Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/April

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← March 2019 · April 2019 · May 2019 → · (current)

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sleiveen

This spelling is extremely rare in books, and the spelling sleeveen is 360 times more common in raw Google search results and is the only spelling found in other dictionaries https://onelook.com/?w=sleiveen&ls=a https://onelook.com/?w=sleeveen&ls=a. Is it OK to switch the contents of the two entries? --Espoo (talk) 06:12, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

@Espoo: Yes, this is a perfect example of when you should switch them. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:54, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Regional variation: Penultimate as second highest?

See also somewhat relevant previous discussion about penultimate for "best".

At w:Talk:Christchurch mosque shootings#Penultimate there was a discussion about using penultimate to mean the second-highest terror level (diff). Consensus seems to be that it is unnecessarily confusing for our purposes, so this isn't an article debate. But it leaves lingering questions: apparently at least one person from New Zealand thinks it is completely valid to use it this way. To my ears, it might be interpreted as "the terror level before the last one", and there is an underlying issue that the "ultimate terror level" in my mind would not imply the highest on the present list but the highest that could potentially exist. So ... do we have a genuine case of an international difference in meaning that is worth noting in Wiktionary? It might help head off many future miscommunications on and off Wikipedia. Wnt (talk) 13:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

I have a feeling that it's just a misunderstanding of the word rather than a real regional difference. But I suppose we might as well ask @Jamesjiao, Kiwima for New Zealander insight. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:36, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I have nothing to add as a New Zealander. I have always known penultimate to mean next to last, since before I moved to New Zealand, and I rarely hear the word used at all here. Kiwima (talk) 22:46, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

It means second to last to me. I guess it depends on which way you look at it: is the highest level the 'last' level or is the lowest level the 'last' level? If there is no consensus to this question, then it is ambiguous at best. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 22:29, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

choice

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/choice#Adjective sense 2 (NZ slang term) is listed under 'adjective' but the example sentence shows it used as an exclamation. 79.180.55.69 23:38, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

for a minute there

I wanna add this term. It's in the Radiohead song Karma Police, which I believe automatically qualifies under Wiktionary:Entry layout#Rock and roll. --I learned some phrases (talk) 10:20, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

• I think it is just for a minute and there. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

  And I think for a minute is just for and a minute. There is also “for a second there” and “for a brief moment there”; we should not discriminate against shorter divisions of time.  --Lambiam 20:47, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

  For just a few confused minutes there I was almost lured into accepting for a minute as legitimate. DCDuring (talk) 20:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

sideways on

Are adverbial phrases adding "on" at the end, such as sideways on, accounted for yet in Wiktionary? --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Do you have some actual examples? DCDuring (talk) 20:51, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring: This one --Backinstadiums (talk) 03:41, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

on the shelf is just a PP serving as an adjunct to sideways. DCDuring (talk) 04:03, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring: sorry that was not the link I intended. Check this one --Backinstadiums (talk) 17:51, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't see any definitions or usage examples, let alone attestation. DCDuring (talk) 18:34, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring: ...while facing him, not sideways on like many matadors do. --Backinstadiums (talk) 22:23, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

See sideways-on (adjective). DCDuring (talk) 00:27, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

year adverb

Should year be added as adverbial because of sentences like "Immigrants officially sent $51 billion in remittances home in 2012 — far larger than the US government’s foreign aid budget of $39 billion that year"? --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:33, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't think [year] is adverbial in that example, but [that year] is. Short for (in) that year, and similar in construct to today (= this day/(on) this day), tomorrow, next year, etc. We have entries for last year, next year as translation hubs... Leasnam (talk) 19:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

This is a very common pattern for nouns that refer to time periods, including all the days of the week, months, named years (eg, year of the rat), quarter, period, decade, century, millennium, named holidays, periodic events with temporal extent. Some nouns referring to periodic events (punctive) behave somewhat similarly, I think. I think in every case the noun alternates in speech with a prepositional phrase using some preposition having a temporal sense. In temporal use these nouns still behave like nouns, accepting modification by determiners and adjectival phrases, sometimes even forming plurals. I suppose that we could have usage notes for all such nouns, usage examples, and perhaps even separate definitions, but an adverb PoS seems more confusing than helpful. Something similar comes up with locative use of nouns. DCDuring (talk) 20:48, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Election Night

Shoudd "Election Night" be added owing to its usage On Election Night, Republicans were... --Backinstadiums (talk) 18:46, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Well, we have Election Day, but I think you could add "election" to any period of time. DTLHS (talk) 18:48, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, there is also "Election Eve", and apparently "on election afternoon", although it seems to be mostly Day, Night, and Eve which function (with caps) like proper 'holiday'-like names. - -sche (discuss) 21:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Devales? Non-English for shrine, or god-like being or...?

Helloo from Wikipedia again~

I'm starting from here, looking at the instances of 'devales', as I believe it's non-English and should be templated. I found this, but I don't think it's enough by itself.

Thanks for your insights~ Elfabet (talk) 20:47, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

devale, yes it looks includable as English. DTLHS (talk) 21:00, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

There is also the more literary term devalaya (Sinhala දේවාලය), from Sanskrit, which appears to be about equally common. But isn’t this a case of code-switching, using a (transliterated) Sinhala word in an English text? In this book, for instance, the occurrences of the word devale are either part of a proper noun (the name of a temple), recognizable as such by the capitalization, or else given in italics.  --Lambiam 23:26, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Were either of you able to find a more concrete definition, or should we go with the simple "a temple, particularly in ______"? Thanks, Elfabet (talk) 15:07, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Please don't define things you don't understand; that's how errors get propagated. It seems to refer only to Hindu temples. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:44, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Of course not, hence why I'm here, looking for help. Which I'm appreciative of. Do we have a method of requesting the plural of a noun be looked into for inclusion as well? Cheers! Elfabet (talk) 21:20, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

The plural in -s seems to be attested. That's what I put in the entry. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:33, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Not so much Hindu temples but actually the Sinhalese version of Buddhism, which has an unusual dose of syncretism with Hinduism. The Sinhala Wikipedia uses the term also for other temples, such as the Luxor Temple. I am still not convinced that this is more than code switching as you may expect in travelogues and such (like “My personal favorite were poffertjes”, written by an American student visiting Holland).  --Lambiam 21:37, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

The Sinhalese dictionary I checked made a distinction, with a different word being used for Buddhist temples (as would make etymological sense). I would also be suspicious of using Wikipedia as a guide to usage in smaller or minority languages; they are forced to resort to protologisms and protologistic uses of existing words in order to describe things that never before had any local relevance. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

electrencephalography -> electroencephalography

According to google search

• electrencephalography: 79,000 hits (I suspect a common spelling error)
• electroencephalography: 3,270,000 hits

The w:electroencephalography is correct. Category:Electrencephalography should be renamed to Category:Electroencephalography. Perhaps that needs to go under a categories for discussion - never done that before.

• Also, electrencephalography links to a non-existing Wikipedia article!

Dpleibovitz (talk) 01:24, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

• I've converted it into an "alternative form of" and got rid of most of the cruft (don't know about pronunciation). SemperBlotto (talk) 05:06, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

thionyl

Hey. On the WP page, what is that symbol that looks like a robot head? Someone trolling? --I learned some phrases (talk) 12:24, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Looks more like a "grey" alien than a robot. He/she may also be sighted at thionyl chloride. Equinox ◑ 13:46, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

It's a lone pair. DTLHS (talk) 16:44, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Awesome. Is there a Unicode symbol for it? --I learned some phrases (talk) 18:52, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

speak baguette, speak spaghetti, speak sushi

I don't speak baguette, I don't speak spaghetti, I don't speak sushi… there is clearly a pattern but do you think they are worth having an entry? — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 13:40, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Definitely not. It is an indefinitely expandable set of expressions. We might need more at speak#Verb. DCDuring (talk) 14:16, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

"Can't read baguette" etc. can also be occasionally found. Equinox ◑ 14:23, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

The phenomenon is apparently sometimes metonomy for the language which is associated with the noun, more often for the culture of speakers of the language. DCDuring (talk) 14:38, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Doesn't our sense 8 at speak cover it? It might benefit from additional or better examples and rewording. DCDuring (talk) 14:41, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

When the phrase "I don't speak spaghetti!" is used, does it have a jocular connotation, an offensive connotation, or both? Because, if I were Italian, and someone were to say that to me, I feel that it is likely that I would probably laugh more than anything else. On the other hand, "I don't speak baguette." seems much less jocular and far more insulting (although I admit that that is debatable, and that there is a good likelihood that the perception of that particular sentence might vary from person to person). "I don't speak sushi." seems like it could be either or depending upon the tone, but I would perhaps lean more towards the thought that it would be insulting. I don't know, I just think that the phrase "I don't speak spaghetti!" sounds utterly absurd no matter how one might say it. I mean, picture someone saying that in a serious tone, an attempted condescending tone, or a jocular tone. Even if it were a bully saying "Yeah? Well I don't speak spaghetti!" [followed by roaring laughter from their toadies] to a small child, a scenario which would have the most potential for causing offence, I can't imagine the child going home to their parents and saying "Kevin beat me up and said ‘I don't speak spaghetti!’" and the parents having any other reaction than to burst out laughing and then telling their child that "Kevin" sounds like a buffoon. If someone were to say "I don't speak pierogi." to me (I am of partial Polish descent [and in case for some reason you care enough to bother keeping track of what some random person on the Web has said previously {please, if possible, forgive this--in all likelihood--needless digression that has the potential to come off as vain/indicative of narcissism or the like even though that is not my intent/how I think. Y'see, I'm actually a bit paranoid about people jumping to conclusions about--and misunderstanding--myself, my motives, what I am saying in a given instance, etc., and although there--as I just said--is no good reason why anyone here could justify bothering to pay attention to the stuff that I have said previously on personal beliefs, I still feel that I need to cover all of my bases just in case}, you would be incorrect to presume that that was where my and my family's Catholicism came from {or that that even played any part at all in it]. My Polish forebears were Protestant, and my Polish-descended forebear who was a first-generation New Englander converted to Catholicism only when she married an Irish-descended New Englander forebear of mine. The French and Portuguese sides of my family provided the other side of my family with their Catholicism]) in an attempt to mock me, I would lean more towards laughing at how silly they sound saying a line like that, than towards being offended.

@TAKASUGI Shinji: If you don't mind me asking, how would you take someone saying "I don't speak sushi!" in a playful tone. Would it have any impact at all on whether or not you would take offence at such a line? I'm asking because I am wondering if perhaps the perception of lines like the ones that you gave here would at least in part depend upon what culture the person being spoken to grew up around/in, or if it is purely a person-to-person difference. If we include lines like these in the dictionary, I think that labelling them properly (as "jocular", "derogatory", or both) is important. Tharthan (talk) 16:39, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't know what is funny about that, if it is a negative sentence. “I want to speak baguette!” sounds nice. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 22:27, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Found in a book: "I don't speak Starbucks and just always ask for something simple."

I got to it because on a forum someone wrote: "I don't speak sushi or Starbucks […] ." DCDuring (talk) 22:49, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't see anything inherently pejorative in the baguette, spaghetti, and sushi examples. In context they could be used pejoratively. DCDuring (talk) 23:00, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

It seems better to explain those expressions in each entry of food rather than in speak. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 23:33, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Getting off topic, sense 5.1 and sense 8 have some overlap and should perhaps, at a minimum, be moved next to each other. - -sche (discuss) 00:04, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Possibly a merger as subsense 5.1, with rewording, and broad range of usage examples. DCDuring (talk) 12:54, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Variant of 茶餅

I have a package of tea labeled 雲南七子餅茶 with "yunnan chi tse beeng cha" underneath (= 云南七子饼茶 simplified). A web search will show a picture of what I mean. Note the last word is 餅茶, which is not in this dictionary, rather than 茶餅.

