Talk:porno

adjective

"Porno" is sometimes used (probably not in the USA, though, I suspect) as an adjective, as in "a porno film" etc. Etymonline says "Porno (adj.) is attested from 1952" [1]. I think we should add the adjectival use. Thanks - Person12 08:59, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

• No - that is just an attributive use of the noun. SemperBlotto 09:01, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

I've just done a bit more research comparing North American (US & Canadian) usage to Australian and New Zealand usage (couldn't find a lot on British usage, unfortunately) and it looks like 'porno' is considered an abbreviation of "pornography" (and thus a noun) only in North America, whereas it's used as an abbreviation of "pornographic" (and thus obviously an adjective) in Australia and New Zealand.

See:

• Canadian Oxford Dictionary "( also porno ) (informal) → noun pornography"
• The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English "pornography"

vs:

• The Australian Oxford Dictionary "pornographic"
• The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary "pornographic"

It's also listed as an adjective as well as a noun at dictionary.com ("pertaining to or dealing in pornography; pornographic: porn shops" - that's the adjective sense) as well as the previously mentioned Etymonline, of course.

So it actually looks like "porno film" is equally likely to be an attributive use of the adjective rather than necessarily the noun and our entry does need to show the adjectival usage, perhaps with regional tags.--Person12 05:34, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Revised entry

Based on the information in the previous discussion, I propose something along the following lines for the revised entry:

===Abbreviation===

1. (Canada, US) pornography; usually refers to an audiovisual recording (e.g., on a videotape).

# (Canada, US) a pornographic film # (Australia)(New Zealand) pornographic (adjectival use)

--Person12 06:00, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

(maybe a better version:)

Abbreviation

1. pornographic [from 1950s]

   That's a porno film.

2. pornography [from 1960s]

   They're going to watch a porno.

(dates - generalized to decade - from etymonline, which has 1952 and 1962 respectively) --Person12 08:32, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Adjectival usage in Finnish

In colloquial Finnish, "porno" is widely used as an adjective, meaning "excellent, hot, great, awesome" etc. E.g. "tosi porno auto" = "that's one bitchin' ride". Could somebody please add this usage?

89.27.34.156 15:05, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

RFV discussion: March 2012

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porno

Rfv-sense, but I can't work out which sense was meant to be RFVed, 'cause the tag is badly placed. Let's assume "(uncountable) pornography" (even if that wasn't the sense the tagger meant, I hereby RFV it), because "(countable) a pornographic film" is clearly in widespread use. - -sche (discuss) 21:32, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

This was indeed the second sense that was tagged, with the following comment: "rfq-sense re sense 2: if uncountable how does it apply to a single recording (as per def)?". — Xavier, 00:11, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, the confusion seems to be that sense 1 covers adjective/attributive ("a porno film"), 3 covers the individual work ("watch a porno"), and 2... what is 2? It could be uncountable if it means e.g. "watch some porno". I would suggest dropping the whole Abbreviation malarkey and having a Noun entry. (It doesn't seem very adjectival: "more porno"? "very porno"?) Equinox ◑ 00:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

There seems to be such adjectival uses, though: "You're more porno than any other ok maybe not markus but otherwise.", "The more porno than homo visual style of Interview magazine, the excessive stylistic play, is frankly non-erotic.", "I had another good cum, but this one was much less loving and more porno than my first one", etc. — Xavier, 00:34, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Could be. They still sound like noun usages to me. Sometimes a noun is self-consciously used as an adjective without really having any adjectival properties, e.g. (from Google Books) "This story is very sci-fi", "It was very California". Equinox ◑ 00:39, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Maybe. But consider that in each of those sentences, "porno" is compared to another adjective : porno vs homo (another abbreviation), porno vs visual, porno vs loving.

As for (uncountable) pornography, bgc yields some results too: "First I remember, that in Denmark, where porno is the most popular among Scandinavian countries, as far as I know, the violence crimes decreased after porno was made free", "Unfortunately, Porno is itself excessively rule-bound", "In any case, porno is littered — porno is heaped — with the deaths of feelings", etc. — Xavier, 00:56, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Good points, everyone, and good cite-suggestions, Xavier. I've cleaned this up a bit, and now I think I'll withdraw the RFV. - -sche (discuss) 04:40, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

RFV discussion: December 2017–December 2018

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porno

Dutch, RFV-sense of: (slang) use of the word to say someone is hot in an attractive way 1. Is this attested? 2. Is this really used as a noun? Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 13:51, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

( Might be something like de:porno (adj., colloquial youth slang). -84.161.36.181 20:47, 23 December 2017 (UTC) )

