Talk:lose one's virginity

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.

---

lose one's virginity

Funny, but it looks like "lose + one's + virginity" --Hekaheka (talk) 18:02, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

• Keep, this is the idiomatic way to express the idea in English, no one talks about discarding or breaking one's virginity. Anyway ‘lose’ otherwise implies carelessness, whereas losing one's virginity is normally a deliberate thing. Ƿidsiþ 18:18, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, what the heck, we have also lose one's mind, lose one's life and whatnot. --Hekaheka (talk) 20:32, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Here's a list of some other collocations involving things one can lose. The ones with "?" are ones I am not familiar with in the US. Are they all idiomatic? We have about half of them.

1. lose one's bearings
2. lose one's bottle (UK slang)
3. lose one's cool
4. lose one's grip
5. lose one's head
6. lose one's heart (to)
7. lose one's life
8. lose one's lunch
9. lose one's marbles
10. lose one's market (backgammon)
11. lose one's memory
12. lose one's mind
13. lose one's nerve
14. lose one's rag
15. lose one's reason
16. lose one's self
17. lose one's shirt
18. lose one's temper
19. lose one's tongue
20. lose one's touch
21. lose one's virginity
22. lose one's voice
23. lose one's way
24. lose one's buttons ?

-- DCDuring TALK 23:00, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Also lose one's religion, which I think is a Southern expression meaning "to lose one's mind". —Ruakh_TALK 23:13, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

lose one's appetite, lose one's faith, lose one's child (ie, to death, also any member of one's immediate family), lose one's balance, lose one's home, lose one's job, lose one's hearing (sight, body parts)? The logic of keeping common collocations would seem to lead to keeping all of these, AFAICT, even if they do not otherwise meet any tests of idiomaticity. I'm fairly sure the translation-target logic would apply as well for almost all of these in at least some languages. DCDuring TALK 23:36, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Two more that we have: lose one's rag, lose one's shit. DCDuring TALK 23:40, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

• Comment: Of the things listed above, some are more idiomatic and/or more deserving of an entry than others Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 17:20, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, we have to check each expression individually. Keep lose one's virginity.

RFD discussion: December 2018–May 2019

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

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.

---

lose one's virginity

SOP. The previous discussion doesn't seem conclusive to me:

• Widsith says "Keep, this is the idiomatic way to express the idea in English, no one talks about discarding or breaking one's virginity": but none of the languages found in the translation table speaks of "discarding" or "breaking" the virginity either; all use the same idea of "losing" it. Hence it's not specific to English.
• He adds "anyway, ‘lose’ otherwise implies carelessness, whereas losing one's virginity is normally a deliberate thing": I don't think people go about with the intent of losing their virginity; they go about with the intent of making love/fucking for the first time, and a byproduct of that is that they lose their virginity (but losing it wasn't the aim in itself).

Possible idiomatic translations would be Chinese 失身 (shīshēn) and Spanish debutar. Per utramque cavernam 15:30, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

• MW has it (ergo Lemming), and also this feels like a set enough phrase that I would favor keeping it regardless. Re intentionality, I think it goes both ways (e.g. movie trope summer camp pact to lose virginity). - TheDaveRoss 15:42, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

• Delete, SOP, obvious choice of words, I can’t follow the idiomaticity claim. Fay Freak (talk) 20:42, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

  It is non-obvious that the concept is expressed in specifically this way. While you can say that someone lost their sanity, it is far more common to say that they became insane. So why don’t we say equally commonly that someone became deflowered?  --Lambiam 08:51, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

  Maybe that's because "insane" is a common word and "deflowered" isn't. There may also be a problem with "become" + past participle—other examples of that structure sound strange to me ("*became eaten", "*became erased"). I think "lose one's virginity" is clearly SOP, but it's the kind of common collocation that English learners need to know and that we haven't found a good way to cover here at en.wikt. The phrase should be an example sentence at virginity, I'd say. —Granger (talk · contribs) 11:03, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

  I've added it to virginity. Per utramque cavernam 13:32, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

• Keep: 1) WT:LEMMING via M-W; 2) WT:THUB via Chinese 失身 (shīshēn) and Spanish debutar thanks to nom; now THUB does not really allow Chinese, but that's a defect in THUB. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:50, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
• Leaning keep per Dan Polansky. bd2412 T 21:41, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
• Comment. Classic case of a set phrase or common collocation that is nevertheless SOP and easy to understand from the parts. These seem to come up fairly frequently. I believe that some kind of "set phrase / common collocation" category has been discussed in the past? Perhaps this should be revisited. Mihia (talk) 21:52, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Kept, no consensus. Canonicalization (talk) 18:19, 25 May 2019 (UTC)