1. Are 餅茶 and 茶餅 the same? Should a page be created for the missing one?

2. Which romanization system of which regional language is being used?

Vox Sciurorum (talk) 00:31, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

It's just Mandarin, albeit in a seemingly ad hoc romanisation scheme. I can't speak to whether 餅茶 deserves an entry, although it does seem to mean the same thing. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:52, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

A piece of paper inside has a different non-Pinyin romanization: yunnan chitsu pingcha. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:51, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

餅茶 rather than 茶餅 is the Chinese (and Japanese) name presented in the Wikipedia article Compressed tea. Neither term has a page on the Chinese Wikipedia, but zh:餅茶 is a red link there with 89 incoming links, including one from zh:中國茶 (Chinese tea), where it is given as a synonym of “compressed tea”. No pages link to zh:茶餅. In a Google search, however, "茶餅" is the clear winner, getting 7000 times the number of hits for "餅茶".  --Lambiam 15:00, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

茶餅 is the common vernacular term. I have added 餅茶 as a literary synonym. ---> Tooironic (talk) 14:07, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

nap of the earth

Are we missing a sense at nap, and/or an entry for nap-of-the-earth? (Or which sense covers such usage?) - -sche (discuss) 00:38, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

It is probably the sense of “nap of a fabric”.  --Lambiam 06:20, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ténonts

This is a participle, but what verb is it a participle of? The root *ten- does not list any descendants that this verb can be the participle of; the participle reflects a thematic root-accented *téneti. —Rua (mew) 13:18, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

dipstick

We have these two senses: "(slang, UK) A useless person of inferior intellect"; "(slang, euphemistic) A dipshit". Are these definitions not trying to say the same thing? Merge? Equinox ◑ 19:04, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

They might be used distinctly, but I doubt it. Also, I think the term would be understood and used in the US with either definition, not just UK. DCDuring (talk) 22:04, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't see any important difference in meaning if it's referring to a person. "dipshit" is obviously more vulgar. Mihia (talk) 20:49, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

I merged them. - -sche (discuss) 01:06, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Category:Hot words older than a year

This category is getting pretty big (currently over 50 members). Many of them will now pass CFI just fine, but others will need to be sent to RFV. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:16, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

YÜCE DİRİ-P

This links to a page on the English Wikipedia that doesn't actually exist. Thus, the definition doesn't actually tell a user what it means. What should the definition really be? Should we have our own Yüce Diriliş Partisi entry? If not, then should we have an entry for an acronym of a term when the term itself is not includable? A possible solution would be to link to each individual term separately, but then that would be implying that the full expanded term "Yüce Diriliş Partisi" is SOP. And is it? —Rua (mew) 19:04, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, I was editing that page, and TBH I got a bit lazy. I made a link to tr.wikipedia, which should be sufficient. --Pious Eterino (talk) 19:11, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't think that's really any better. A Wikipedia page in an unfamiliar language (to an English speaker, i.e. one using the English Wiktionary) is not really any more useful than a nonexistent page. —Rua (mew) 19:13, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

I'd say it's better. If a reader really wants to find out more, they could Google Translate the page. --Pious Eterino (talk) 19:29, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

I GT'd the page myself and added a detail about the party. --Pious Eterino (talk) 19:34, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Ok, so the original problem hasn't actually been solved. Anyone else who has ideas? —Rua (mew) 13:25, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

This party (basically a one-man party) wants a homeland for Muslims, like Israel is a homeland for Jews, but then comprising the totality of what they deem to be Muslim countries, from Morocco to Brunei. Kind of like the Arabic, Ottoman and Mongol Empires combined. To explain the underlying ideology, going back to Necip Fazıl Kısakürek – also the main source of inspiration of President Erdoğan of Turkey – requires an encyclopedic treatment. Since the aim is completely divorced from any semblance of reality, the party has very few followers and no influence on the political discourse.  --Lambiam 21:28, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Look, that doesn't even really matter, I don't care what the term means. What I'm pointing out is that right now, there's a bunch of entries like this that link to either a nonexistent or a foreign Wikipedia article, giving the user not even a hint at a definition. So there's no way for them to use Wiktionary to find out what it means, our primary mission. —Rua (mew) 21:31, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

So is “a Turkish political party founded in 2007” not enough? Imagine we had an entry Yüce Diriliş Partisi here. What else should be put in its description?  --Lambiam 07:23, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Why do we even have this? Delete. Chignon – Пучок 12:35, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

stop

Verb senses 7 and 8:

7. (intransitive) To stay; to spend a short time; to reside temporarily.

to stop with a friend

He stopped for two weeks at the inn.

• R. D. Blackmore

  by stopping at home till the money was gone

• 1931, E. F. Benson, Mapp & Lucia, chapter 7

  “She’s not going away. She’s going to stop here forever.”

8. (intransitive) To tarry.

He stopped at his friend's house before continuing with his drive.

The difference between 7 and 8, if there is any, is quite poorly explained. One definition of "tarry" is "To stay somewhere temporarily", which seems little different from "to spend a short time". Other definitions of "tarry", such as "To delay; to be late or tardy in beginning or doing anything" or "To linger in expectation of something or until something is done or happens" do not obviously have anything to do with the example sentence. If anyone sees what this is getting at, perhaps they can suggest an improvement. Mihia (talk) 20:45, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

I merged them. The only difference I would discern was in the length of time one stays in a place (stopping briefly before continuing, vs stopping for two weeks / forever), but I'm not sure that requires separate senses. - -sche (discuss) 21:19, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, thanks. I think that makes sense. Mihia (talk) 23:01, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

what

What is "how" under the adverb meanings supposed to refer to? I don't think either of the adverb meanings of how can be replaced with "what". Added by @Osbri. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 08:59, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

I reverted it. This editor has a history of adding inexplicable senses to common words. As far as I can tell, they're sincere and not a vandal, but they also obviously have problems with basic English. I'm not quite sure what we should do about it. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:06, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

I was thinking it's like "how" or similar to "how" because I've seen some show or say "What good is this?" Or maybe I've seen "what" before an adjective or something similar to that. Osbri (talk) 19:17, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

"What good is this?" and "How good is this?" mean different things and are grammatically different too (e.g. "good" is a noun in the first case and an adjective in the second). Mihia (talk) 02:58, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

I think I see that. I think I've seen 'what' before some adjectives but I think I see that now. Osbri (talk) 04:28, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Insufficient meaning in Korean word '바르다'?

Can someone provide the source for "# To be uncommon, insufficient; to be rarely encountered, to fail to reach a given degree or amount." in Korean adjective '바르다'? I've looked up several dictionaries, but I couldn't find this meaning. BTW insufficient in Korean is 모자르(라)다.

This meaning was from North Korean dictionary. So I didn't know. Solved.

悬念

According to some guy on quora, 懸念 / 悬念 can translate the English cliffhanger. Can a Chinese speaker confirm and update the definition if necessary? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:01, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

@Vox Sciurorum: Yes, I believe that "cliffhanger" is right. We say "这集留了个悬念" (This episode is left with a cliffhanger). But recently we use "坑" (hole) more often. "这集留了大坑" (This episode is left with a hole). We find it vivid because, just as a hole, it can be "filled" with the plots from the next episode/season. We also say "这么大个坑，下集怎么填啊？" (Such a big hole, how are they gonna fill it in the next episode?), where "填" (to fill) means "to resolve (the cliffhanger)".QIU Ao (talk) 09:09, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Plot hole means something different in English. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:54, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

@Vox Sciurorum:I believe it's a different "hole". Maybe I should have used the word "pit".QIU Ao (talk) 05:09, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

how, where, when as conjunctions

I don't agree with the analysis as conjunctions here. They are very clearly relative adverbs, they introduce an adverbial relative clause in the same way that why (which is marked as an adverb) does, and also the relative pronouns. —Rua (mew) 00:55, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

They are also "clearly" subordinating conjunctions. The question is whether we have both PoS sections to accommodate the divergence of terminology or whether we can find evidence that the references used by ordinary users mostly favor one set of terms over another. Our admins and professional linguists ought to be able to accommodate the redundancy without their heads exploding. DCDuring (talk) 03:13, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

See Conjunction (grammar)#Subordinating conjunctions on Wikipedia. Personally, I find it confusing that coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions are covered by the umbrella term “conjunction”, because (to me) they are totally different animals.  --Lambiam 15:24, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Ok, but then we should be consistent and label relative pronouns as conjunctions too, because they also introduce subordinate clauses. —Rua (mew) 15:40, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

I sympathize with the feeling that the consistency leaves much to be desired here. However, we (Wiktionary) did not make these part-of-speech categories up. They are the traditional ones invented by traditional grammarians, and I’m afraid we are stuck with them for now, until one glorious day a new school of grammar ascends and gains primacy.  --Lambiam 17:02, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Um, not if there's a consensus to do it another way. We're not slaves to traditional grammar, it's our dictionary you know! —Rua (mew) 17:05, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

It's not "our" dictionary; it's our users' dictionary. Why should we indulge the desire of some of us for internal consistency, non-redundancy, or adherence to some particular terminological system unless it clearly serves the interests of our users?

I was reading through the ComprehensiveGEL on this and noted that they have notes referring to the alternative terms used by linguists to refer to these. CambridgeGEL explicitly addresses areas of controversy with conspicuously marked sections of polemic. The very least we should do is try to use the most common categories for word classes. In the case of determiners we already have redundant definitions under different PoSes. This seems just to be another example of the same phenomenon. DCDuring (talk) 18:58, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

စာပို့

@Mahagaja, Hintha: Hi. Has this term changed from the dictionary meaning "mail-train; mail-boat" to also include mail (postal delivery system)? Some less reliable source suggest this and my Google search about the usage. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 06:18, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

@Atitarev: Sorry about the late reply; this question goes far beyond my rudimentary knowledge of Burmese anyway. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:06, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

@Atitarev: စာပို့ဆက်သွယ်ရေး (capui.hcakswaire:) (lit. "mail communications") would be the closest approximation for mail (postal delivery system), or to be more literal, စာပို့စနစ် (capui.ca.nac) (lit. "mail system"). The postal organization is typically called စာပို့တိုက်လုပ်ငန်း (capui.tuiklupngan:) or shortened to စာတိုက်လုပ်ငန်း (catuiklupngan:) (e.g., Myanma Post is called မြန်မာ့စာတိုက်လုပ်ငန်း (mranma.catuiklupngan:). --Hintha (talk) 04:16, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

@Hintha: Thank you. So, the base word is correct then. I have now defined ဆက်သွယ်ရေး (hcakswaire:, “communications”) and စနစ် (ca.nac, “system”) with your usage examples - pls check, စာပို့ (capui.) still needs some attention (definitions). --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 05:08, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

dildo non-sexual uses

"An artificial phallus (penis), particularly for sexual uses." What other uses does it have? Door-stop? Equinox ◑ 17:41, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

dildos as windscreen wipers.  --Lambiam 19:56, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Art? I suppose the question is, would just saying "An artificial phallus (penis)" be sufficient? (Should we clarify that it is three-dimensional and a drawing of a penis would not count?) - -sche (discuss) 21:25, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

I would at least add "designed for sexual stimulation" or similar. IMO "artificial penis" would also describe a neopenis (there has been disagreement about this before); in any case that definitely isn't a dildo. But if there aren't any other serious uses for it then we should drop the strange "particularly" bit. Equinox ◑ 01:03, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

I probably wouldn't call a neopenis an artificial penis, but I would call a packer one, and a packer isn't a dildo. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:08, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

There's an episode of the CBC show Still Standing wherein the lead is talking with a boat-builder on Fogo Island (show synopsis here streaming here if your IP is in Canada, also available for pay here on Amazon Prime), and the boat-builder is walking him through the names of various parts of a small rowboat he's building. Apparently the short wooden post to which the oar is lashed is called a dildo. It's roughly the same size and shape as the phallic device, but here it's clearly not used for sexual purposes. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:34, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Good points. (The use Eirikr mentions seems like a different sense, like the plant sense is a different sense, and not an example of this sense.) Would a usage note clarifying what the term is and isn't be a good idea? A bar of soap shaped like a mini penis or lipstick shaped the same way (both found as e.g. bachelor/ette party gifts), or an oversized sculpture like in Korea's Penis Park, might be intended to be sexual ("naughty" or titillating), but wouldn't be dildoes. An artist could design "the world's largest dildo" too large to use, but I suppose that's an edge case that shouldn't influence the definition (like the world's smallest shirt might not constitute clothing). Adding illustrations to the entry would probably help. - -sche (discuss) 19:56, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

retard

When I came upon our entry for this word, I was somewhat surprised to see the slang sense marked as vulgar. I wonder about that.

Out of curiosity, I checked the talk page for the entry. When I did so, I saw that (a little under a year ago) @-sche and @Mnemosientje had a brief discussion that seems to have led to the (vulgar) label being tacked onto the aforementioned sense of retard.

Now, (and please do correct me if I am wrong here, -sche. I'm not trying to put words into mouths here) -sche seemed somewhat hesitant at first about having the (vulgar) label be applied there, because they weren't certain that it was the most accurate label in this instance. However, Mnemosientje (and the same—of course—goes for you, Mnemosientje: feel free to correct me if I am wrongly representing what you said or am otherwise misunderstanding what you meant) indicated that they felt that the (vulgar) label would do quite a good job at communicating that the term is "offensive, and [...] not used in polite company". They (Mnemosientje) then said that the label also noticeably fits given the original meaning of the word vulgar (I don't particularly find that point to make for a strong argument, considering that, by that logic, any particularly colloquial word that indicates any level of offensiveness could be argued to rightfully deserve the label "(vulgar)".)

Now, I actually do have one instance of an anecdotal experience that at least suggests that some people may well look at retard (and its derivatives) as vulgar. Several years ago, I was chatting with several people that I knew (in a public place, although not amidst a whole bunch of other people), and one of those people (someone who was a former friend of mine at the time [he was a former friend even then, I mean]) expressed some shock when I described some moronic (not a strong enough word in this instance) happening or notion as "retarded". Now, I don't call people "retards", because there is no good reason to describe someone that way, and I am not really the kind of person to characterise a person themselves with a term like that [considering that the only thing that I can in any way rightfully do myself is interpret and judge the actions and behaviours of an individual or group of people]. However, given the fact that (at least where I live) the adjective retarded has—to most people—an often particular meaning that is more or less a combination of foolish (or idiotic, depending upon the circumstances) + demented, that is not very well represented with other words (at least not very many non-vulgar words, anyway [and I choose not to use vulgar words]), I do in rare circumstances use the adjectival derivative if I am describing something that is not only utterly idiotic or foolish, but also makes me question if, in the case of it being a proposed idea or something of that sort, there is something behind that whatever-it-is that is, well, "off". ...In any case, if I recall correctly, someone who was a closer (and actually at that time current) friend of mine said that the word wasn't vulgar (although I will note that there were a few others in that conversation who sided with the surprised fellow on this, perhaps more than who sided with me or who didn't have an opinion. I really can't remember).

