Talk:night of the long knives

@-sche: I think this is entry-worthy, but I'm not convinced the quotes point to a truly generic use. Oh well. Canonicalization (talk) 01:16, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

It's a valid worry; a lot of the capitalized uses of the phrase do seem to be referring back to the 1934 event ... or to the w:Night of the Long Knives (1962), w:Night of the Long Knives (1982), or w:Night of the Long Knives (1992). OTOH, that sheer number of specific events with that name, the existence of this in lowercase and in the plural, and (although I didn't include this) the fact that nights of [the] long knives, despite being plural in form, can also be attested with a singular sense meaning an individual multi-day purge, suggests genericization; indeed, the existence of phrases like google books:"days and nights of the long knives" and google books:"day of the long knives"/google books:"day of long knives" made me worry it could actually be so generic as to be SOP.
The Mansel Jones citation seems pretty clearly to be alluding back to the w:Night of the Long Knives (Arthurian) (known by various names incorporating references to "long knives" since well before 1934), not the Nazi event AFAICT. And when the Department of Defense citation explicitly ties its reference to a "night of the long knives" back to a previous event, it's an event from 1946, not 1934. So I think, on a balance, this probably has a genericized meaning (like also putsch and holocaust/Holocaust). - -sche (discuss) 02:54, 24 February 2020 (UTC)