordati is next.
• Any word may be rendered in Pig-Latin, but only a few (e.g., amscray) have found their way into common use.
• Any word may be rendered in leet style, but only a few (e.g., pr0n) see general use.
• Grammatical affixes like meta- and -ance can be added in a great many more cases than they actually are (Some basic suffixes like plural -s and past tense -ed really can be used almost anywhere. Adding terms with these inflections but with no special meaning is mostly harmless but discouraged).
• It may seem that trendy internet prefixes like e- and i are used everywhere, but they aren't. If I decide to talk about e-thumb-twiddling but no one else does, then there's no need for an entry.

E-business is used all the time, in news stories, advertisements and most likely scholarly journals by now. There are plenty of terms and particularly senses of terms that I don't like, but that can't keep them out of Wiktionary. There is ample precedent for including a "Usage note" to the effect that, say, "this term is considered <your pejorative here> by many", though be warned it generally takes a few iterations to get the languages of such a note hammered out to everyone's equally mild dissatisfaction. -dmh 19:29, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

e- as an abbreviation for a different Latin pefix

explain the etymology of ebracteate and ebracteolate (without bracts)

E-quaintance and E-quainted

• E-quaintance and E-quainted - e-nonsense. Protologisms at best. --Connel MacKenzie 10:35, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Indeed, that one as well. All three are protologisms promoted by on-line dating services with minimal actual web use, and apparently no actual print use. And the discussions about such constructed protologisms has gone on at length in the past, perhaps before your time here. These should be (at most) single line entries in Appendix:List of protologisms. And then deleted. --Connel MacKenzie 16:42, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
    • So Dmh's comment that these are not protologisms, in the history of e-quaintance, just passes you by? And there's no evidence to back up your assertion that on-line dating services are the promoters of these words, upon which you are basing your argumement. None of the quotations in e-quaintance or e-quaintances have anything remotely to do with dating. Uncle G 20:43, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You had already pointed out that I had missed (entirely) e-quaintance. All the quotations are internet related, but I was referring to the results of doing a very quick www.google.com search for the terms...which showed a heavy bias towards on-line dating. Furthermore, although I respect dmh's opinion, even he can make a mistake; I did not see any justification for his assertion that it is not. JesseW obviously first pointed out the term's specious origin. The point that you are adept/talented at cleaning up an article, does not make the word any less of a protologism. --Connel MacKenzie 21:31, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Things may have changed in my absence, and if so that's fine, but my understanding was that a protologism was essentially a term and definition offered up in the hope of usage. If it's already in use prior to the definition, then it's not a protologism. The judgment call here is what we decide to call "in use". We tend to disallow terms whose only examples are limited to a particular person or entity. If I work for FleargleCorp and we all call ourselves "Fleargloids", but no one else does, that's too specialized. If I concoct a philosophy of fleargology and want to promote it by defining it on Wiktionary, that's going to get shot down too — I need to promote myself to the point that people unconnected with me are using it, and then it can go in. We're also careful about trademarks that haven't become household words for similar reasons. Much of the impetus is from the desire to keep Wiktionary being from used as a promotional vehicle. To me, this is one of very few reasons not to err on the side of inclusiveness.

In this case, while I quite agree that I can make mistakes (duck tape anyone?), I don't think this is one of them. E-quaintance seems to be fairly widely used, and its origin in online dating is not relevant here. It's not a trademark of a particular company, it's just a bit of net.jargon that may well fade into obscurity but hasn't yet. That said, I'm not a big fan of separate entries trivial inflections. I'd think E-quaintances and E-quainted should be no more than redirects to E-quaintance and E-quaint. -dmh 19:30, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thank you very much for that clarification. By your explained definition, it would clearly be included. But my understanding was that there was a distinction between print and internet-only references. I do not recall seeing any NYTimes quotatons in my cursory google search, so nominating it seemed (and still does seem) reasonable. --Connel MacKenzie 07:14, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've just had a go at updating/clarifying Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion, but even before that there was no specific mention of print. As long as we don't just go by sheer numbers of google hits (unless that number is in the thousands), the internet is an extremely valuable source of attestations. -dmh 18:53, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I strongly object to you adding the anything-goes line It has been used in running text in at least three independently recorded instances, whether in print, audio, video or on the internet. "...publicly available written texts" is pretty much the exact opposite of what you wrote! That does not coincide with the spirit of the previous versions; it directly conflits with them. This opens the door for vandals (or anyone promoting their protologism) to post three blurbs on three different blogs. The previous phrase (that you deleted) "publicly available written texts" essentially refered to anything one can check out of a public library. That is certainly a specific mention of print.