But I think that perhaps there may be some distinction between how retard and retarded are generally perceived by the everyman or everywoman who does not really have a horse in the race that is the controversy that is found in the usage of this particular word and its derivatives (I say this only because I recall there actually being a specific campaign to end the use of the word "retard" and its derivatives specifically, which leads me to believe that this particular word is seen by a significant number of people to be particularly unacceptable). I, at least, have long gotten the sense that to call someone a retard is particularly low and callous (for obvious reasons). On the other hand, calling a decision, concept, proposed law, etc. "retarded", whilst still most definitely insulting and offensive, is (perhaps) not perceived to be as unacceptably slighting as the use of its root noun. I don't know. I'm just suggesting the possibility. I will note that, although definition four for our entry for retard is marked as (vulgar), its adjectival equivalent is not, for what that's worth.

Also, just to be clear, I am in no way intending to suggest that the word retard and its derivatives are acceptable in polite discourse, inoffensive, or the like. I'm just saying that I question the veracity of the (vulgar) label in this instance. Tharthan (talk) 21:13, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

To me "vulgar" means it's something like a swear-word. I wouldn't call retarded vulgar, just likely to be offensive. Equinox ◑ 21:16, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, that's pretty much how I see the (vulgar) label as well, hence my concern about its application in definition four of the noun in our entry for retard. Grouping retarded (and the like) with actual vulgar terms is, at best, inaccurate. At worst, it could potentially be perceived as deceptive. Tharthan (talk) 22:22, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

A usage note like the one on girl may be more appropriate. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 00:08, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

On one hand, I agree that this doesn't feel vulgar. On the other hand, it seems like it may meet our (terrible!) glossary definition of 'vulgar'. I would nonetheless remove the label, maybe replacing it with 'informal' or something, but we should also consider how to refine that glossary definition of 'vulgar'... the definition that Google supplies if you search for it is "making explicit and offensive reference to sex or bodily functions", which seems like a reasonable starting-point. - -sche (discuss) 01:00, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

given to

Despite the lemming test, isn't given to really just an 'adjectival past participle' + 'preposition' ? Originally having a literal meaning of "dedicated to" (cf. I now give the boy to the LORD. For as long as he lives, he is given to the LORD." Then he worshiped the LORD there. 1 Samuel 1:28, CSB). Then over time becoming reflexive: I give myself/am given to drinking a cup of green tea every morning. We call the whole set an Adjective, but is that right ? Can one ever use it without an object of the preposition, as "I am really given to" or "She's more given to than I am" ? Leasnam (talk) 23:10, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Additionally, we have something very similar already at at given (sense 5) Leasnam (talk) 23:19, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

My initial reaction/inclination is: redirect to the "Prone, disposed" sense of given (via {{senseid}}). But maybe just redirect to given, not to any specific sense? Or delete... - -sche (discuss) 01:04, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

This is very similar to partial, sense 4. We also have an entry partial to. There is something peculiar to these cases: when used in these particular senses, it is strictly obligatory to combine the adjective with a prepositional phrase starting with to. So if it is a sum of parts, these parts do not allow themselves to be pried apart.  --Lambiam 17:26, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

If we intend to eliminate duplication of lemmas, we could eliminate the relevant sense of given (assuming, as I do, that Lambiam's conclusion is correct). I think we are trying to help our users find definitions appropriate to what they have heard or read. Having this kind of redundancy may help. DCDuring (talk) 19:50, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Or we can change partial sense 4 to mean exactly what it does: "biased or favourable" and then the combination 'partial' + 'to' all makes sense (e.g. I'm partial to doing what's best for the users = I'm biased to or favourable towards doing what's best...). prone to is another one. If we need to keep these, can we call them something besides 'Adjectives' ? Maybe Phrase ? Leasnam (talk) 01:03, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

beech tree usage notes

Usage notes: "Beech tree is less commonly used by far than ? in referring to such trees." I know them as beech trees, anyone know what the "?" might be? Or is this some copy-paste artifact. - TheDaveRoss 02:10, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Than beech alone, I expect. Equinox ◑ 02:16, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

There are also about twice as many OneLook references that have an entry for beech as have an entry for beech tree. DCDuring (talk) 02:24, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Also "Elm tree is less commonly used by far than elm in referring to such trees" at elm tree and "Oak tree is less commonly used by far than oak in referring to such trees" at oak tree. I think these usage notes are of questionable correctness or usefulness, and I would consider deleting them. I also don't know on what basis we have a separate "~ tree" entry for some trees and not for others. Mihia (talk) 19:35, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

See Talk:oak tree. If beechtree is not attested, this could be RfDed. Or it could be RfDed to generate the effort to attest beechtree, which would succeed. The effort would not succeed for the overwhelming majority of tree species.

And this is all fundamentally a result of the tail wagging the dog: those creating FL L2 sections like to be able to link to [[beech tree]] rather than [[beech]] [[tree]].

The point of the notes is to help those who might use beech tree (or the others) to realize that it is not the only, not the most common way to refer to such a tree. DCDuring (talk) 00:22, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

"by far" is too extreme. It sounds as if e.g. "oak tree" is an unusual thing to say, whereas in fact it is common. I don't think that the difference in frequency between "oak" and "oak tree" when referring to such trees is sufficiently notable to be worth mentioning. I don't object to "oak tree" etc. as separate entries, but I don't grasp why the existence in print of "oaktree" (which seems verging on a spelling error anyway) should make any difference to whether or not we include "oak tree". Mihia (talk) 18:00, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

We could always use fresh eyes on WT:COALMINE. DCDuring (talk) 18:06, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, thanks, I see the arguments stated in favour of it. Mihia (talk) 19:24, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Corbynization

As the person who first posted the word Corbynization, I should like to say that the term Progressive is better than Socialist in the context of describing political alignments pertinent to the word, as the term Corbynization is often applied to the American Democrat Party, which is Progressive but NOT Socialist.

bridge (card game)

Bridge: "A card game played with four players playing as two teams of two players each." I'm afraid I don't play this game, but I'm sure we can come up with a better definition! — SGconlaw (talk) 08:00, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Is the definition at contract bridge any better? I am not a bridge player either, but I believe these terms are synonyms, bridge being a shortening of contract bridge, which is named thus to distinguish it from its precursor, auction bridge. (See History of contract bridge.)  --Lambiam 16:41, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

We could say the same about many card games - the definition of shithead is pretty, err, shitty, for a start. --I learned some phrases (talk) 12:31, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps: "a trick-taking card game, usually played by four players in two competing partnerships, where players attempt to covertly communicate information about the cards they hold so that they can XXX". What is XXX? Maybe "bid to win tricks". I don't understand this game fully. Equinox ◑ 14:05, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, something along those lines would be more informative. — SGconlaw (talk) 02:02, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

go haring past

How is the phrase go haring past to be analized? --Backinstadiums (talk) 17:49, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Like [the fellow] came running around the corner. In your phrase, haring is the present participle of the verb hare, and past is an adverb. Now analyze the phrase Bij zoute haring past een zeer droge, diepgekoelde sherry het best. :)  --Lambiam 18:55, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Josue

This looks like a Spanish entry inexplicably changed into English. Is there anything there worth salvaging? Ultimateria (talk) 19:03, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Maybe Basque or Tagalog, not Spanish.  --Lambiam 19:28, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

A Google news source gives plenty of occurrences, apparently as a diacritic-free spelling of Josué, just like the many occurrences of Francois.  --Lambiam 19:37, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

I just saw that the Biblical senses were added a few days ago by an anonymous user. But there is plenty of evidence searching Google Books for "book of Josue" and "Josue chapter" that it's an obsolete synonym of Joshua. I'm going to convert the page into an alt form. Ultimateria (talk) 15:20, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

deem

Because this is the word of the day...is sense 6 completely redundant? Isn't is just a partial repetition of sense 5? Esszet (talk) 14:32, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

One sense is supposedly transitive and the other intransitive, but when I looked for some quotations yesterday I actually had some trouble distinguishing between the two. I suppose I could combine them into “(transitive, intransitive)” – thoughts? — SGconlaw (talk) 14:59, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Sense 5 already says “transitive, intransitive”. Esszet (talk) 15:44, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Oh yeah … OK, merged. The WOTD has also been updated. — SGconlaw (talk) 16:00, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

yay

In the sense of "so" or "that", indicating degree or extent, e.g. "It was yay big". We describe it as a misspelling of yea, but at least three other dictionaries list it as a valid spelling. [1][2][3]. Is it a misspelling? Mihia (talk) 19:15, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

I changed it to "alternative spelling". Since it exists and other dictionaries consider it a standard spelling, it seems likely it's just "alternative" and not a "mis-" spelling. If some authorities specifically proscribe it, that could be added as a label / usage note. - -sche (discuss) 18:21, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Messrs#French

How should this be labelled, and should the lemma have a dot (Messrs.)? Looking at the edit history a number of editors over the years have added, removed, readded etc the French section, and the French Wiktionary lists it as exclusively English. google books:"et Messrs" suggests it is attested in French, but maybe only marginally: the first several results are some Louisiana French, some Guernsey French, and some rather old French. - -sche (discuss) 07:51, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

The French orthographic rule is not to use a dot after the abbreviation when the last letter of the abbreviated word is included. See fr:Abréviation#Typographie et abréviations. The GBS results show, though, that this rule is not universally followed. I think that in French this is obsolete. The current convention is to use MM. (with a dot).  --Lambiam 14:35, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

I took a stab at editing the entry and writing some usage notes at M.. - -sche (discuss) 19:54, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

instrument flight, instrument flight rules, IFR, visual flight, visual flight rules, VFR

Entry-worthy? Chignon – Пучок 11:31, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

I had the impression that “instrument flight” means, “a flight that is operated under instrument flight rules”, but the earliest instances I can find for “instrument flight” precede those for “instrument flight rules”. That suggests that instrument flight rules is a rather transparent SoP. On the other hand, I believe that someone who is told that “flight” in “instrument flight” means “trip made by an aircraft” would still not be able to infer the meaning of the attribute “instrument” unless they happen to have further knowledge of how pilots operate aircrafts. So that makes instrument flight in my eyes worthy of inclusion. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, for visual flight.  --Lambiam 13:34, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Does visual flight precede visual flight rules? And even so, the existence of the abbreviations is suggestive the the underlying terms have become set phrases in their own right. And, etymology is not destiny. DCDuring (talk) 17:59, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Is there a word for it? Examples?

Study the phrase "If you don't know what an X is, you are an X". Now tell me which words can fit into the sentence for it to make sense. Next week we'll do the same but with "If you don't know what an X is, you are not an X"--I learned some phrases (talk) 12:34, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

If you don’t know what an ignoramus is, you are one. See further Thesaurus:ignoramus. Already now for next week, if you don’t know what a sesquipedalianist is, you ain’t one yourself, bro.  --Lambiam 13:49, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Probably two categories that fit the bill: 1. words describing stupid or oblivious people (like "ignoramus" suggested above); 2. words describing people who are uncool/unhip (since not knowing the grooviest words makes you a square, daddy-o). Equinox ◑ 14:01, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Like if you don’t know what a sad case is, ... . But then, maybe you are an O.G., just not British.  --Lambiam 14:40, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Pathology

I think that the etymology section implies that "pathology" existed in ancient Greece. However, as far as I know, even the word "παθολογια" didn't exist, and it is a 15th-century neologism. What are your thoughts about it? Do you think that there should be an alteration to show that historical perspective of the word? I would love to see some citation for the existence of the word in ancient Greek, but even if it did exist, I don't think that matters, because the word was made to show the usage of the ancient Greek way of thinking to explain and study diseases and medicine in general. In my opinion, it needs some more explanation. Thank you.

This was written for the French/Dutch pathologie where the connotation is more severe, however, I can see the same in the English version, to a lesser extent.

