Talk:pick up the phone

RFD discussion: December 2017–November 2018

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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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pick up the phone

Delete (or convert to a {{translation only}} entry if it's really needed). --Barytonesis (talk) 15:26, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

{{translation only}} seems fine to me. The translations are hard to guess. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 16:11, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Even though pick up has a phone-specific sense (which is reasonable, since you can “pick up” a phone by pressing a button or swiping an icon), I’d expect pick up the smartphone or pick up the mobile to be possible if this was just pick up + the + phone. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 11:47, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

These may be possible (see a cite I found below); "phone" might just be more common. Equinox ◑ 12:00, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

• 2012, Robyn Carr, Virgin River (page 424)

  And to Sharon Lampert, RN, WHNP, for sharing her expertise as a women's health nurse practitioner, but mostly for picking up your cell phone no matter where you were and answering delicate questions about female anatomy and function with directness and honesty.

I mean this wording specifically (pick up the <type of phone>). It is odd that you can say “pick up your <any type of phone>” and “your <any type of phone> is ringing, Joe. Pick it up”, but only “pick up the (tele)phone, God damn it!” (or rather, other nouns are unexpectedly rare in this construct specifically). — Ungoliant ^(falai) 12:13, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

(note: my comments are not a vote) — Ungoliant ^(falai) 12:24, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

It does not seem to be idiomatic. Make a {{translation only}} or delete it, IMO. - -sche (discuss) 23:21, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Make {{translation only}} or delete. pick up + the + phone. If we deleted it, could the translations be moved to pick up as a translation of sense 13? Of the languages I know it seems acceptable, but I don't know about the rest. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 03:12, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Delete. Translations can be moved to pick up or to a combination of targets. Kiwima (talk) 20:29, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

• Keep as is: it can only be sum of parts with respect to the phone-specific sense of pick up, and it seems "pick up the phone" (or telephone) came first, and from it pick up developed as an abbreviation; I am not sure. dictionary.cambridge.org has it for learners[1], which is a bit of a WT:LEMMING. As for the claim that translations can be moved to a combination of targets, that is user unfriendly and may not even work. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:38, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Kept. Consensus is in favor of keeping as a translation target, but there are two reasonably possible meanings to be translated, so the entry needs to be cleaned up. bd2412 T 15:42, 21 November 2018 (UTC)