• I appreciate your notion that it would be nice for Wiktionary to be the first "authority" to validate a new term, but that clearly is not our goal. There is something to be said for not including "leet" terms and limiting entries to spoken languages. Suddently including massive quantities of questionable terms only makes Wiktionary look like a very unreliable reference.

• Lastly, no one, when doing a google search, can conceivably verify more than the first few entries (alternately, the first entry from several pages.) Instead, time and time again, the simple number of google hits is referenced. Google hits shouldn't be a permissable positive justification for a word's use; the pages linked to should be the attestations. Google itself is a great resource, but is being relied on too heavily, often inappropriately.

• The problem with google search results is that they are not verified. Published items are.

• To slide this change into Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion, obfuscate the change with dozens of good improvements and then to misrepresent it is very underhanded. I have held a high opinion of you in the past; I am baffled by this, as it seems intentional. --Connel MacKenzie 06:37, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Clearly there is not a consensus here. I've added a note to that effect in CFI, and created a page for discussion here. I should not have made a substantive change without calling it out more explicitly, and I apologize for that. That said, it was an honest mistake. I did not realize that the issue was still as controversial as it turned out to be. -dmh 16:18, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

• I am prepared to accept that various of these e- terms have come into common use. This applies as well to the e-business discussion as to this one. As much as I hate to side with dmh on this kind of thing, I find them more common than the leet terms that have also been a topic of discussion. Leet terms tend to be used only by a particular subset of the internet community. The one that I would seriously question is e-quaint as a verb. The fact that e-quainted is commonly used as an adjective does not imply that the verb from which it appears to be derived is used as much. I even thought of the adjective "e-quaint" as a way of referring to some of the weird people I've met on the internet. :-) I do agree that this was not the place for launching into a general policy discussion about "criteria for inclusion". That aspect of this entry will be removed when the rest this entry is removed on the assumption that the arguments have already been made in the appropriate place. Eclecticology 19:26, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

March 2017 deletion discussion.

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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e-#Etymology_1, "out of"

Delete [as English] or reclassify as Latin like ec-; and probably sug- et al should be recreated as Latin; for the same reason as Talk:sug-: it seems to me that Etymology 1, the prefix supposedly meaning "out of", is describing a Latin conditional variant prefix and not an English one. Looking at the "derived terms", "evict" is borrowed whole from Latin, it is not "e-" + *"vict"; "egress" is from Latin, not "e-" + *"gress"; etc. - -sche (discuss) 16:01, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Looking at Category:English words prefixed with e-, there are a few words that look like they are examples of productive use of Latin-derived e- (but some have a sense that is more accurately described as non- rather than out of): ebracteate, enucleate, ecostate, elamping, elocation, enodal, etypical, evacate. Maybe they are actually borrowings from scientific New Latin terms, though; does anyone have more info?

Even if this is enough to keep the section, we ought to add information to describe the real situation (that nearly all words with this e- are Latin borrowings). — Ungoliant ^(falai) 16:34, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Merriam-Webster says ebracteate is from New Latin ebracteatus and enucleate is from enucleatus, and I can find ecostatus and elocatio and enodalis as (New?) Latin words which would account for ecostate, etc. In all of those cases, e- looks like "sug-": like the prefix only existed in Latin. The invocation of "e-" in our etymology of "elamping" seems to be someone's guesswork, qualified by that question mark at the end. "Evacate" seems likely to also have a Latin or other etymon like "evacuate", or perhaps it is a variant of that word. I can't find a reference that explains the etymology of "etypical"; can anyone else? - -sche (discuss) 21:10, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Are there any cases where English uses e- where Latin would use another allomorph of ex- due to the initial sound(s) of the word? Any examples of the suffix being used in an "un-Latin" way would be evidence of it being thought of as an English prefix. —CodeCat 21:14, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Deleted. - -sche (discuss) 19:56, 15 January 2018 (UTC)