LSJ lists παθολογία, but with a different meaning. I don’t know what “Gloss.” means here; it does not occur in the list of abbreviations. Apparently, Galen used the corresponding adjective παθολογικός in the sense of “pathological”. The Greek Wikipedia presents Modern Greek παθολογία as a loan from French pathologie.  --Lambiam 23:06, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Bailly does not have a lemma παθολογία. So (unlike the adjective παθολογικός and the verb παθολογέω), it would seem that this noun – although it would likely have been understood and may well have been spoken – is unattested in Ancient Greek.  --Lambiam 17:39, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

@Lambiam: I already addressed this at Talk:pathologie, but OP has seemingly not noticed. If it's attested in Byzantine Greek, the solution is clear. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:55, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I assume that in saying it is a 15th-century neologism he meant that French pathologie is a 15th-century neologism in French, although Le Trésor says 1550, which is 16th century. While the latter source says the French term is borrowed from Greek, citing Liddell-Scott, the Greek Wiktionary claims the opposite direction. From these sources it is not clear to me if παθολογία can really be found in pre-Modern Greek; it seems unlikely that Hervé Fierabras took the term from a Byzantine text. If the term can be found in pre-Modern Greek, the situation is probably similar to that of French acoustique and Greek ακουστικός (akoustikós). To complicate the matter, Fierabras reportedly wrote in Latin and translated the text to French later, which gives a chain like pathology/παθολογία < pathologie < *pathologia < παθολογία.  --Lambiam 23:47, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Earlier editions (Liddell & Scott American edition, 1859, Scott 1889) also list παθολογέω and παθολογικός but not παθολογία, which appears to confirm that the word is not attested in Ancient Greek.  --Lambiam 01:03, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

sosh

This was discussed briefly in 2013, but defining it as "Abbreviation of various terms beginning "social"" without spelling out which terms seems abnormal for us: for most shortenings, e.g. sitch, we spell out what it's a shortening of (situation), and for acronyms, we don't just say "acronym of any of several strings starting with these letters", we list each thing it's an acronym of. It follows that, here, we should list each attested sense, at least as a subsense: "social security number", "socialist", etc. Right? - -sche (discuss) 19:30, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Well, we certainly should have the leading attestable cases, but if it is productive in its application, we would still need the open-ended definition. Also, isn't socsci/soc-sci/soc sci more common as an abbreviation of social sciences than soshsci or sosh. DCDuring (talk) 23:42, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Pushrim vs. push rim?

How do I look up the instances difference between two similar words in order to best assay which should be included? (The word in question is the rim of a wheelchair which users can push on in order to produce locomotion.) Thanks! Elfabet (talk) 19:40, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Both here and on Google, enclosing the term in " forces a literal search for the enclosed string. DCDuring (talk) 23:43, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! Follow up: if both have about equal usage in g.scholar and g.books, is there any additional criteria that would distinguish which to use? Appreciate the timely responses~ Elfabet (talk) 13:13, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

In this case an ordinary Google search reports many more hits for “push rim” than for “pushrim”, about 250 times as many. All other things being equal, I’d go for push rim as the main lemma and pushrim as an {{alternative spelling of|push rim|lang=en}}. (Compare the infamous coal mine.) --Lambiam 17:20, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I've taken a stab at both of them with your suggestsions. Additional flushing out would be well appreciated. Cheers! Elfabet (talk) 12:54, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

It was good, but I reworded it as a single phrase and added an image, which often helps with uncommon words relating to fairly common objects. DCDuring (talk) 13:09, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

However much

much as is defined as However much, but are they interchangeable? {Much as - However much} I like James as a friend, I could never date him --Backinstadiums (talk) 00:37, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

In that case they are, IMO. DCDuring (talk) 01:34, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Agreed. Ultimateria (talk) 02:51, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I added your sentence as an example of much as sense 1. Sense 2 may need some work:

2. Almost as; as much as.

"as much as" is confusing as a definition since "as much as" works just as well in the sense 1 example "As much as I like James ...". I can't offhand think of a case when "much as" means "almost as", at least not in a sense where "as much as" could also work. There is the usage like "He spoke to me much as a doctor would". Could this be what it is getting at? If anyone understands it, an example sentence would be good. Mihia (talk) 19:39, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I think you have it right. I couldn't understand the much as entry, which was the redirect target of as much as. I made a real entry for as much as (which gets an entry in dictionaries more often than much as does), which BTW would benefit from a fresh set of eyes. I wonder how many of the definitions in much as are the same as those of as much as. DCDuring (talk) 20:30, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

A definition for much as in the sense it is used in “He spoke to me much as a doctor would” could be “largely in the same way as”. I think there is agreement that the definition “as much as” for sense 2 is confusing rather than enlightening, so why not scrap it?  --Lambiam 20:57, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

to say somebody nay

Shouldn't it be the verb tell instead? --Backinstadiums (talk) 02:14, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

"Tell" is an old sense of say. In a set phrase sound matters: say and nay. DCDuring (talk) 02:35, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

to-do

Sense 1 is "archaic Ado.", but then sense 3 is "A fuss made over something, commotion." Am I correct in wanting to remove 1 entirely? 3 fits the definition of ado, and it's not archaic. Ultimateria (talk) 02:50, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I think so. IMO, ado in at least one of its senses is a synonym of to-do. DCDuring (talk) 03:43, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I think so too, unless anyone can demonstrate in which way it is different. Mihia (talk) 19:29, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps it's archaic in the phrase "without further 'to-do" = "without further ado". Leasnam (talk) 22:56, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

"without further ado" is a bit more of a set phrase than "without further to-do", but for me the latter is also usable and does not seem archaic. I am a BrE speaker. Mihia (talk) 12:50, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

To do this to excessright we should test the relative frequency of to-do and ado in the various common collocations and insert each common collocation in usage examples in the entry with the greater relative frequency. We might discover something. DCDuring (talk) 13:34, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

• I have combined the relevant senses and removed the "archaic" tag. The other definition, "A task that has been noted as one that must be completed, especially on a list", is very dubious for me also. Surely in the example "to-do list", the word "to-do" does not mean "a task". I'll have to come back to this one. Mihia (talk) 23:23, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I started a new thread for this at Wiktionary:Tea_room/2019/May#to-do_.282.29. Mihia (talk) 22:35, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

run up

This is how the first few definitions of "run up" presently read (partly as a result of my additions):

1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see run,‎ up.

   The small boy ran up the hill.

   As I was walking along the road, a man suddenly ran up to me.

2. To hasten to a destination.

   The dog ran up under the table to get his food.

3. (with to) To approach.

   We are putting on lots of special events as we run up to Christmas.

Now I feel unsure about this. Is "a man suddenly ran up to me" literal enough to be in the "&lit" section, on the basis that there is a corresponding sense at up, and that we can also have "walk up", "stroll up", "saunter up" etc.? Or is it idiomatic? But then is "The dog ran up under the table to get his food" not really just the same sense? Is "The dog ran up under the table to get his food" also a literal sense? Mihia (talk) 19:28, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Phrasal verbs are confusing, but important to many non-native English learners. :MWOnline has 5 verb senses for run up:

1. (intrans.) grow rapidly
2. bid up (run up shares in Lyft)
3. stitch together quickly (I can run up a cushion cover in less than an hour)
4. erect hastily (run up a store out of so many planks and so much corrugated iron)
5. achieve by accumulating (run up the score, run up a big bill)
6. run up against experience (something difficult)

[The examples are not from MWOnline.]

McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs has:

1. run up against (See up against)
2. run up to (a place) travel to (a place) quickly or for a brief time
3. run up (to someone or something) run as far as (someone or something)

None of these quite fit run up the flag/sail, run up the engine, run up a column of figures, run up a covey of birds.

I haven't compared each of these definitions to determine whether there actually is a sense of run that carries an appropriate definition and that works without up.

Based on previous discussions here, opinions on this differ, but IMO MWOnline has it right and the senses that you have at run up seem SoP to me. DCDuring (talk) 21:19, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

governor-general

Any Vietnamese language editors who can check the translations here? From what I can tell "tổng đốc" refers to what was once a 總督 of a Vietnamese or Chinese province, while in fact the modern concept of governor-general should be toàn quyền. ---> Tooironic (talk) 15:01, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, governor-general is normally translated with toàn quyền. The Vietnamese Wikipedia page about toàn quyền does state, however, that tổng đốc is an equivalent position from feudal/imperial times. MuDavid (talk) 09:31, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Petrarch

How is that a nickname? Chignon – Пучок 12:36, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

“Dante” was a nickname for Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, but “Petrarch” is clearly merely an anglicization of “Petrarca”, just like “Livy” is an anglicization of “Livius”.  --Lambiam 20:47, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/mōdēr

@Erutuon, Florian Blaschke, Rua, -sche and anyone else who knows about Proto-Germanic: why does *mōdēr have Verner's Law? In other words, why *mōdēr and not ^×mōþēr, since the stress in Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr is on the first syllable? There's no Verner's in *brōþēr from *bʰréh₂tēr, so why is there here? —Mahāgaja · talk 14:58, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Never mind, I've just read the answer at the PIE entry. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:34, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

-wich

This was recently added as a suffix meaning "sandwich". The sole example given is ribwich. To me that is a blend of rib and sandwich; is there enough evidence for -wich as a suffix? Equinox ◑ 15:02, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

• We have fishwich, Manwich, and snackwich. OneLook has bagelwich, chipwich, croissantwich (not croissandwich), and dozens from Urban Dictionary. There are I think many more unattested ones, which indicate productivity of the suffix. DCDuring (talk) 17:09, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

an all

Given as an alt form of and all, with no further explanation. Is it non-standard, regional, a misspelling or typo? Should we have a new sense at an defined as "and"? — Oh, I've just noticed that the originally said "Northern England", but this was removed at some point. Equinox ◑ 15:16, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

It represents a pretty common informal/regional BrE pronunciation of "and all", especially in the sense "in addition", but surely it should properly be written an' all. Since we already have an', I'm not sure that we need a separate entry though. Mihia (talk) 19:30, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

BTW, an' is labelled "nonstandard". Similar to y'know, below, I question whether "nonstandard" is appropriate. Mihia (talk) 19:32, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Cablinasian

This is a word only used by or in reference to the golfer Tiger Woods. It is not a general designation used by other people for themselves. Also, we define it as "of mixed ethnicity", whereas Tiger derived the word from "Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian", and presumably meant that specific mixture, not any ethnic mixture. The whole entry feels a bit wrong. Equinox ◑ 15:42, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

I've revised the def. According to one of the hits, Tiger dropped the term soon after he coined it. Maybe we should RFV it to see if there are three authors using it outside even just direct quotations of Tiger. If there are three authors using it outside quotations, but still all describing Tiger, I'm not sure what should be done, but I guess we'd keep it? We do have e.g. Windy City which only refers to Chicago, and more recently RPattz was kept. - -sche (discuss) 19:30, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Another word of this type just came up at WT:RFVE#cannista (discussion will eventually be archived to Talk:cannista); in the discussion, it was brought up that tweet also only(?) refers to Twitter. - -sche (discuss) 07:49, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

If it passes our attestation requirements ("clearly widespread use, or use in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year"), perhaps label it as a nonce word. — SGconlaw (talk) 08:58, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

y'know, y'see

If fuggedaboudit and c'mere are not nonstandard, how exactly are y'know and y'see nonstandard? Marking the latter two as nonstandard seems incredibly arbitrary, I feel.

I take no issue with the former two (in fact, the variant(s) figgedabatit/figgedaboutit [/fɪˈɡɛdəˈbæːtɪt/ / /fɪˈɡɛdəˈbaʊtɪt/] of fuggedaboudit are certainly common enough in my speech to be considered "part of my vocabulary"), but why is it that they (along with d'ya and probably others, although I need to be somewhere in a moment, so I don't have time to look) are somehow different? Tharthan (talk) 15:50, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't think y'know should be labelled nonstandard. Informal, yes. Mihia (talk) 19:25, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I think these are informal, not nonstandard. - -sche (discuss) 19:31, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, I changed both to "informal". Given y', I'm not sure on what basis we include separate entries for some contractions and not others, but that is another discussion. Mihia (talk) 00:19, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

barrebases

This is a Spanish baseball term, which could be translated as "base sweeper". Not knowing anything about baseball, and watching a couple of "barrebases" videos, I guess this is just a jonrón where there are batters already on the bases. Further research suggests there's an English phrase clear the bases, and there's probably a noun for that situation too - a base-clearing home run? Help from some Yanks would be much appreciated. --I learned some phrases (talk) 21:13, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

ice

"(uncountable, ice hockey) The area where a game of ice hockey is played. The neighbouring countries have enjoyed many great battles on the ice." Isn't that just the normal sense of "frozen water"? Equinox ◑ 02:41, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Isn't it the specific (yet not always critically defined) space, size, and quality of the arena or designated area? As compared to the smaller, but unusable, ice in your glass? Elfabet (talk) 13:12, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Re tennis, I found: "She had won on the clay of Paris in 1961 and 1966 but few expected her to succeed on fast grass at Wimbledon..." They're just surfaces as far as I can tell. Equinox ◑ 14:10, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Here the sense is rather specifically the rink on which the game is played and not the material forming its surface. I expect that a diligent search will turn up enough uses to meet our usual requirements.  --Lambiam 18:11, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Spreuken

Does anybody know what the gender of this title is? I'd say the title is in practice singular in contemporary Dutch, like most titles are and just like Proverbs is singular in contemporary English, but it seems like writers tends to use appositions with (bijbel)boek to avoid a bare singular for a word that might superficially seem plural. The term almost never takes any articles. @DrJos, Mnemosientje, Morgengave ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 08:04, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

One test is to use een + a declinable adjective + the gender-curious word. Like *een vrolijk meid vs. een vrolijke meid, maar een vrolijk meisje vs. *een vrolijke meisje. The test requires a native or near-native speaker to assess the grammaticality. It is not easy to apply this to Spreuken, but what about this:

*“In zijn boekenkast stond een tot de draad versleten Prediker naast een nog puntgaaf Spreuken.”

