Talk:subway car

RFD discussion: January–October 2022

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

---

subway car

WT:SOP. Additionally, the reference provided is not a lemming: The site just shows a couple of automatically filtered example sentences. Search engine output does not constitute a lemming. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 02:55, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

• Leaning keep, but the definition needs work. "A passenger vehicle in a subway train" sounds like a vehicle that goes back and forth inside the subway. bd2412 T 00:16, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Is the def better now? Keep anyway, it's NOFSOP (not obvious from sum of parts). DonnanZ (talk) 00:32, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

How is it not obvious? subway sense 2 "An underground railway, especially for mass transit of people in urban areas. " + car sense 5 "A passenger-carrying unit in a subway or elevated train, whether powered or not." — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 02:15, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Is it really, though? bd2412 T 17:19, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Nice one! DonnanZ (talk) 17:44, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

"Subway" and "subway" are not the same. Our entry titles take capitalisation into account. Equinox ◑ 09:34, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

You can write "on a New York Subway car" or "on a subway car in New York". DonnanZ (talk) 10:39, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox: The car doesn't say "Subway", though; it says "SUBWAY", which can be parsed as any capitalization the reader can think of. Also, what about this (Elon Musk's subterranean car tunnel), or this scene of "subway cars"? bd2412 T 19:39, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

So what is that supposed to mean for Wiktionary? I can spray SHIT on a car? Does that attest "shit car"? What point are you trying to make, dude? Equinox ◑ 05:33, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox: Surely you know that the phrase "shit car" occurs almost exclusively within the larger phrase, "piece of shit car". The point in this case, however, is that there are numerous meanings of "subway" and "car" and the common meaning specific to the combination of them is less obvious. bd2412 T 22:08, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@BD2412: Yes, many words are polysemous. How does this escape our long-existing "brown leaf" benchmark? Equinox ◑ 17:33, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

We have an entry for brown leaf, for a nonidiomatic sense of the term. I expect that this meaning of "car" is sufficiently overshadowed by the most common meaning of "car" that a person seeing the phrase "subway car" might legitimately be confused as to what kind of "car" is intended. bd2412 T 18:03, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

"brown leaf" used to be in the RFD header but someone changed it to "green leaf" exactly since brown leaf is an entry. An academic note. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:45, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

An editor who thinks he "knows it all" shouldn't assume that passive users can piece together the parts like he can. That is the height of arrogance. This entry should do it for them. DonnanZ (talk) 09:32, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I am not sure if this term is entry-worthy or not, but you might as well use this collocation as a usage example at the subway entry: {{ux|en|subway car|t=a passenger compartment which is one of several in a subway train, used on a subway}}. I think it’s the compromise we badly need for non-obvious SoPs like this. The |t= parameter is already used to translate some obscure Early Modern English quotes, so this idea should not be problematic. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 17:30, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Leaning keep per bd2412. AG202 (talk) 01:06, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

• Delete – obviously SOP as per Fytcha.  --Lambiam 19:30, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
• Delete – Jberkel 20:07, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Weak delete. Must have been spending too much time around the brown-leaf OED. Equinox ◑ 05:34, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Delete. - TheDaveRoss 15:19, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

• Would this be a useful entry for translations? Are their other languages where "subway car" is translated differently than "train car"? bd2412 T 16:54, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Possibly. Synonyms would be metro car, Tube car, Tube carriage, underground car, etc. DonnanZ (talk) 07:27, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

What are they called in other languages, though? bd2412 T 04:03, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

German U-Bahn-Wagen and Romanian vagon de metrou. Boring! — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 04:08, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Judging by TLFI (sv voiture, section C.), it's "voiture de métro" in French. I believe in Spanish it's "coche de metro" or "vagon de metro" or both. The problem is that a subway is just another type of railroad as far as the terminology goes, so the parts of a subway train have basically the same names as the parts of any passenger train. After all, there are passenger rail routes where the same train travels both above and below ground- if you board aboveground in the suburbs somewhere and alight in a subway station downtown, is it a subway car or a passenger-rail car? Chuck Entz (talk) 05:38, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

It depends, I think, whether the above-ground passages are uncommon. A regular railroad train passing through a long tunnel certainly doesn't become a subway. bd2412 T 07:36, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

This is 5:3 for deletion but the "weak" and "leaning" votes make the counting harder. If "weak" and "leaning" is 0.5, we get 4.5:2 for deletion, which is above the 2/3 threshold and in the RFD closure vote no one required a higher threshold. This can probably be closed as deleted. 6 months passed from last comment. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:45, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Delete, SOP. PUC – 18:50, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Delete as per nomination. Meaning can be inferred from the definitions of the entries subway and car. ‑‑Kai Burghardt (talk) 00:36, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Delete as SOP (as explained by Fytcha). - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 02:59, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

• Deleted - TheDaveRoss 14:19, 6 October 2022 (UTC)