Talk:opinions are like assholes
Add topicLatest comment: 2 years ago by Metaknowledge in topic RFD discussion: November–December 2021
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No actual content, just red links. It is not a real proverb but a joke or quip. Equinox ◑ 06:36, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- Joke or not, the four-word statement does carry meaning that cannot be deduced from its parts. I have heard the phrase used myself (IRL) with no context to the rest of its bit, so I dug around Google Books in an attempt to prove my case. I inserted an actual definition and etymology, although I hope someone improves it because I for the life of me can't find the movie this was from... As it stands after I edited it, Keep. PseudoSkull (talk) 07:13, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- Although come to think of it, I guess none of the terms listed were even SOP. opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one doesn't mention anything about the opinions "stinking" which is an explicit part of the meaning of the proverb according to my definition. Even opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one and they usually stink is arguably not SOP, because it is using a different sense of the word stink for each noun in the joke. What I mean by that is, when you say "someone's opinion stinks", you're using sense 2 of stink; you're saying the opinion is inferior. But when you say "an asshole stinks", you're talking about the bad smell of the asshole which is sense 1. So really the joke is mixing 2 senses of the same verb stink to apply differently to both the nouns in the proverb, assuming you, the reader, know the connection between these two senses. I can imagine a situation of some foreigners learning English, for example, not being able to see this connection. PseudoSkull (talk) 07:40, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- What really stinks is this entry. Delete 94.109.175.130 23:39, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- Sorry, but IPs can't vote by default per Wiktionary:Voting policy. PseudoSkull (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- @PseudoSkull: This policy applies only to formal votes. In informal votes such as this one, the decision to take IP votes into account or not is left to the closing administrator's discretion. As an involved party, you shouldn't strike votes like that. 94.109.97.108 14:20, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
- There's no bias here (believe it or not), I would have scratched it even if you had voted Keep. I always took the eligibility section of the voting policy to apply even to RFD votes, because 1. the page doesn't explicitly say the rules only apply to formal votes, and 2. if it doesn't apply to RFD I find that very concerning. But since my striking was disputed, I'll call in another admin to check out the situation: @Chuck Entz. PseudoSkull (talk) 14:58, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
- I can't point to any policy or precedent (I don't normally deal with closing these things), but this is the first time I can remember anyone explicitly striking a vote on the forums for this reason. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:31, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
- It's clear from the rest of the policy that it only covers votes proper, not RFD discussions. Look no further than the sections on "vote creation," "starting the vote," or "closing the vote" - all of which describe certain rules that we have never applied to RFD discussions. If we want to invalidate IP votes at RFD, we'd need a new policy; we can't interpret this one to cover more conduct than it was ever intended to. Imetsia (talk) 22:49, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
- Let's not edit each other's presumably good-faith comments during a live discussion. (I've undone the strikethru.) That vote as it stands may very well not count, so thanks for pointing this out. I'm not going to weigh in on this deletion request, but I will say that I don't think the joke about the entry stinking really adds anything to it either. DAVilla 20:37, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Imetsia, DAVilla Well then I apologize for the generous judgment of policy on my part; however, I must say am very surprised that IP votes are technically allowed to be counted in RFD, and I'd be willing to vote for a policy against that at the BP. It's a bad precedent that a future vote should address. PseudoSkull (talk) 14:30, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
- @PseudoSkull: This policy applies only to formal votes. In informal votes such as this one, the decision to take IP votes into account or not is left to the closing administrator's discretion. As an involved party, you shouldn't strike votes like that. 94.109.97.108 14:20, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
- Sorry, but IPs can't vote by default per Wiktionary:Voting policy. PseudoSkull (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- What really stinks is this entry. Delete 94.109.175.130 23:39, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- Although come to think of it, I guess none of the terms listed were even SOP. opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one doesn't mention anything about the opinions "stinking" which is an explicit part of the meaning of the proverb according to my definition. Even opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one and they usually stink is arguably not SOP, because it is using a different sense of the word stink for each noun in the joke. What I mean by that is, when you say "someone's opinion stinks", you're using sense 2 of stink; you're saying the opinion is inferior. But when you say "an asshole stinks", you're talking about the bad smell of the