 “In zijn boekenkast stond een tot de draad versleten Prediker naast een nog puntgave Spreuken.”

I hope I got this right. If so, this suggests that also viewed as a singular we have a de word.  --Lambiam 18:31, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Proper nouns can just be plural-only without being reinterpreted as singular (e.g., de Pyreneeën, de Vogezen, etc.). I believe that's the case here. As a consequence, they don't have a gender as only singular words take a gender (and just FYI: singular spreuk is a feminine word). Morgengave (talk) 19:49, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

The thing is that you could still use Spreuken as a subject so it must be able to take conjugated verbs. According to my sense of grammaticality Spreuken in that position always agrees with singular conjugated forms, similar to how other plural book titles like De avonden, Twee vrouwen do so. E.g. "Spreuken is een verzameling die samengesteld is uit verschillende bronnen en heeft veel gemeen met andere voorbeelden van wijsheidsliteratuur uit het oude Nabije Oosten." You couldn't use zijn or hebben in this context without changing the meaning (and then the statement would make no sense). ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 11:23, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, I think that is sufficient reason for stating the gender as common. If someone would prefer to specify that to feminine based on the etymology, they can have a shot at that. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 11:23, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

village idiot

The label at village idiot denotes "Britain", but isn't it more widespread than that ? Leasnam (talk) 21:07, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I've heard it in the U.S. —Mahāgaja · talk 21:43, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I removed both the label and the etymology, which despite being in the entry for quite a long time, are just plain wrong. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:21, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, all ! Leasnam (talk) 23:50, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

cockmonger

Can we specify the meaning of cock in the definition? Sobreira ►〓 (parlez) 12:44, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Needs work generally. I'm not sure "consumer of cocks" means anything much. Equinox ◑ 13:24, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

It might refer to Armin Meiwes, with Bernd Brandes as the purveyor.  --Lambiam 10:26, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

graffiti

Subheader: "But first, we must ask ourselves...what is art?" We have two senses identical besides one calling it art and one calling it vandalism. Aren't they just the same practice from different perspectives? I say merge. Ultimateria (talk) 20:59, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, something along the lines of this might actually be an improvement over the current entry. - -sche (discuss) 05:25, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

I agree we should merge senses 1 & 2 (hopefully with a better wording than given by C133). At the same time, it should be pointed out that graffiti in this sense is considered (at least, sometimes) an art form by some but vandalism by others. Can we use the Usage notes for this? Formulating this may be tricky; for instance, I consider some graffiti more art than vandalism, and some more vandalism than art. Another issue: isn’t it better to complete separate the archaelogical sense by defining it as the plural of graffito?  --Lambiam 10:21, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes to separating the archaeology sense. I would do change it to {plural of} with gloss, but the singular needs a better definition first. Ultimateria (talk) 17:49, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

my man

Google built-in dictionary says it's "(British, dated)", but other references say it's American. Which is right? Chignon – Пучок 10:42, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

It has no definition. Isn't it SoP? Perhaps "my" in a term of address gives it a patronising tone, but the noun can vary widely. Equinox ◑ 11:44, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

It has been used as a term of address and an exclamation of approval in the US (Compare you go, girl.). DCDuring (talk) 12:06, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

As an exclamation of approval, shouldn’t it be categorized as an interjection rather than a noun? As a form of address, used similarly to ”my dear man” or “my good man” (cf. French mon bon homme), I think it SOP.  --Lambiam 17:16, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Almost anything attestable used in these ways without proper names included is a set phrase. It deserves a non-gloss definition. We have a fairly large number of these already. I don't see how my + man conveys approval or greeting, whereas may man does.

Vast numbers of the members of Category:English interjections are readily seen as nouns or other PoSes. We seem to believe that almost any attestable excited utterance, not matter how many components it has, and no matter how readily subject to modification by determiners, adjuncts, etc. is an interjection (sensu lato ad absurdum) Almost any noun can be used in a way similar to interjections sensu stricto. DCDuring (talk) 00:49, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

But what if some phrase, in a particular given sense, can only be used as a stand-alone exclamation? Like “hear, hear” occurs in the tragedy Phædra and Hippolitus by Edmund Smith: “Hear, hear the ſtunning harmonies of woe”. But in the sense in which it is used as an exclamation of approbation, as heard e.g. in the British parliament, what else can it be than an interjection?  --Lambiam 19:02, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

a

An anon has been adding strange translations to a (some containing numbers). I have no idea if they are correct but didn't block him in case it was real. Any ideas? SemperBlotto (talk) 12:33, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Reverted by @Rua, and I cleaned up some that got by @Surjection yesterday and weren't affected by the revert. Pretty obvious because:

1. The IP geolocates to "Newfoundland & Labrador English School District"
2. The translations covered an impossibly broad range of obscure languages (I think they just typed in random language codes)
3. The translations themselves were mostly obvious keyboard mashing

The clincher for me was that there was a translation for an extinct American Indian language that was spoken in Los Angeles before Europeans arrived. It survives mostly in a few fragmentary mentions by non-linguists, and in the field notes of John Peabody Harrington- not the kind of sources available to a child or teen (it also goes against everything I know about the morphology of the language, as well).

They evidently edited from their school computer, then from their phone, then from their school computer again, so Surjection's revert only got the phone part and Rua's revert got only the last part.

I'm going into detail because I'm really surprised you missed all of the red flags above- you've been at this longer than any of us and you know all of this stuff (the numbered ones, anyway). Chuck Entz (talk) 13:59, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Eh, Semper does a lot of good and hard work patrolling; if he wants to bring something like this in languages he doesn't speak up for others' input I don't think that's a problem. (On Wikipedia, I just saw a more experienced editor revert an IP's change to the spelling of a name, presumably since the changed spelling was less common in general and the IP's edit summary was "you spelled my dad's name wrong", but when I looked into it the IP appears to have been right, so discussion rather than a "this is probably wrong" revert would've been useful.) Thanks for looking into this so thoroughly. - -sche (discuss) 17:37, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

you go, girl

According to User:Ivan Štambuk, this is a feminist phrase. According to me, it is not and doesn't belong here. you go, girl is around 30 times more common than you go, boy, I'm sure you'd be quick to mention. But who cares? --I learned some phrases (talk) 22:02, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

In saying that it “doesn’t belong here”, do you mean that, according to you, the phrase should not be included at all on Wiktionary, or merely that it should not be labelled as “feminist”?  --Lambiam 18:37, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Not sure. --I learned some phrases (talk) 18:40, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

It probably could be viewed as originating from the spirit of feminism, possibly with an admixture of AAVE, but that is mostly of possible etymological interest now. It's persistent use in many registers, despite its crudeness, is, I think, an indication that it is a set phrase. DCDuring (talk) 18:54, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm not aware of "go" being used in this way outside of "you go". Presumably not "she really went!" after seeing a great slice of feminist performativity. Whether it has to have "girl" (and whether you can say "you go, boy!" without making a self-conscious play on "you go, girl") I do not know. Equinox ◑ 21:01, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

On further thought, I've also often heard "go you!" as an expression of approval. Equinox ◑ 21:05, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Removed feminist label and added early examples. DTLHS (talk) 21:10, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

It no longer says "feminist" but now it doesn't mention women at all. Are we to understand that saying "you go, girl" to someone who identifies as male is normal? Equinox ◑ 21:52, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Is that part of a definition? DTLHS (talk) 21:55, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

added "for a woman or girl" and synonym attagirl. I wanted to add good girl too, but that may be too canine. --I learned some phrases (talk) 21:59, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

If "girl" is part of the term then yes. Imagine a foreign learner who picks up this phrase, learns the definition, and then says it to a guy. That would be silly; so we need to make any such usage restrictions clear. It's almost like how "Your Highness" isn't a term of respect to just anyone, but only to kings, popes or whatever. Equinox ◑ 21:59, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

It's very common for cisgender gay men to say "you go, girl" to each other, as indeed it's common for us to use just about any term chiefly applied to females to refer to each other (including the pronoun she, which in recent years gay men have started applying even to inanimate objects). —Mahāgaja · talk 07:33, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

True, but the fact that that phenomenon is so general, extending to all feminine words, suggests it's not an impediment to defining this one as being mostly or exclusively said to women. I recall that we excluded both the derogatory call-a-boy-a-girl sense and the gay call-another-gay-man-a-girl sense from girl for the same reason, and drill sergeants calling men "ladies" hasn't (yet) changed how we define lady, either. As an aside, do you think we should have an entry for [[gay she]] a la royal we? - -sche (discuss) 09:44, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't think I've ever heard the phrase gay she used, so I'm not in favor of an entry unless cites are found. If you have some, go ahead and start Citations:gay she. I'd be interested to see if it's used to refer to the age-old phenomenon of gay men using she not only in reference to each other (and in reference to straight guys they wish were gay), but also to the relatively recent phenomenon of gay men using it to refer to objects (e.g. She looks good! in reference to a wig or a brightly colored coffee cup). And I'm not saying we need a separate sense of you go, girl for its usage among gay men or even mention gay men in the definition at all; I'm just saying we should phrase it as something along the lines of "chiefly for a woman or girl" so that the definition doesn't exclude the possibility of its being used occasionally for boys and men. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:39, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

"Chiefly" or "usually" seems like a good-enough solution. The gender-identification complexities may seem a little difficult to address in a dictionary, but we have plenty of polysemic entries. I think our entries for she, girl, lady, etc fall a bit short of adequate coverage of use that reflects current subculture usages. Citations would be essential. OTOH, I can't see it for MWEs that use these terms, like ladies and gentlemen, you go, girl/you go girl, etc. DCDuring (talk) 14:28, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Sure, "chiefly" or "usually" would work here. ("Chiefly", "typically" and "mostly" do a lot of work for us in various words, including male and female, and lesbian, where I've known and also known of [cis] women—like E. J. Levy, who's also in the news lately for a use of she—who've identified as lesbians but fell in love with and married [cis] men.)
I suppose my concern is, would/should we similarly change the definitions of e.g. every feminine word ("heiress", "actress", etc) for which we find three instances of a man being put down as such, or a gay man being referred to as such? I...don't know; I concede that the other 'would we add a sense if...?' situations that come to mind, like finding three instances of people insulting a fat person as a balloon or calling a bad speech vomit probably are situations where we'd add a sense. (Maybe, despite my initial thoughts, bullies calling boys "girls" and sergeants calling men "ladies" is common enough to merit mention in a usage note or sense after all? Or maybe just a usex/quote... hmm...) - -sche (discuss) 20:36, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

red sauce

Should we have a more specific definition? [4], [5], [6]. Or maybe red-sauce restaurant. DTLHS (talk) 22:35, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

I added ", as typically served in Italian cuisine, especially of southern Italy." But, see red sauce on Wikipedia.Wikipedia for more. DCDuring (talk) 17:47, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

I suspect that the marinara sauce mentioned on Wikipedia is essentially the same thing. We do not have an entry for marinara sauce nor Italian alla marinara, but we have Spanish salsa marinara. Of course, any sauce that has a red colour may be called “red sauce”. In Chinese restaurants, spring rolls are often served with two sauces: a green sauce (which is hot) and a red sauce (which is not hot but somewhat sweet).  --Lambiam 19:14, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

mojo is another red sauce. Unlike the Chinese one, it is pretty spicy. The Spanish don't call it red sauce though. Which makes this post entirely pointless. --I learned some phrases (talk) 22:03, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

It is not pointless, however, to mention that there is a WP page for green sauce too. --I learned some phrases (talk) 22:05, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

I'd be surprised if red sauce was restricted to marinara sauce. DCDuring (talk) 22:23, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

There should probably be a literal definition, but if it's used specifically for a tomato sauce in certain contexts, we need that definition.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:12, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

The red sauces of Italian, Asian, and Tex-Mex are all distinct but at least tomato- or chili-based. I think it's a synonym of pasta sauce / marinara sauce / spaghetti sauce / tomato sauce(?), as well as enchilada sauce (which does not refer to green sauce of green enchiladas). I don't know of any synonyms in Asian cuisine. I don't think it's hot sauce or chili sauce. Ultimateria (talk) 23:18, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

I think red sauce will be found to be used attributively to characterize a certain type of Italian cuisine and purveyors thereof, whereas spaghetti sauce, pasta sauce, marinara sauce, and tomato sauce, which may be identical to or types of red sauce, are not. DCDuring (talk) 02:13, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

West Frisian g

Looking at the Pronunciations of begraafplak and begrave, I noticed that the g is fricative. It was my understanding that g at the onset of a stressed syllable was plosive (/ɡ/) in West Frisian (?) Leasnam (talk) 14:28, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

