Talk:résistance de l'air

RFD discussion: January 2019

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résistance de l'air

Sounds SOP to me. Per utramque cavernam 11:28, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

RFD discussion: December 2020

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

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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résistance de l'air

See also: Requests_for_deletion/English

French. Tagged by PUC on 4 January 2019, not listed. J3133 (talk) 09:46, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Delete, SOP. Imetsia (talk) 17:43, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Delete. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 18:51, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Keep. Air resistance is specifically resistance towards motion of an immersed object, and not, say, resistance to being heated (heat capacity), or to being accelerated (mass). Taking that point even further, I could climb halfway up a mountain before being unable to breathe, and then say "the air is resisting my ascent -- the air resistance prevents me from going further up". Or, if UV rays are unable to penetrate the atmosphere, you could say the air is "resisting" entry. If anyone feels that I am being disingenious in "misinterpreting" the term, that is evidence that that person has a specific understanding of the "proper" interpretation, which means it's totally a word.
More importantly, it's an important concept in engineering, and this dictionary would become less useful if the entry was deleted, and following guidelines should be subservient to being useful.
Also, the term was listed here. It was archived without being detagged, after being ignored on this page for just under a year.__Gamren (talk) 19:58, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

@Gamren: You say air resistance is "resistance towards motion of an immersed object". So if you wanted to study the motion of an object immersed in gaseous methane or in liquid mercury, for example, you'd speak of "air resistance" too?

Also, our definition of immerse speak only of liquids, not of any type of fluid. If it can be used for gaseous mediums too, it would be good to add that to our entry.

And are you judging the French entry on its own merits, or on the merits of the English one? Because from where I stand, i.e. from a native-speaker point of view, it's completely SOP. PUC – 19:21, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

No, I wouldn't call it air resistance in those cases. Your comparison is irrelevant, since mercury resistance and methane resistance aren't, to my knowledge, attested. If a great number of such constructions were attested, I would probably be inclined to add a sense to resistance, and declare the constructions to be SOP. But, they aren't, and it's not.
immerse is also used for gases, I've added three citations to that page.
I don't see how the French and English terms are meaningfully different, i.e. in what way they have different merits. "Resistance of the air" isn't SOP, because the question "resistance to what?" is unanswered.
__Gamren (talk) 19:45, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

The English and French seem to have quite different merits. Compare something like sewing machine (assuming, for the sake of argument, that it's not SOP) and the Italian macchina per cucire ("machine for sewing"). They both refer to the same physical item, but the additional "per" in the Italian seems to me very probative of SOPness. So too with the French here, where the extra preposition and article indicate that the page is worthy of deletion. Imetsia (talk) 19:54, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

@Gamren: I simply wanted to point out that your definition is misleading: AFAICT, "air resistance" does not mean "resistance towards motion of an immersed object (in just any fluid)" (if it did, it would definitely not be SOP), but merely "resistance towards motion of an object immersed in air" (in which case it can, imo, legitimately be argued to be SOP).

Also, you're bringing attestation into the equation, but it seems to me to have no bearing on whether what we're dealing with is SOP. I'm not surprised that "methane resistance [to motion]" or "mercury resistance [to motion]" aren't attested, given the state of the physical world: we move around in air, and are consequently chiefly interested in the effects of air on motion. But given that air is not the only fluid in existence, other combinations are conceivable too; and I don't see any difference in SOPness between "air resistance" and these hypothetical combinations. So in other words, I would add a sense to resistance right now, without waiting for attestations of other "X resistance" to support it.

Another point: air drag is attested. Should we have an entry for it? PUC – 21:09, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Obviously not. drag already has a relevant definition at the very top: "Resistance of the air (or some other fluid) to something moving through it". Then, "air drag" is just "drag due to air". See, the definition explains that drag is a specific type of resistance. You can't just add a new definition to resistance if that sense is only ever used in one specific complex.__Gamren (talk) 23:36, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

@Gamren: It's not clear to me why it's different. It's a bit like saying that because methane drag or mercury drag (or other combinations) are unattested (AFAICT), we should not have a generic sense at drag ("Resistance of a fluid to something moving through it.") (I've slightly edited that entry, btw, please revert if it's incorrect).

And water resistance is actually attested in the relevant sense. (Examples: 1, 2, 3). PUC – 11:23, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

As I said, the difference is that you can use drag, without any specification of the medium, to express this, as the current citation does. You can't do that with resistance. The sentence When designing cars, manufacturers have to take resistance into consideration. doesn't convey the same information. These two words are not synonymous. Resistance does not mean drag. Drag does not mean resistance. They are two words, and they do not mean the same thing. I don't know how to simplify this already very simple message. We're clearly missing each other's points here. @Equinox, you're good at English, can you help us communicate?
I've removed the subsense at drag, as it seems entirely superfluous.__Gamren (talk) 12:33, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

@Gamren: "As I said, the difference is that you can use drag, without any specification of the medium": that's an interesting point, which I haven't seen you make clearly before, so I don't know where that "As I said" comes from.

