Jump to content

Talk:magnum opus

Page contents not supported in other languages.
Add topic
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Latest comment: 16 years ago by Doremítzwr in topic There are more like magnum opi out there…

RFV discussion

[edit]
Latest comment: 17 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

The following information has failed Wiktionary's verification process.

Failure to be verified means that insufficient eligible citations of this usage have been found, and the entry therefore does not meet Wiktionary inclusion criteria at the present time. We have archived here the disputed information, the verification discussion, and any documentation gathered so far, pending further evidence.
Do not re-add this information to the article without also submitting proof that it meets Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion.

The sense meaning the crux of an argument. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 11:41, 11 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

I've never encountered this sense and do not think it is valid. Below are all the hits at Onelook.com for "magnum opus." I read them all and not one supports this sense. Neither does the OED or the Random House Webster's Unabridged Electronic Dictionary. This sense is also not very consistent with the Latin meaning of the term. -- WikiPedant 14:21, 11 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
  1. magnum opus : Encarta® World English Dictionary, North American Edition [home, info]
  2. magnum opus : Compact Oxford English Dictionary [home, info]
  3. magnum opus : Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 10th Edition [home, info]
  4. Magnum Opus : Wiktionary [home, info]
  5. magnum opus : The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus [home, info]
  6. magnum opus : The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language [home, info]
  7. magnum opus : Infoplease Dictionary [home, info]
  8. magnum opus : Dictionary.com [home, info]
  9. magnum opus : UltraLingua English Dictionary [home, info]
 10. Magnum Opus : Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [home, info]
 11. magnum opus : Rhymezone [home, info]
 12. magnum opus : The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy [home, info]
 13. Magnum Opus : Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) [home, info]
 14. magnum opus : WordNet 1.7 Vocabulary Helper [home, info]
 15. magnum opus : LookWAYup Translating Dictionary/Thesaurus [home, info]
 16. magnum opus : ArtLex Lexicon of Visual Art Terminology [home, info]
 17. magnum opus : ODLIS: Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science [home, info]
 18. magnum opus : A Word A Day [home, info]
OK; thanks for that. We’ll give it its month. If someone does come along and verify it, and can’t imagine that there’ll be much of a problem in tagging it as non-standard. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 21:16, 11 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
rfvfailed Cynewulf 08:26, 28 October 2007 (UTC)Reply


Wikipedia Edit History

[edit]

This page was m:Transwikied from Wikipedia. Below is the edit history for the Wikipedia article.

Wiktionary:Requests for verification - kept

[edit]

Kept. See archived discussion of October 2007. 07:10, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Requests for verification - kept

[edit]

Kept. See archived discussion of March 2008. 06:00, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

There are more like magnum opi out there…

[edit]
Latest comment: 16 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

Having read WT:RFV#magnum opi, I was curious about how many other mangled plurals of magnum opus — besides magnum opi — there are out there (magna opera being correct and magnum opuses being excusable). This is what I found:

  1. magna opi:
  2. magna opus (which, nota bene, is used as a singular noun):
    • 1828: Katherine Augusta Ware, Bower of Taste, p385 [This may be an invalid citation — in it, (deprecated template usage) magna opus seems to be part of a longer noun phrase (magna opus domi).]
      Among the rest, he was a firm believer that there was one genius in every family. I was pitched upon unfortunately as the brightest child in ours — the real genius — magna opus domi.
    • 1971: Andrew T. H. Tan, A Handbook of Terrorism and Insurgency in Southeast Asia, p98 (Edward Elgar Publishing; →ISBN (10), →ISBN (13))
      As argued by Van Dijk in his magna opus Rebellion Under the banner of Islam: The Darul Islam in Indonesia, it provided a tangible taste and a real-life manifestation of the possibility of the Islamic state as an alternative to the Indonesian republic.101
    • 2002: Jin-young Choi, Unspoken Voices: Selected Short Stories by Korean Women Writers, p259 (Homa & Sekey Books; →ISBN (10), →ISBN (13))
      But her magna opus, The Land is the novel that crystallizes the uniquely Korean emotion of “Han,” a long repressed frustration, expressed in what the critics call “a treasure chest of the Korean language.”
  3. magni opi:
    • 1924: Mark Lemon, Henry Mayhew, Tom Taylor, Shirley Brooks, Francis Cowley Burnand, and Owen Seaman, Punch, p392
      The theory is that these artist fellows steal out of a night under cover of darkness their pictures under their arms, and land the magni opi furtively on […]
    • 1986: Donald McQuade, The Territory of Language: Linguistics, Stylistics, and the Teaching of Composition, p17 (Southern Illinois University Press, →ISBN
      […] Leonard Bloomfield had published their magni opi, both entitled Language, in 1921 and 1933, and in the thirties their students moved more and more rapidly toward a genuinely scientific linguistics.
    • 2001: Lou Marinoff, Philosophical Practice, p126
      Horror stories abound about well-known philosophers who used PhD students as research assistants, burning the students out while producing magni opi to their personal credit.

Pretty interesting, I thought. How should these be dealt with? –A matter for discussion… † ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 22:19, 23 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Some more…

  1. magna opuses — a couple from a web search:
    • RINKER ON COLLECTIBLES — Column #662 Copyright © Rinker Enterprises, Inc. 1999; Researching Collectibles Part I, link
      Having once had a foot in the academic camp, I assure you that many collectibles titles I have read written by “amateur” researchers put a significant number of scholarly PhD dissertations and university press titles to shame. What galls many of these ivory tower purists is these insignificant, inconsequential collectibles titles usually outsell their magna opuses by five-, ten-, and even fifty-to-one. Who said there is no justice in the world?
    • 2008, July the 10th: Digg — If You Build a Wiffle Ball Field, They (Lawyers) Will Come, link
      The hilarious think about this all is that – according to the theorists – the era of “magna opuses” and great well-known artists like
  2. magnae opus — just the one English result (an internet discussion board):
    • 2007: “Corporal Parmenio”, +CGO+ — ACLU, May God have mercy on the soul., Thursday the 29th of March at 11:57pm
      An America hater? EZ, are you serious? Because I uphold the values that the Founding Fathers set forth in their magnae opus? I don’t slight them, I simply assert that things were not perfect in 1787.
  3. magni opera:
    • 1874: Cornelius Nepos, Cornelii Nepotis Vitae, with notes by J.F. Macmichael, page 170
      …reditary estate. A plot of two soldier. —annorum] Cf. Ages. viii. 2. acres, assigned ‘viritim’ in the —magni opera] Cf. Datames i. 2.
    • 1965: Peter Bull, I Say, Look Here!: The Rather Random Reminiscences of a Round Actor in the Square, page 148 (P. Davies)
      I don’t know how many magni opera we turned out during the next few years but we have quite a little collection of untold and unsold children of our two brains.
  4. magni opus: There may be some English uses amidst all the Latin ones in these 319 Google Book Search hits.

† ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:45, 17 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:magnum_opus&oldid=47205968"