Talk:stick of furniture

Deletion discussion

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stick of furniture

I stubbornly persist in holding that one can have a stick of [X] where X anything possibly made of wood with a negative, meaning something like "the slightest bit". If this is so, this is SoP. See WT:RFV#furniture for attestable examples of X. DCDuring TALK 22:03, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

As a set phrase, I think this should have an entry. SpinningSpark 01:20, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

See stick#Usage notes. (I didn't add that. If I had, I would have generalized it to make clear that the term applied to more than furniture.)

It is a set phrase only if set phrase does not mean a "phrase" that is "set". If it were a set phrase, then I couldn't substitute terms. Of course there is a need to respect the semantics, so the substitutions are restricted in range. Consider: for stick: single piece or bit; For furniture: wood/furniture/firewood/fuel/lumber/timber/spruce/pine etc. DCDuring TALK 02:04, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Was going to disagree (the examples you give are all specifically types of wood, while "furniture" is more generalised, and wouldn't usually be thought of as a type of wood - and the fact the phrase continues in the modern era suggests that not all the furniture involved is made of wood anyway), but there are a handful of Google Books hits for google books:"stick of a house" and one relevant hit for "stick of a chair". google books:"stick of a table" and google books:"stick of a cupboard" found nothing. For mass nouns, google books:"stick of furnishing" finds 16 hits. Still not convinced how valid this extended sense is: google books:"stick of furniture" finds ~39,000 hits - compared to the sparse-to-non-existent hits for the other terms, there's clearly some sort of setness about this. Still, we could do what Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary does, and move this to a sense at stick (I think it's unlikely anyone would look up stick of furniture first anyway). Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:04, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

(I think you mean {{b.g.c.}}). Mglovesfun (talk) 09:10, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Whoops, thanks. Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:07, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

“stick of furniture”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. finds no lemmings. “stick”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. finds some dictionaries with stick of furniture as a usage example for a specific (usually overspecific IMO) definition. Obviously, as a common collocation, "stick of furniture" would be a lovely addition to a comprehensive, high-quality phrasebook, if only there were one. DCDuring TALK 12:14, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

I've seen both stick of and lick of used to indicate (usually in the negative) a complete lack of something, as in not a stick of furniture in the place or she didn't have a lick of sense. But it can be used without furniture, as in not a stick of kindling or firewood, so I would have to vote for deletion.--Jacecar (talk) 10:16, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

• Keep. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:28, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 12:44, 8 August 2013 (UTC)