Talk:geflissentlich

RFV discussion: June 2022

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geflissentlich

German. Rfv-sense: "assiduous, studious, diligent" @SemperBlotto as the person who added this sense. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 18:56, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Huh, I thought this is the only sense. Assiduosity, studiosity, and diligence uses to have, if it does not have per definition, intent. Basically, I was always using it in the belief that it means the same as fleißig, and I would interpret most examples on German Wiktionary this way. Not also that the first which you don’t RFV defines “without making the deliberateness apparent” while German Wiktionary the opposite, “deutlich sichtbar”, and their “sorgfältig, eifrig” also comes closer to what I and the objective meaning of the second gloss imagines. If it doesn’t mean this then I bet that that is only a post-classical development from the Thomas Mann era on. Fay Freak (talk) 20:07, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

I think in the collocations geflissentlich übersehen/auslassen/vermeiden it is clear that it has to mean deliberately right? It was by the way me who added "without making the deliberateness apparent" exactly because the previous collocations strongly suggest an underhanded (heimliche) component to me, though after reading the examples on de.wikt I don't think it is entirely accurate, so I'm going to remove it.

Reading through them additionally made me think that sense 2 is just synonymous to gewissenhaft right (examples 2, 3)? That would also check out with sorgfältig, eifrig. In that case, a bit of a pointless RFV but I do think sense 2 needs some tweaking too. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 20:54, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

When I look at 18th and 19th century attestations found in the various corpora listed in the DWDS, the meaning "deliberate" seems to have been the basic one for quite some time. It is tempting to think that because of its shared root with fleißig, its "objective" meaning must be something related to "diligent", but this might just be an etymological fallacy. –Austronesier (talk) 21:17, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

In my understanding it does not refer to deliberation but to effort, so in German, as one says sometimes in the colloquial, dass man sich schon anstrengen muss, to achieve a certain result. In English it is effortly, which is uncreated in spite of being attested not badly.

If Austronesier thinks it is tempting, it may also have tempted a large share of the language community, including me, to always treat it like this (if I as a member of this language community made an etymological fallacy all my life, why has everyone else understood it differently all the time? Not likely), or it is one of those words which everyone understands slightly differently—all difficult from context, since the same quotes are understood differently by me and thee. The malapropism for or contamination from gewissenhaft may also be varyingly there. Fay Freak (talk) 21:23, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Everyone? Really? Anyway. I have just checked Grimm, and again, all historical examples only point to sense 1. Quite interestingly, and contrary to my expectation, it even is mentioned that mit fleisz can be used to mean "deliberately" (vorsätzlich/absichichtlich). The latter usage of course is as obsolete as "Ich möchte meinen Dünkel sagen, mit Urlaub " :) –Austronesier (talk) 21:28, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Well, we all have done our due diligence and the entry and the citations page contains clear examples of both and their currency and I also added one current one where it only means “consciously, but rather necessitated than wanted”; the examples on beck-online / Juris / Wolters Kluwer are surely endless, I did not even need to search but picked five clear ones in ¾ of an hour. They are more necessarily clear since the jurists need to distinguish subjektiver and objektiver Tatbestand. You are wrong about “all historical examples” if you are not baiting, only a few in the DWDS DTA-Kernkorpus appeared to me to exclusively mean “intentional” (oftener, they mean both: with intentional effort). Fay Freak (talk) 22:34, 22 June 2022 (UTC)