Talk:guard ship

Deletion discussion

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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Transwiki:Guard ship

Discussion moved from WT:RFDO#Guard ship.

Says it's a warship used as a guard. I assume it can be any type of ship, just a warship is much more suited to the task than a shrimper. Ergo delete, unless guardship is ok, then we kinda can't. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:14, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

No, it fails WT:COALMINE because it's not significantly more common than guardship, it's significantly less common than it; on Google Books an estimate 441 hits whil guardship gets 25100, more than 50 times more. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:42, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

But guardship can also refer to "the state of being a guard/guarded", so a simple Google Books search may not be representative for this particular sense. —CodeCat 18:14, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

"A guard ship" gets 32900 GBC hits to 3930 for "a guardship". "Guardships"+crew gets 1440, "guard ships"+crew gets 4950 (with some being for "Coast Guard ships"): "the guardships"+crew gets 529, "the guard ships"+crew gets 3480. - -sche (discuss) 16:45, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Have you noticed how wonky Google search results are? The counts, in particular, seem unreliable. Caution seems required. Sometimes it pays to try to page toward the end of the results. That end may come much sooner than the indicated number would suggest. That might be the result of Google limiting the number of such pages they make available or it might indicate a bad estimate. Heavy use of qualifying terms to reduce the absolute count, possibly even going further than -sche did above, may be desirable to make a page-by-page scan of the results more feasible, without fear of Google-imposed limits. DCDuring TALK 16:58, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Good point. "Of the guardships" masts crew gets 9 results (though it says it gets 10), "of the guard ships" masts crew gets 12 (though it says it gets 237). "Of the guard ships" boats crew gets 18 (claims 673), "of the guardships" boats crew gets 6 (claims 7). The two-word term seems more common than the one-word term. - -sche (discuss) 17:05, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Also guard ship seems to be a calque for the Russian ship-class name storozhevoj korabl. It may be worth checking the literature for whether this is a common English name for the particular type. —Michael Z. 2013-06-10 19:44 z

Maybe not. First page of GBooks results for storozhevoy korabl has various SOP translations including guard ship, escort ship, patrol ship, etc. —Michael Z. 2013-06-11 00:54 z

Keep per WT:COALMINE. I'm not sure what the point of reporting on the wonkiness of Google search results is, when the actual hits can be looked at, and reveal uses like:

• 1873, David Hogg, Life and Times of the Rev. John Wightman, D.D., 1762-1847, p. 138:

  On one occasion the captain of a guardship was obliged to put in at Whithorn to have some repairs done for the accommodation of a number of men who had been impressed and taken on board.

• 1904, Marcus Robert Phipps Dorman, A History of the British Empire in the Nineteenth Century, p. 182:

  Captain Adye was therefore ordered to Caprara, while the Fleur de Lys, the French guardship, sailed towards Antibes.

• 1908, Dues and Charges on Shipping in Foreign Ports, p. 591:

  A guardship is stationed in the Bay of Nagara, about three miles to the northward of the Dardanelles town, and vessels must stop off and communicate with this guardship The guardship is a small man-of-war schooner sailing vessel, anchored in 10 fathoms water, and carrying by day the ordinary Turkish ensign.

Cheers! bd2412 T 15:56, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

The question is not whether there are such hits but rather whether "guard ship" is significantly more common than "guardship", since that being the case is one of the conditions in WT:COALMINE. guard ship,guardship at the Google Books Ngram Viewer. suggests that "guardship" is more common, so coalmine would not protect "guard ship". An editor has tried above to differentiate the term per sense and show that "guard ship" could be more common for that sense. In any case, this is not a clearcut coalmine case. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:27, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

• In retrospect, I'm actually not bothered by the ratio of one-word to two-word formations. The phrase, "guard ship" is one for which it is trivially easy to find citations:

• 1832, William Allen, An American Biographical and Historical Dictionary, p. 209:

  He was pronounced guilty, and sentenced to confinement on board a guard ship, and in forty days to be sent with his family to England.

• 1919, George Grafton Wilson, International Law Situations, p. 137:

  Vessels after having been visited by the guard ship in Monvik and taking route toward Reval, must, for the second time, pass the guard ship near island Wulf for delivery of permission of the previous mentioned guard ship and then continue their route, according to orders of this guard ship.

• 1999, Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity, p. 23:

  The narrator describes — in what could be exaggeration — what newly pressed sailors discovered when they were hauled aboard a guard ship to wait for orders.

• 2007, C. Douglas Kroll, "Friends in Peace and War": The Russian Navy's Landmark Visit to Civil War San Francisco, p. 67:

  With the guard ship Shubrick gone, the commanding officer of Alcatraz assumed guard duty to make sure that no hostile foreign warships entered the bay.

• 2010, British Ships in the Confederate Navy, p. 218:

  In 1858, taking up his commission once more in the Royal Navy, he was appointed an officer of the guard ship at Malta, and subsequently was given command of the gunship Foxhound, which patrolled in the Mediterranean.

• 2011, Murray Leinster, The World is Taboo, p. 122:

  The guard ship would overhear. He could not trust untried young men to act rationally if they were unaware and the guard ship arrived and matter-of-factly attempted to board one of them.

  I would keep this, therefore, irrespective of whether "guardship" exists to describe a kind of ship. bd2412 T 14:10, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

  If you want to keep it without WT:COALMINE, then you have to show that it is idiomatic. I think you'll have more luck keeping it with WT:COALMINE. --WikiTiki89 14:58, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

  What if it was just an {{alternative spelling of}} guardship, with the main definition at the unspaced title? bd2412 T 17:21, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

• Keep guard ship. The case for keeping is rather weak; the COALMINE case is nowhere entirely convincing, but since the usual deletion supporters have not already decided, and there could be a valid COALMINE case, and there is a Wordnet definition at “guard ship”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. (a weak argument indeed), then let us just keep it; it does no harm. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:48, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Closing as kept, no consensus to delete. bd2412 T 15:48, 4 June 2014 (UTC)