asshole which is sense 1. So really the joke is mixing 2 senses of the same verb stink to apply differently to both the nouns in the proverb, assuming you, the reader, know the connection between these two senses. I can imagine a situation of some foreigners learning English, for example, not being able to see this connection. PseudoSkull (talk) 07:40, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- Delete. Not dictionary material. Mihia (talk) 22:50, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Mihia And what are your grounds for saying that? PseudoSkull (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- What Equinox says, basically. I think we should set a high bar for sayings, and that we do not need to list middling wisecracks, even when these are circulating. Mihia (talk) 10:22, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Mihia I don't think the "middling" quality of a saying needs to be assessed to any extent—we're bordering on a court filled with all kinds of inconsistent biases if we allow judgments like that to be debated... We don't need to discuss how much we like the saying—just whether or not it could be deduced from the sum of its parts. And I think the phrase in question meets that criterion pretty clearly per my explanations. PseudoSkull (talk) 21:06, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- I don't fully agree that the usual SoP rules should apply to sayings and proverbs. For one thing, I believe that strong proverbs and sayings should be kept even if they are explicable as SoP (e.g. absence makes the heart grow fonder). Conversely, I do not believe that every not-fully-understandable-as-SoP clause or sentence that people utter in attestable frequency should be included as a "saying". Therefore, I believe that some judgement must be made about what is and is not a "proper" saying or proverb, which will necessarily sometimes be somewhat subjective, or something of a grey area, into which "opinions are like assholes" perhaps falls -- but just on the wrong side of the line, in my own opinion. Mihia (talk) 14:14, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Mihia But that's the thing, you can't expect a consistent interpretation from a community of editors of "what is and isn't a proper saying". IMO I think it's generally more productive to have to have some consistent measure of what is and isn't acceptable. The term you brought up, absence makes the heart grow fonder, is so much a set phrase that it is subject to little to no variation, so I think it's acceptable to keep that. Its amount of setness is a reasonable metric for deciding whether to keep or delete it. opinions are like assholes; everybody has one, and they usually stink is, however, not very set at all, although the ellipsis (opinions are like assholes) at least consistently appears as it is. I'd still argue it needs to be kept in though, in its most common form, because another metric for SOPness can be used in this case, which it, at least technically, passes as being not deducible. While I don't like the level of variance of the phrase (as Chuck Entz points out below) that exists, I think the most common forms of these three phrases should be kept in. Whether or not it's a "proper" phrase is vague and I believe it cannot be used as a consistent metric, so therefore should not be used. On another note, I think practically it's very likely a good handful of people will find our entry for the phrases useful, as I already find evident during this discussion. Digging around through Google Books for cites also gave me some more evidence, via the dialogue of the characters in some of those books, that not everyone who's presented the saying really gets it. PseudoSkull (talk) 17:28, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
- For sure, a less vague or subjective description than "proper" would be wanted for, let's say, the CFI, hence my scare quotes. Nevertheless, some, even many, of the decisions at RFD are routinely just based on people's subjective opinions (e.g. whether something is understandable as SoP). If we had only tests that could be mechanically applied, so that everybody always arrived at the same answer in all cases, then we would not need RFD discussions at all. Mihia (talk) 17:57, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Mihia But that's the thing, you can't expect a consistent interpretation from a community of editors of "what is and isn't a proper saying". IMO I think it's generally more productive to have to have some consistent measure of what is and isn't acceptable. The term you brought up, absence makes the heart grow fonder, is so much a set phrase that it is subject to little to no variation, so I think it's acceptable to keep that. Its amount of setness is a reasonable metric for deciding whether to keep or delete it. opinions are like assholes; everybody has one, and they usually stink is, however, not very set at all, although the ellipsis (opinions are like assholes) at least consistently appears as it is. I'd still argue it needs to be kept in though, in its most common form, because another metric for SOPness can be used in this case, which it, at least technically, passes as being not deducible. While I don't like the level of variance of the phrase (as Chuck Entz points out below) that exists, I think the most common forms of these three phrases should be kept in. Whether or not it's a "proper" phrase is vague and I believe it cannot be used as a consistent metric, so therefore should not be used. On another note, I think practically it's very likely a good handful of people will find our entry for the phrases useful, as I already find evident during this discussion. Digging around through Google Books for cites also gave me some more evidence, via the dialogue of the characters in some of those books, that not everyone who's presented the saying really gets it. PseudoSkull (talk) 17:28, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