If it's attested, it probably wouldn't be a noun. But I've never heard of this, so it's likely not used in Randstad slang. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 22:02, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

I've retracted the RFV, it seems attestable as an adjective in phrases like "echt porno" and "helemaal porno". Perhaps it's mostly internet slang? Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 10:47, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

• Striking as withdrawn. —Granger (talk · contribs) 13:02, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

RFD discussion: February 2021–January 2022

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porno

RFD sense: adjective. Clear use of the noun attributively. Renard Migrant (talk) 21:57, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree with you. I did a bit of fishing on Google Books just for fun, and did find the following:

• "Babe! You look so porno!"
• It could be called The Joy Suck Club . No , that sounded a little too porno.
• "Not too porno for you?" Lagerfeld had asked his older assistants at the studio.
• Your novel isn't too porno, I hope?
• ...thumbed through his collection of magazines. Nothing there. Too dull or too porno.

(There are actually a handful more "too porno" results, but I'll stop here.)

I'm still inclined to see these as nonce formations, in the same way that other nouns can be "adjectivalized" on the fly, e.g. "That sweater is so 80s", or "Their drama is very high school". But I'm afraid I've opened Pandora's box by finding these quotes, since they do seem to satisfy WT:CFI, which (unfortunately) has no provisions regarding ad-hoc/nonce forms. And even if it did, I don't know if I can muster a good quantitative argument for why it shouldn't be counted. If the number of uses modified by adverbs of degree (a proxy for number of adjectival uses) as a fraction of all uses of the word is very small compared to 'real' adjectives, that would be a good argument that the adjective form should be ignored as nonce. But (using just a few arbitrarily chosen adverbs), the ratios for porno and high school are not that far below orange which is clearly a bona fide adjective+noun (though not particularly gradable as an adjective - more gradable adjectives like hungry, lovely, or hot blow the others out of the water). So, yeah. What a mess. Colin M (talk) 23:53, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Right, this has come up before. Many nouns can in a certain style be "graded" like this with "so", "too", "very" etc., as a regular feature of English, without apparently thereby qualifying for a separate adjective entry. Some genuine adjectives are not, or rarely, gradable, however, so I'm not sure that counting frequency will always work. I'm not sure whether we have objective criteria other than "feel" or "common sense" to distinguish. Mihia (talk) 01:34, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, if we were considering something like inverted that isn't really gradable, I think the other two tests to look at would be whether it can be used predicatively ("the bottle ended up inverted"), and whether it can be modified by adverbs ("a concerningly inverted minivan"). Regarding porno, the examples above are mostly predicative, and it's possible to find some stray examples of interesting adverbial modifiers like "deliciously porno", or "suspiciously porno", but those clearly aren't representative of standard usage. Colin M (talk) 03:53, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

There are a few uses of “more porno than graphic”,^[2][3] which a superficial analysis could view as attesting a sense as an adjective. However, I take this to be a playful decomposition of pornographic as porno- + graphic instead of pornography + -ic.  --Lambiam 18:23, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Also, to be clear, my !vote (do people say that here?) is Delete. Colin M (talk) 03:56, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Over here, using the wikipedianism “!vote” is !done.  --Lambiam 18:23, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

At the very least delete the current adjective sense that adds nothing. It's been there since 2010, as an adjective section since 2012, and it has always been placed above the noun. Talk about an embarrassment. I think the quotes found by Colin M are mostly "reminiscent of pornography". ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 08:31, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

• Keep porno -> (pornography, pornographic) — Dentonius 13:42, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
• Delete adjective sense since it's the noun used attributively. --Robbie SWE (talk) 18:54, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
• Delete in the absence of convincing true adjectival uses. Mihia (talk) 23:13, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
• Keep. We don't say that's a pornography film, but we do say that's a porno film, meaning pornographic, not pornography as defined for the noun. DAVilla 22:51, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
• Strong Keep In the talk page for porno it is demonstrated that ‘porno’ should be considered an adjective by the Lemming principle (Aus and NZ dictionaries) and also a noun by the same principle (U.S and Canadian dictionaries). Also Colin M has demonstrated in quotes from U.K, U.S, Irish and even German (Karl Lagerfeld) sources that ‘porno’ can be an adjective. Also in the entry for porno we have a quote from Martin Amis proving that it can be a noun in the U.K too. Clearly we should keep both noun and adjective senses and also remove the North American/Australasian distinction. Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:20, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Keep per Overlordnat1. AG202 (talk) 20:15, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Kept. bd2412 T 07:14, 26 January 2022 (UTC)