@Leasnam I'm not questioning at all what you're saying, but how do we think that that happened? I've always been under the assumption (perhaps it is an incorrect assumption) that the shift of Proto-Germanic /ɣ/ to /g/ in most Germanic languages happened at least somewhat independently from one another (not entirely, of course, as in later Old English it seems to have been due to Old Norse influence). How did West Frisian, considering the part of Frisia that it has long been spoken in, develop /g/ from /ɣ/? And how did it retain such a development over time, considering where West Friesland is located? Do we have any idea at all? Tharthan (talk) 04:44, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Leasnam, Tharthan, Rua – The book Phonology & grammar of modern West Frisian by Pieter Sipma (1913) states (on page 5) that g, when initial, has (almost) the same value as in English, but when not initial is a voiced fricative. On pages 15 and 17 these values are further specified to be, respectively, a voiced velar [ex]plosive and a voiced velar fricative. Omniglot gives the values [ɡ/ɣ] without a hint on which occurs in which positions.  --Lambiam 10:37, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

They are allophones of a single phoneme. Wikipedia treats /ɣ/ as the phoneme and [ɡ] as the allophone, so that is what has been adopted here as well. We could equally do it the other way around, although it can be argued that [ɡ] is the special case so it should not be considered the main realisation of the phoneme. But regardless of what we do, we should not mix ɣ and ɡ within a phonemic transcription. —Rua (mew) 11:00, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Lambiam, Leasnam After some research I found that there are actually words that violate the allophony. In words of multiple morphemes, each morpheme preserves its status as plosive or fricative, regardless of stress. hartoginne preserves the fricative of hartoch despite being stressed, while needgefal preserves the plosive of gefal despite being unstressed and no longer word-initial. Thus, the allophony only appears to hold within single-morpheme words, but compounding or affixation can break it. I've therefore changed my mind and think that we should give the allophones the status of full phonemes. —Rua (mew) 00:16, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

How is a morpheme boundary any different from a word boundary in this respect? It looks like it's just another condition for the phonological rule. Are there cases where a morpheme boundary doesn't have this effect? Chuck Entz (talk) 00:32, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

But a phonological rule for determining allophony that depends on morphological analysis isn't tenable. If we treat them as one phoneme, the only way to know that hartoginne has a fricative is by comparison with hartoch, which cannot be expressed in IPA. In phonological terms, the only way to treat these cases is as different underlying consonants; treating them as one phoneme loses this information and makes users of our phonemic IPA unable to pronounce it correctly. This makes both of them phonemes for our purposes. —Rua (mew) 00:43, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

what's up

-- Yeah, how you doing, man? -- Just kidding. I don't care about how Wiktionary editors are doing.

I think we should merge senses 3 and 4, that is: (3) "(idiomatic, colloquial) What do you need?; How can I help you? "Can I ask you something?" / "Sure, what's up?"", (4) "(idiomatic, colloquial) What’s the matter?". I don't think that what's up, by itself, goes so far as to mean "how can I help you?" (sense 3): rather, it's just asking what the problem or issue is (sense 4). Equinox ◑ 20:59, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

behavioral force

"Anything, such as peer pressure, that makes the people in a society behave according to certain norms." Is this a sum of parts? If it's a set phrase, what group of people use it: psychologists, advertisers, etc. Equinox ◑ 21:54, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

The term comes from (post-Skinnerian) behavioural psychology, but is used by all sorts of pop psychologists.  --Lambiam 23:37, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Hyphenation at supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I'm pretty sure "ifrag" and "ilis" are missing a syllable divider, the former being i-frag (or if-rag?), and the latter being i-lis or il-is. First of all, which is it? Also, why doesn't the hyphenation section show up when I edit the pronunciation section? Is it a bug in the mobile website (I'm on a Huawei p10 lite)?

MGorrone (talk) 22:26, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

They weren't there and I added them. Syllables can be pretty subjective in English, though; a Brit might disagree with me. Ultimateria (talk) 23:05, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

For the record, regarding "syllables", hyphenation (as noted on WT:Hyphenation) is about "how a word is broken across line breaks [...] a question of typography," not necessarily the same as pronunciation. For example, in German, Schlüssel is hyphenated Schlüs·sel, but there's only one /s/ sound in between the /l/s. And, conversely, Ecke is hyphenated Ecke despite being two syllables. - -sche (discuss) 00:10, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Oh that's right. They should probably be sourced more often than not then. Should I undo my edit? Ultimateria (talk) 00:30, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Eh, your edit had as many sources as the previous content (ha). Maybe we should just comment-out the hyphenation altogether. Or look for sources or even instances where the word is hyphenated in books. Google's suggested hyphenation is su·per·ca·li·fra·gil·is·tic·ex·pi·a·li·do·cious. In books, I can find the following line breaks (not exhaustive): "superca-lifragilisticexpialidocious", "supercal-ifragilisticexpialidocious", "supercalifra-gilisticexpialidocious", "supercalifrag-ilisticexpialidocious", "supercalifragilisticexpiali-docious". Someone with more patience could try all possible line break locations and see which existed. - -sche (discuss) 21:25, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

wug

I’ve noticed the word wug in Michael Carr’s “Chinese Dragon Names” (1990) listed in Wiktionary:About Chinese/references#C. He uses it to refer to the radical 虫. Isn’t it a dialectal form of bug? — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 01:09, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Do you mean a dialect form of "bug" in English? Mihia (talk) 02:19, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

This is a WUG.  --Lambiam 23:25, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Μανούσιο

So I just made Μανούσιο, which I guessed is a Greek surname. Obviously, I should never ever be allowed to edit in Greek. Was my guess correct that it is a surname? --I learned some phrases (talk) 09:43, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

The form is wrong. There are people whose surname is Μανούσιος, with a final sigma. It is not a good idea to make entries based on guesses.  --Lambiam 23:31, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

κανούσιο

Another question about Greek. It seems that κανούσιο might be a word. Possibly referring to Canusium. --I learned some phrases (talk) 09:45, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

That would be the accusative case (as in στο Κανούσιο), with Κανούσιον (spelled with a majuscule, as it is a proper noun) as its nominative. This form was apparently already used by Plutarch, so it is also Ancient Greek.  --Lambiam 23:03, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

ladies and gentlemen

Our usage notes have a number of problems. For one, they seem to be confusing "unisex" with "monosex" (probably we should just spell out "audiences of all one gender"). For another, they say the phrase is "used with ladies before gentlemen even in feminist [...] environments", as if to imply (by "even") that this is unusual or unexpected, but wouldn't feminists be expected to put "ladies" first in this phrase? (Or am I just influenced by the tendency to say Foobar-innen und Foobar-en in German?) - -sche (discuss) 20:11, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Now I'm sad to discover that the term Foobarinnen doesn't seem to exist... 😢 ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 20:35, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

I wonder at what age it becomes ladies first, as the customary extended greeting, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls”, puts the male children before the female. I thought female feminists don’t care about being called “ladies“; perhaps “wymmyn and doodz”?  --Lambiam 23:19, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

It's better than "Guys". SemperBlotto (talk) 05:40, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, I rewrote the usage notes. - -sche (discuss) 06:09, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

heaping big, heaping-big

Is heaping used as an intensifier with any other adjective than big? (a few quotes: "Intermittently, the mommas would bring us heaping big plates of home made teacakes", "I done dug a heaping-big can full of the biggest fishing worms you ever saw", "Right in the middle of all that stood a heaping big plate of cookies", "Then you spoon a heaping big portion onto your plate and eat it").

Compare Wiktionary:Tea room/2017/December § socking; see also Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/March § smoking hot, freezing cold et alii. Chignon – Пучок 07:58, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

Looking at google books:"a heaping big", the things described—spoons, dishes (bowls, plates), quarts, portions / amounts, piles (of leaves), or ice-cream sundaes—could also be described just as "heaping", so I think it may be not an intensifier but a second descriptor, like with google books:"large fat man". We're currently missing an adjective section at heaping, but it has as much merit as the adjective section we do have at heaped, I think: the verb sections could intelligibly cover both, but other dictionaries do have adjective sections. (The only oddity is "a heaping big rain squall", and even there I see "a heaping rain" and "a heaping storm" also occur.) As to other collocations, there is google books:"a heaping large" and a couple for "(the|a) heaping great". - -sche (discuss) 08:31, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

There's also the pseudo-American-Indian heap in the mix somewhere. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:26, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: Yes, indeed. I stand corrected. Chignon – Пучок 20:42, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

girlfriendable, boyfriendable, wifeable, husbandable, girlfriend material, boyfriend material, wifey material, husband material

• Is girlfriendable attested on UseNet? I couldn't find anything on Google Books.
• Is husbandable attested in a similar sense to wifeable and boyfriendable, beside the sense that's already mentioned in the entry?
• Are girlfriend material, boyfriend material, wifey material, husband material entry-worthy?
• Shouldn't we have a verb section at wife? (Wiktionary:Tea room/2017/December § wife)

Chignon – Пучок 08:04, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

1. You can check. 2. You can check. 3. I'd lean towards not. 4. Yes; you can add it. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:17, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

About 1. and 2., the problem is I don't know how to use UseNet (and husbandable isn't attested in that sense on GB, AFAICT). About 3., okay, no entries. About 4., done, but I'm not sure about the inflection, and I don't know how to define it. Chignon – Пучок 20:13, 23 April 2019 (UTC) 

Use groups.google.com, and only look at results from groups in the Usenet format (e.g. rec.arts.foo). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:29, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

comfortability

It has been quite a while since I have been so put off by a word as I am now by this word. It is definitely attestable, but we are the only OneLook dictionary to have a full entry for it, Dictionary.com having only a run-in at comfortable.

I would very much like to discourage use of this word. What is reasonable for labels, usage note, etc?

I also don't think the third definition is substitutable, which is IMO an indication that it may be wrong. DCDuring (talk) 21:39, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

You could add a usage note explaining that experienced Wiktionary editor DCDuring experiences a great deal of discomfortabilitation at the use of this word and therefore requests that any uses be replaced by a word providing simple “comfort”. (I feel your pain; I too become disorientated by such words.)  --Lambiam 12:15, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

We may need to clean up the current definitions; I am not convinced they are a good reflection of the senses the word has. If some senses are nonstandard, uncommon, or rare, they could be labelled as such. You could add a usage note suggesting that the word is not common enough to be in (many / most / all) other (major) dictionaries. For some senses the word seems to be the standard/expected one, however (though attestation of it would be key), like for "the extent to which someone can be comforted", like how the extent to which something can be deleted / redefined / whatever is its deletability, redefinability, etc. - -sche (discuss) 18:01, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

One problem is that in one definition it just means comfort, but has three more syllables that add nothing. But I think part of my particular problem is that my normal interpretation of such a word is that it should be decipherable as comfort#Verb + -ability ("'ability' to be comforted"), but that almost none of the usage seems to fit that definition. The alternative derivation, comfortable + -ity would yield the same meaning as comfortable + -ness (comfortableness), which word is not subject to alternative constructions and is used with a single definition about three times more frequently than comfortability, with its three or more definitions.

Perhaps another definition is "Affording the potential for comfort; enabling comfort." This is not the same as the "comfort" thereby achieved, nor is it "comfortableness", the state of having achieved comfort.

I've tried to reword the existing definitions and reallocate the cites, but haven't added the definition proposed immediately above. Please take a look. DCDuring (talk) 01:53, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

wretched

When I came to our entry for wretched, I was surprised to see the third sense marked as obsolete, because that sense was literally why I looked up the word here. I was thinking of synonyms for "despicable", "deplorable", worthy of detesting, and "wretched" was the first thing that came to mind for me.

I checked the talk page after noticing that one existed, and found that someone had left a message saying that they didn't think that the third sense was obsolete. Now, just to make sure that I hadn't left that message a long time ago, I looked up the IP address. Safe to say that it wasn't me, because they were on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

I suppose that the problem is that distinguishing senses two and three in practice is sometimes quite difficult. If we read literature holding the belief that sense three is most definitely obsolete, then it is most likely that we will interpret nearly all potential instances of sense 3 as sense 2. Tharthan (talk) 23:49, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

If no one's complaining that the definition is accurate, let's see if anyone wants to cough up a source that says the usage is obsolete, which i also find questionable. (Even if such a source exists, i have to wonder if its research is obsolete.) i removed that tag solely on the merits of personal experience (original research, Wikipedia calls it) and Being Bold. Would dated or archaic be a less objectionable tag? Now that i'm thinking about it, i don't think anyone has forgotten or changed the meaning... People just seem more inclined to cuss these days.

Does Wiktionary have a ^{[citation needed]}template? 71.121.143.4 01:28, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Erm... huh? We're supposed to discuss things like this, preferably. Be bold, but not reckless. I've taken the liberty of reverting your edit, because (even though I agree that the tag ought to be removed) it is unreasonable to just make serious changes like that all willy-nilly. I would suggest that you familiarise yourself with Wiktionary policies.

 

With that said, I think that the removal of the tag would be potentially reasonable. However, I would like to hear from other Wiktionarians first. But to address your statement...

1. You don't know whether anyone contests the definition. Someone here might say that definitions two and three are too similar, and need to be looked at. Let's wait and see.

2. We do give more leeway here in the research department than Wikipedia does (largely because a dictionary is a different beast from an encyclopaedia).

3. I would say that, at worst, (archaic) ought to suffice. But, at best, we might not need such a tag at all. Let's discuss, like I said. Many people (including myself) work on Wiktionary in their spare time, so please understand that it might take some time for the discussion to get going.

