Talk:sectary

RFD discussion: August–September 2017

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sectary

I think I have succeeded in making "A sectarian" redundant by adding "A member of a particular sect of thought or practice, school, party, or profession."

The above looks like a DCDuring comment from 16 February 2017, per diff. I find the technique of editing senses by adding new ones and then sending the old ones for deletion quite odd, but anyway. I think that, for disambiguation, the edit should have been from "A sectarian" to "A sectarian; a member of a sect"; "member of a sect" is the first sense of sectarian#Noun, and it is the definition that Merriam-Webster has for "sectary"[1]. The new definition is syntactically ambiguous; it is probably intended as "A member of a particular sect of (thought or practice, school, party or profession)" but it can be also parsed as "A member of ((a particular sect of thought) or (practice, school, party or profession))"; the first "or" is misleading since if this is an OR-list of items, there should be only one or, before the last item, and therefore "A member of a particular sect of thought, practice, school, party or profession". I guess my preference would be to change the original def to "A member of a sect", and remove the newly added definition. On the other hand, the new def makes it clear that the definition is not constrained to religious sects. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:32, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Sense deleted without opposition, although it could have just been deemed redefined in the entry without bringing it here. bd2412 T 18:23, 14 September 2017 (UTC)