- I don't fully agree that the usual SoP rules should apply to sayings and proverbs. For one thing, I believe that strong proverbs and sayings should be kept even if they are explicable as SoP (e.g. absence makes the heart grow fonder). Conversely, I do not believe that every not-fully-understandable-as-SoP clause or sentence that people utter in attestable frequency should be included as a "saying". Therefore, I believe that some judgement must be made about what is and is not a "proper" saying or proverb, which will necessarily sometimes be somewhat subjective, or something of a grey area, into which "opinions are like assholes" perhaps falls -- but just on the wrong side of the line, in my own opinion. Mihia (talk) 14:14, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Mihia I don't think the "middling" quality of a saying needs to be assessed to any extent—we're bordering on a court filled with all kinds of inconsistent biases if we allow judgments like that to be debated... We don't need to discuss how much we like the saying—just whether or not it could be deduced from the sum of its parts. And I think the phrase in question meets that criterion pretty clearly per my explanations. PseudoSkull (talk) 21:06, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- What Equinox says, basically. I think we should set a high bar for sayings, and that we do not need to list middling wisecracks, even when these are circulating. Mihia (talk) 10:22, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Mihia And what are your grounds for saying that? PseudoSkull (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
- Keep. Meaning can not be deduced by its parts. Implies (without stating any further context or explanation) that a person’s opinion has no value as everyone else has one.--Dmol (talk) 03:09, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- Keep as it’s idiomatic as PseudoSkull and Dmol explain and also because we have other similarly crude wisecracks like mushroom syndrome (but oddly enough not mushroom management), so this doesn’t seem to be a valid basis for exclusion. Overlordnat1 (talk) 17:58, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- However, note that "mushroom syndrome" is a phrase, not a saying. For me this makes a difference – quite an important one in fact – and I would support keeping "mushroom syndrome" (assuming it exists as a known phrase as described). Mihia (talk) 19:00, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- If kept, note under etymology that the quote is from the character Harry Callahan in the movie The Dead Pool. 70.175.192.217 21:13, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
- I was trying to think of other nouns that opinions might be like to see if this was a unique phrase, but all I could come up with that had any use was opinions are like onions. DTLHS (talk) 04:45, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
- @DTLHS The version I first heard, many years ago in more innocent times, was "opinions are like armpits- everybody's got 'em, and they all stink." Looking through Google Books, there's quite a bit of variability in the punchline: "[everybody has/everybody's got] ['em/a couple/at least one] and [they all/most of them/many of them/some of them/they tend to] stink" (among others). This may be at least partly an artifact of authors independently reworking a more uniform set phrase on the fly because they can't or won't use it in print. Still, if you search on "opinions are like", you'll find there are lots and lots of variations- and none of them are entirely SOP. It looks to me like this is an idea for a joke rather than a lexical item. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:54, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Chuck Entz I am willing to concede that there are many variations to the saying, and I don't particularly like that—however, from a practical perspective, if we include only the most common of the variants I think it can be useful to people who want to know what the phrase means. Including all the variants as entries would be a giant mess, though (redirects at best, maybe?). The fact that someone (not even me!) created the entry and one user commented in this discussion about its etymology is some nice anecdotal evidence that shows me that people have an interest in its lexical value. PseudoSkull (talk) 14:26, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
- @DTLHS The version I first heard, many years ago in more innocent times, was "opinions are like armpits- everybody's got 'em, and they all stink." Looking through Google Books, there's quite a bit of variability in the punchline: "[everybody has/everybody's got] ['em/a couple/at least one] and [they all/most of them/many of them/some of them/they tend to] stink" (among others). This may be at least partly an artifact of authors independently reworking a more uniform set phrase on the fly because they can't or won't use it in print. Still, if you search on "opinions are like", you'll find there are lots and lots of variations- and none of them are entirely SOP. It looks to me like this is an idea for a joke rather than a lexical item. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:54, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
- Keep. I agree with PseudoSkull. Imetsia (talk) 22:49, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
- Keep. Idiomatic and can't really be deduced from the text. Conflatuman (talk) 04:22, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
- RFD-kept. 5 for keeping, 3 for deleting, and all opinions considered valid (the title of this section notwithstanding). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 21:45, 22 December 2021 (UTC)