4. I would agree with that sentiment. In fact, I would venture to say that the English speaking world today is more rife with vulgarities than ever (almost certainly literally true anyway, considering the size of the English-speaking world today, and the number of words now in the language). I have things that I could say about the shocking comparisons that could be drawn between many of today's "First World" societies and the Roman Empire as it was before Constantine got the ball of progress rolling, but this is neither the time nor the place to get into that. We all have different takes on things, and this is a dictionary, not a message board.

5. Wiktionary has different rules than Wikipedia regarding the subject of citations, due to the fact that the two are different projects. However, I am not the best person to go into the details of that. Perhaps someone else can explain more to you. Tharthan (talk) 01:52, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

It looks like the definition and the obsolete tag was copied from Webster 1913. The best way to show it to not be obsolete would be to find citations. Another, lazier way would be to see what MWOnline says. They have 4 definitions, none marked as obsolete. But their wording is not in the form of a synonym cloud, so it is not easy to determine which of their current definitions correspond their century old ones. Our entry could stand modernization. DCDuring (talk) 02:12, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

criticality point/rate

The entry for CRT includes the role-playing game's definition "criticality point/rate", and links to criticality, to point, and to rate. i do not know what "criticality point/rate" means, and i do not think reading the definitions of the component words helps. (The comparison that comes to mind is: linking to gold and digger might be misleading about the definition of gold digger.) Would anyone object if we do not include links in the case of criticality point/rate?

71.121.143.4 01:00, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

A definition that is incomprehensible is useless. I have requested verification of this sense.  --Lambiam 09:37, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

o' course

Real, of course, but not a very typical form. Should o' and of course suffice? Equinox ◑ 00:59, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Economy, sadly, is not a consideration in CFI. DCDuring (talk) 03:02, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Where a multi-word phrase has secondary variant spellings/contractions for its individual components, we do not, in my opinion, need to include separate entries for permutations of those variant spellings, unless any such are notably prevalent. Fer cryin' oot lood. Mihia (talk) 03:17, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Not typical in writing, but very typical in speech, and it patterns differently than o' in my idiolect, at least. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:59, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps this is reflected in the spelling acourse – easily attestable and passing the lemon test.  --Lambiam 07:43, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Is this comparable to e.g. Talk:eatin' for two (2011) and Talk:eatin' like a bird (2018), which were both deleted? (I am on the fence about whether or not these are useful. I think I would prefer redirecting to outright deletion.) - -sche (discuss) 07:36, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

want + adjective/adverb (?)

Recently heard in the movie Fracture (2007): "- I don't care. That's not what this is about. - What is it about? - It's about whether you can do what you're told. You wanted corporate, right? That was the point".

I'm familiar with this use, which I've come across before, but I don't think our entry want covers it. It seems similar to want in. Chignon – Пучок 18:56, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Isn't it just the past perfect tense? DTLHS (talk) 18:58, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

@DTLHS: I'm confused. Of what verb? Chignon – Пучок 19:08, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

"You [had] wanted corporate". DTLHS (talk) 19:10, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Mh, maybe, but even if it is, I don't think that would change anything to how corporate must be parsed. Or am I missing something? Chignon – Пучок 19:16, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

"Corporate" is definitely a noun in this case, if that's the problem. We don't have a good sense for this currently. DTLHS (talk) 19:17, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, that's the problem. I'm not convinced it's a noun; I could have sworn I've come across similar (slang) constructions before ("to want X", meaning "to want to join..." or something like that), where I would intuitively parse X as an adjective. Though right now I can't give you any examples... The only thing it reminds me of is want in and want out. Chignon – Пучок 19:30, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Actually, I'm willing to concede it's a noun, but I really think it's the entry want that's lacking, not corporate. Chignon – Пучок 19:46, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Well I'm coming around on it being an adjective. "You wanted fast", "you wanted bad", etc. I think we could come up with other verbs than "want" that we could apply this pattern to although none are coming to mind right now. DTLHS (talk) 19:48, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Surely it's an adjective. Also "you wanted difficult", "you wanted different" etc. Mihia (talk) 22:09, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, isn't it just elision of "you wanted (it/things to be) corporate/fast/difficult/etc"? I don't think it's "you wanted to join (corporate/whatever)", or at least I don't read the examples that have been listed so far that way. As to other verbs, what about (in the context of discussing e.g. a car) "you (needed / were looking for) fast, so I (built / got you / brought you) fast"? - -sche (discuss) 23:03, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

It is not just the verb want. For example: “You wanted cheap, you got cheap.” (Here, the verb get means “obtain” or “acquire”.) To me, it feels as if “something that is” has been elided: “You wanted something that is cheap, you got something that is cheap.” (Be careful what you want: you may get it.)  --Lambiam 00:00, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Applied to the original quotation: “You wanted a job that is corporate, right?”  --Lambiam 00:05, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Yet another verb + adjective: “I’m thinking modern but plush and sexy.”, meaning (in the context), “I’m thinking of an interior decorating style that is modern but plush and sexy.”  --Lambiam 00:27, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm with Lambian.

This is not limited to want, think, get. It is a property of many English adjectives: that they can be used as nominals, with obvious meanings. "He intended to marry rich." "Living Poor with Style". "We should take a step back just to see the true beauty in ugly". "Jack's problem was that he was short, but played tall." It is not too common in formal speech and writing, but more so in informal settings, I think. DCDuring (talk) 02:20, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I think -sche's explanation and yours are convincing. Chignon – Пучок 09:15, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

In many instances, "Corporate" is a proper noun, referring to the central, highest-level division of some corporations: "you can't do that without approval from Corporate". Without context, I'm not sure if that's what's referred to here, but it sounds plausible for such a sentence. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:26, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: I don't think that's that. Unfortunately I'm not too well acquainted with the terminology, but the gist, I think, is that the character the sentence is addressed to used to work in a public service (?), but has applied for a new position in the private sector.

Here's what Wikipedia says: "Now in jail awaiting trial, Crawford engages in a battle of wits with rising star deputy district attorney William "Willy" Beachum [that's the person the sentence is addressed to], who considers the case an open-and-shut matter and agrees to go to trial immediately. Beachum is preparing to transition from criminal law to a corporate attorneyship at well-known law firm Wooton & Simms, and flirts with his future boss, Nikki Gardner [that's the person uttering the sentence]." Chignon – Пучок 09:15, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

As an aside, I think the played tall example is at least as well analyzed as an adverb, though we don't have an adverb PoS section at [[tall]]. MWOnline has it as a run-in; AHD, RHU, and WNW with a definition. Ergo, it may be US.

Also, I find it hard to imagine anyone not immersed in an English-speaking setting ever learning much of this kind of thing from any amount of study, even with a native speaker as a personal tutor. There are many ways of expressing the thoughts behind these expressions that are somewhat longer, but not likely to generate comment or confusion. DCDuring (talk) 12:03, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

The phrase play tall is idiom (used in basketball, baseball and other sports) and may – just like idioms such as think big and stand corrected – defy standard analysis.  --Lambiam 13:24, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't really think play tall is an idiom. One doesn't have to look hard to find "Are you willing to play heavy or conservative?" (craps); "As one who chooses to play light, I am inclined to probe deeply into the various subjects I explore." (new age); "you can not possibly play heavy as a drummer when you have to have so many beats per minute"; "If it is happy, you can play light and bouncy."; "the thought of seeing the love of his life and Angel too, played heavy in his thoughts"; "play simple, play quiet and play light." DCDuring (talk) 18:07, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

break one's fast

How are definitions one and two clearly distinct, especially considering the line in definition one "[T]o conclude any period of fasting by consuming food"? Tharthan (talk) 07:23, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't think they are. I'd divide the senses up as follows:

1. (dated) [or possibly even obsolete, in my view] To eat the first meal of the day after a night of not eating; to eat breakfast.
2. To conclude any period of fasting by consuming food.

— SGconlaw (talk) 09:58, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

There is (at least in my mind) a distinction between intentional fasting, practiced out of religious (or medical) motives, and simply not taking nourishment between (usually regular) meals. I think the latter sense, used in the present definition (“any period of fasting”), has mostly fallen into disuse, although “nightly fast” or “overnight fast” are still fairly common. In any case, both quotations for sense 1 refer to having breakfast, and it will be nigh impossible to find supporting citations for a more general sense, so the proposed new definition seems fine. The term is still used in contemporary historical novels (e.g. here) and will be understood in context by most readers, so the appropriate label is probably (archaic). To avoid misunderstanding, I suggest though to expand sense 2 to “To conclude any period of intentional fasting (usually for religious or medical reasons) by consuming food”.  --Lambiam 10:59, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. — SGconlaw (talk) 14:28, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Transitivity

On an unrelated point, in a "verbal phrase" like break one's fast (not sure if there is a technical name for it), indicated in the entry as a verb, is it appropriate to indicate whether the phrase is transitive or intransitive? If so, is it transitive or intransitive? — SGconlaw (talk) 10:40, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

The usual term is verb phrase; to be included here it needs to be an idiomatic verb phrase. Some random similar verb phrases that come to mind: beat one’s brain; blow a kiss; kick the bucket; get one’s act together; rock the boat; zip one’s lip. Since these already carry an (idiomatically fixed) object, there is no slot left for another (optional) object, so one might say these verb phrases are formally intransitive, and in a few rare instances they have been labelled thus (e.g., make faces). But since the head verb in these phrases (beat; blow; kick; get; rock; zip) is transitive, that feels weird to me. It is different when the verb phrase itself is not pre-loaded with an object. Then one can have both transitive verb phrases (e.g. blow out of proportion) and intransitive ones (e.g. fool around), and labelling them accordingly is appropriate  --Lambiam 11:47, 2019 April 23 (UTC)

I had established Category:English predicates to capture this kind of expression in case we ever decided the issue SGconlaw has raised. I don't like adding Verb phrase as a PoS; nor do I think Phrase is a good heading. As we have many verbs that don't have their (in)transitivity labeled, simple neglect (ie, no label) may be good enough. DCDuring (talk) 12:14, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

So, in summary, if the verb phrase already has an idiomatically fixed object (e.g., break one's fast) we should not indicate the transitivity, but if it does not (e.g., fool around) we should? — SGconlaw (talk) 14:28, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

That is my inclination. I think these labels are most useful for verbs that have both transitive and intransitive senses, and sometimes also ambitransitive ones, like break. For cases like blow a kiss it does not appear to serve an identifiable purpose. Others may nevertheless prefer to add the label intransitive, as some have in fact done for several of these cases.  --Lambiam 22:43, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

We could go that way; I wouldn't object. But, it may be that we should always add a "transitive" label to the entries that have transitive usage because such a label might help users make sense of such usage, by drawing attention to the requirement for an object. An intransitive label for a term that only has intransitive usage seems to me to be just confusing to users in the same way it has been a bit confusing to us. DCDuring (talk) 02:04, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I agree with always labelling transitive senses as transitive; in English these never have an idiomatically fixed object. And if a verb has both transitive and intransitive senses, I think it is helpful to also label the intransitive senses. Sometimes the transitive sense is NISOP and not listed; for example, you can hang out the washing, but our entry hang out lists only intransitive senses.  --Lambiam 20:54, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

side-eye

Should the pronunciation be indicated as /ˈsaɪˌdaɪ/, /ˈsaɪdˌaɪ/, /ˈsaɪdaɪ/, or perhaps /ˈsaɪd ˌaɪ/? — SGconlaw (talk) 09:09, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

I'd prefer the second option, /ˈsaɪdˌaɪ/. I don't think it's quite a perfect rhyme of tie-dye. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:36, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, the first one (currently in the entry) looks odd to me. — SGconlaw (talk) 10:37, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

I don’t think it makes much of a difference, but in my opinion the current one – although looking odd – is just fine. In English pronunciation, boundaries between morphemes – even words – do typically not give rise to corresponding phonological features. For example, ”I scream” and ”ice cream” are homophonic in normal speech. For an example in Dutch, which in this respect is similar to English, the univerbation heelal from heel + al has hyphenation heel‧al, but the indicated pronunciation /ɦeːˈlɑl/ is probably the best choice. (For the Dutch word nogal two pronunciations have been provided (@LBD), but I think that from a phonetic perspective these are indistinguishable.)  --Lambiam 12:14, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Actually, Lambiam, that would vary from dialect to dialect and even speaker to speaker. "I scream" for me is /aɪ skɹim/, whereas "ice cream" for me is /ʌɪsˈkɹiːm/. Even in casual speech they would sound noticeably different, because /ʌɪ/ could not be by itself in that way; */ʌɪ skɹim/ wouldn't happen. The closest thing to that would be in one of the realisations of fauteuil; /ˈfoʊ.tʌɪ/ (which happens to be the realisation that I use myself). This is why that whole "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!" thing went right over my head and my younger sister's head when we were children. We just thought that the line meant that people throw fits until they get ice cream or something like that. It was only later that I realised that it was a pun on the pronunciation. Tharthan (talk) 00:03, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I am sorry for you and your sister that you missed out on the fun of the pun. In the song the stress is additionally on the first syllable of “ice cream”, as you would expect for a compound; the other stress pattern, also common, may be a holdover from earlier “iced cream”. My point was, though, that the word boundary is not phonologically marked. I’m sure there are other examples, even if somewhat contrived, that would work for your dialect.  --Lambiam 07:38, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

religion

"Religion" is one of those words that is notoriously hard to define. I took a stab at it earlier this year and (IMHO) greatly improved the first definition, and I heavily revised it again today. I'm not entirely sure it's a good definition though, so I thought I'd bring it up here for further scrutiny. Does anything come to mind that fits the definition, but isn't generally considered a religion (or vice versa)? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 20:22, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

I am not sure I understand the “goal-oriented” qualification. If there is a goal, shouldn’t it be identified? Or can it be any goal, like getting rich fast? I also think (others may disagree) that replacing “associated with” by “relevant to” is not an improvement.