Now, to answer that point: the fact that the medium has to be specified does not mean that we cannot add a sense to resistance. We routinely do just that. Take article, sense 7: AFAICT, for it to have that sense, it always has to be qualified with an adjective: "genuine article", "shrewd article", "dateless article", etc. Yet we list that sense, because it's more economical than creating an entry for every attested combination (even though I did create genuine article).

"You can't just add a new definition to resistance if that sense is only ever used in one specific complex": that's also a valid point, which I've just disproven by showing that "resistance" in the sense of "drag" is not only found in "air resistance", but also "water resistance". You said above that "If a great number of such constructions were attested, I would probably be inclined to add a sense to resistance". So, how many more combinations do you need? PUC – 13:40, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Actually, in English you can use resistance without specifying the medium, but you have to have context that shows which sense- which is what this attributive use of "air" really is. The reason this sense of resistance is limited is because there are so few media that one commonly talks about moving through. I have found usage of "wind", "water","wave","snow" (in the context of skiing),"mud" (mostly in the context of launching ships), and soil. I suspect that usage referring to flow of substances is also the same sense, in which case you also have "pipeline resistance". One could perhaps make the case that referring to the resistance of air to being moved and the resistance by air to an object being moved through it are the same sense of "resistance"- it's all drag. I think the problem may not be in finding the usage, but in proving that the usage is analogous. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:25, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

@Widsith Do you have any opinion on this?__Gamren (talk) 17:53, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Keep is my opinion. Ƿidsiþ 15:51, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Why? PUC – 15:57, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

• Keep, no more SOP than [[air resistance]] itself is. —Mahāgaja · talk 18:57, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

  It seems SOP too, though. Also, Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion § Attestation vs. the slippery slope. PUC – 19:21, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lambiam, thoughts? PUC – 21:09, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

In my opinion this is just as SOP as air resistance – neither more, nor less. English compound nouns P Q, such as water carrier, water column or watercourse, often have a French counterpart Q de P, such as porteur d’eau, colonne d'eau and cours d'eau. Like in English, the semantic relation between the head and the adjunct varies from case to case: P can be the object of an action suggested by Q, or that of which Q consists, or what it is intended for, and so on. The variability of this semantic relation is illustrated by comparing pot de verre (“glass jar”) with pot de lait (“milk jar”). The fact that the meaning of some compound involves one of these semantic relations and not another one does not make the compound opaque. I'd Delete this together with air resistance, unless there is some THUB or WT:COALMINE argument to keep the latter.  --Lambiam 00:12, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

• Keep — Dentonius 09:43, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

  I'm sorry, this is just too irritating. To the person who will close this, please don't take this vote into account. PUC – 10:53, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I second that. I don't think we should be counting the votes of someone who doesn't even pretend to follow our CFI rules. Imetsia (talk) 15:35, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Admin, are you suggesting that the democratic processes here be abandoned? — Dentonius 16:35, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

• Keep. The adjudicator should not be swayed by the request above. DonnanZ (talk) 15:32, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

What is the rationale for keeping? PUC – 15:57, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

What is not appreciated by the anti-SoP brigade is that compound words are also sum of parts, but they are not deleted because of that. So there is absolutely no reason to delete useful French or English terms just because these languages tend to have two-word terms. I would not want to delete luchtweerstand or luftmotstand which mean exactly the same. To do that would be just as silly. DonnanZ (talk) 18:00, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I haven't nominated those for deletion, and don't plan on doing so. All I'm saying is that my native-speaker intuition tells me "résistance de l'air" is completely SOP, and consequently that this is not a useful entry.

Anyway, I don't see what can be done to force people like you or Dentonius to provide a semblance of a rationale from time to time, and prevent you from voting willy-nilly, so I give up. PUC – 19:15, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

PUC, I don't mind explaining myself. However, who's listening? There's nothing I can say to you, PUC, to get you to change your mind. There's nothing you can say to me to get me to change my mind. So why type up a storm? Here, I would argue that the "friction" component of "air resistance" isn't implied by air + resistance. A body is moving through this fluid, air, and a counteracting force arises due to a number of factors. If I had no knowledge of the language or any knowledge of physics, it's entirely possible that I could imagine "air resistance" to be like an air gapped part of a circuit, or that we're talking about some kind of inertia of air. All of this is simply not clear by putting together air + resistance. Would any of these words have changed your mind? Probably not. This is why I say: let's just vote. — Dentonius 19:54, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Kept. @Gamren, if you could reply to my arguments above, I would appreciate it. PUC – 19:15, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Late, but I would have voted to delete (SOP, no lemmings). ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 14:04, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

I think this was closed too quickly. PUC, I don't think I have any more useful to say.__Gamren (talk) 18:28, 10 December 2020 (UTC)