What I miss in the definition is that for religious people religion gives a deeper meaning to their lives, a meaning beyond the mundane.

Some inspiration may be drawn from the various definitions given in the Wikipedia article Definition of religion, which is more helpful than the article Religion itself. Also, Spiritual but not religious contains material that may be useful for expanding the usage notes.  --Lambiam 23:16, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. The "goal-oriented" addition is perhaps redundant to the mention of practices and rituals. I wanted to make sure I excluded philosophical systems that aren't religious, as well as scientific study of things that the senses cannot perceive. I've removed the descriptor for now.

I replaced "associated with" because I didn't want things like blowing people up with suicide vests to be considered part of certain religions. I've now changed it to "pertaining to", but the ambiguity might still be there, or I might have created a new problem. I'm not sure.

Good point regarding meaning. I'll have to think about it some more and maybe add it to the definition later. Actually, I think that's what I was trying to capture with "goal-oriented." Andrew Sheedy (talk) 01:12, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I would say "spiritual", i.e. relating to the individual religious person's "soul" or "spirit" (whereas "reality beyond what is perceptible by the senses" could cover purely external supernatural things that are not religions, like holding séances, or ghost-hunting). Equinox ◑ 01:42, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

“Reality beyond what is perceptible by the senses” could also cover quarks and gluons – QCD as a religion, with Feynman as its prophet. :)  --Lambiam 15:23, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Exactly, which is what I was trying to exclude with "goal-oriented" (although the things you mentioned could very well be goal-oriented!). But I think Equinox's suggestion resolves the issue. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:55, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

do more harm than good

Is it entry-worthy? Other dictionaries have it, but it sounds quite SOP.

• “do more harm than good” (US) / “do more harm than good” (UK) in Macmillan English Dictionary.
• “do more harm than good”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.
• “do more harm than good”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

Chignon – Пучок 20:28, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Not always with do: "this often results in more harm than good". Equinox ◑ 20:33, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

IMO [[more harm than good]] seems like it would be a good entry. It should also be the target of redirects from the lemma and inflected forms of do more harm than good. DCDuring (talk) 21:15, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

This Google NGram show that forms of do more harm than good represent at least two thirds of the total usage of more harm than good. The actual total is even higher because these numbers do not report cases of modification by adverbs like far and much, passives, objects intervening between forms of do and more harm than good, etc. The uses without do in the vicinity have synonyms of near-synonyms of do like cause, produce

IOW, it would be easy to justify a full entry for do more harm than good, possibly with a redirect going from more harm than good to do more harm than good.

The deciding factor may be that it seems easier to write a non-SoP definition or at least a useful definition for do more harm than good than for more harm than good. DCDuring (talk) 21:42, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

cringe sense 3 countability

The third noun sense: "An embarrassing event, item or behaviour which causes an onlooker to cringe." Is this countable: can you say that someone's behaviour was "a cringe"? If uncountable (the way I've always heard it), this should be noted. Equinox ◑ 23:06, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Can it be that in this sense it is short for cringeworthy, making it an adjective? That also explains sentences like “it was very cringe” and phrases like “a cringe performance”.  --Lambiam 23:30, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

It sounds like a neologism that a contemporary teen might use. "Pfft. What a cringe, amirite?" ...something like that? Probably used after one of their friends asked "How do I sex?" or said "Alot of my peeps have treaded water, but unlike them I wasn't phased that I had to do it". Tharthan (talk) 00:12, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I do think it's at least an uncountable noun ("some classic cringe"), not just an adjective. P.S. Get off Thartan's lawn. Equinox ◑ 00:17, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

烤羊肉

Does 烤羊肉 deserve a page? Or is it an obvious modification of 烤肉 disqualified by sum-of-parts? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 23:52, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

It feels like a sum-of-parts, 烤 + 羊肉. There is also 烤豬肉, which is more canonical when it comes to Chinese cuisine, but also has no entry.  --Lambiam 10:52, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

legal address, registered address vs. mailing address

Are these entry-worthy? Chignon – Пучок 15:41, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I think so, but legal address, for example, may be SoP as its meaning depends on jurisdiction and purpose. If all we can say by way of definition is "address for legal purposes", we shouldn't include it. DCDuring (talk) 18:31, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Dutch zich suf + verb and "tot je een ons weegt"

@Lingo Bingo Dingo, Lambiam In Dutch, you can combine any verb with either of these, with the meaning "until one is blue in the face". I am having some difficulty how to lemmatise these, so I'm hoping for some feedback.

(verb) zich (adjective)

In the first, the combination of verb + zich + suf is one of verb + reflexive pronoun + adverb suf. Really, the whole combination, including the verb, is a verb phrase, but because the idiom works with any verb, it's hard to decide what to call the entry and what POS to give it. zich suf isn't really anything at all by itself, it only "becomes" something by the addition of the verb and the replacement of the reflexive pronoun by one matching the subject. Moreover, we don't include the reflexive pronoun in verb entries anyway, so a lemma for a hypothetical verb werkwoorden used in this construction would be suf werkwoorden with a {{lb|nl|reflexive}} sense. So should it be on suf, or should there be zich suf, or something else? —Rua (mew) 18:16, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Not an answer, but the observation that the issue occurs also with other cases: One can zich het apezuur schrikken/werken/oefenen/zoeken/..., or alternatively het apelazarus. To find relief, one then can zich klem drinken/zuipen/eten/vreten/lachen or (if you are Mark Rutte) zich klem lullen.  --Lambiam 21:13, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Some more observations. There is a certain similarity in syntactic structure between “ik kan me wel voor het hoofd slaan” en “ik kan me suf piekeren”. In both cases we see a reflexive pronoun (the object of the verb, referring to its subject) and an adverb. There are two significant differences. One is that in the first sentence you can leave out the adverb, but not in the second one: “ik kan me wel slaan”; *“ik kan me piekeren”. The other is that in the first sentence the object need not be a reflexive pronoun or even any pronoun, while it is obligatory in the second sentence, even though the verb piekeren is not by itself reflexive: “ik kan die gozer wel voor het hoofd slaan”; *“ik kan die gozer suf piekeren”. Another case with structural and formal similarities is [iemand] naar de verdommenis helpen/zien gaan/laten gaan versus [zich] naar de verdommenis werken/zuipen/.... Here we see again that in the reflexive case the verb is not by itself reflexive, and not even necessarily transitive, and when it is (zuipen) it takes rather different objects than the [zich]. In the non-reflexive case, the verb is always transitive, and the object is the [iemand]. Hmm, curious. The plot thickens. I think you can also say things like “Hij vloekte zich te pletter”, no? The pattern appears to be that the adverb or adverbial phrase, or whatever, identifies the condition of the actor (the [zich]) that results or will result from their performing the action of the verb. I am starting to suspect that this is a general aspect of Dutch grammar that cannot be properly dealt with at the lexical level by putative lemmas like [zich] suf, or we may also need [zich] het apelazarus, [zich] naar de verdommenis, [zich] te pletter, ad nauseam.  --Lambiam 22:02, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

It just occurred to me that syntactically, this is a causative verb construction along the lines of "to (verb) oneself (adjective)", thus that by verb-ing you make yourself adjective. What's weird is that this construction can be freely used with intransitive verbs, which are definitely not causative (transitive by definition). For example, something like ik pieker me suf uses piekeren, which is not transitive in any sense that I know of. Yet, in this construction, it's not only transitive but causative, with the reflexive object as the patient of the action. So it seems that this kind of phrase has the ability to bend the rules of verbs quite far. Very mysterious. —Rua (mew) 22:27, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

So one way of thinking about this is that adding a reflexive pronoun to a (possibly intransitive) verb turns it into a reflexive, causative and copulative verb that (just like the copulative verb worden) requires a subject complement specifying the result of the action – which can be an adjectival phrase like helemaal kapot, an adverbial phrase like uit de naad, or a noun phrase like een ongeluk. While some collocations using this construction are more idiomatic than others (I do not expect to find uses of zich geleerd studeren), it appears to be at least somewhat generic and productive.  --Lambiam 09:42, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

That's quite an interesting analysis, making this a specific use of the reflexive pronoun. If we can phrase it in that way, then all of these combinations suddenly become SOP terms and the question of lemmatising becomes moot. However, that would imply that any adjective or noun can be used in this way, and I'm not sure that's the case? —Rua (mew) 11:50, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Usually the subject complement signifies something undesirable, but not necessarily. For example, someone can zich uit de put werken. When I google “studeerde zich” I see a hit containing the line ”Studeerde zich een Master in Film“, apparently from a capsule bio. But in any case, it needs to be a possible outcome of an action, something the actor can become (if only in one’s unfettered imagination). One can zich rijk slapen (or hope to do so), but what could someone do to make oneself transcendental? Zich transcendent epibreren? So that gives a semantic restriction. If you can think of another restriction, where X worden as a state transition is possible, but zich X werken/... not, I’d like to hear it. By the way, I can’t imagine that this issue has not been analyzed already by some Dutch, who are known for being cunning linguists.  --Lambiam 12:45, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

It looks like this kind of construction can be applied quite generally. I notice zich already has a sense for it, too, so apparently someone was smarter than us and figured it out first. :D —Rua (mew) 23:26, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

A few other dictionaries either had this as a usage example or as a sublemma of suf with a raft of infinitives, similar to: zich suf peinzen/piekeren/prakkiseren/werken. Both approaches are useless for Wiktionary. If non-duplication is a large concern, I suppose it could be lemmatised under zich suf as a sort of modifying phrase due to its unusual grammatical behaviour with intransitive verbs (though the causative analysis is imo better), but I would not mind it either if it was only lemmatised as a verb phrase with any attested infinitives included. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 08:20, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Impersonal pronoun

The second one, tot je een ons weegt, is somewhat the same in meaning, but at least it is clear that it's an adverb just like the English phrase. The difficulty is in the pronoun. English has an indefinite pronoun one, but Dutch has no such equivalent. In the phrase here I used impersonal "you", but in Dutch that's an informal pronoun so it's not really all that neutral. Using men is a possibility, but feels really weird to have an entry called tot men een ons weegt. Any ideas? —Rua (mew) 18:16, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

As to the last item, I like the way The Free Dictionary handles this, as seen, for example, in the entry “absent (oneself) from (someone or something)”. What I think of as parameters of a phrase are marked by parentheses. Square brackets would be better for us – “absent [oneself] from [someone or something]” – because we already use round parens for glosses and some other stuff. The present approach is ambiguous: you can specialize for someone to for me, for you, ..., but someone else can’t be specialized: *me else, *you else. Using brackets we can make a distinction between for [someone] and just someone else. To introduce that generally would need something stronger than tea, and we may need to wait until a drastic weight reduction.

The adverbial phrase is special in that the subject of the embedded clause must reference the same person as that of the (possibly implicit) verb to which it refers: you have to know Anne’s gender to fill in the blank in the sentence “Anne kan soebatten tot __ een ons weegt, maar mijn besluit staat vast.” If that was not the case, you could use iemand, but that is not right here; men is better.

I’ll think about the first issue and hope some idea will present itself before my face gets smurfed.  --Lambiam 20:25, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Having just checked a few dictionaries, they all have this as an example under ons, with the subject invariably being je. Clearly that is ill-suited to how Wiktionary entries work, so a lemma under tot je een ons weegt would in my view be the best choice. It also seems to me that je is also the most common pronoun to be used in this expression. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 08:08, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

quoth

According to Encarta dictionaries "said (archaic or literary) (1st and 3rd person singular, before the subject) "I swoon," quoth he." Is it really proscribed from other persons than 1st/3rd singular? --Backinstadiums (talk) 19:30, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

• Well, it doesn't sound right in the 2nd person, or in the plural. Have you searched for such usage? SemperBlotto (talk) 19:50, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

The Bard uses “quoth you” in Love’s Labour‘s Lost, Act IV, Scene III. Here you can see uses of “quoth they”. Although not proscribed, it is clearly uncommon.  --Lambiam 20:36, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Categories for numbers

It looks like some entries use {{head|en|numeral}} and some use {{head|en|number}} so we have both Category:English numbers and Category:English numerals. The latter is subdivided with more specific categories like Category:English cardinal numbers. Do we really need categories for both numbers and numerals, or should they be unified? If they should be kept separate, what rule determines what words go where? (It looks like there currently isn't a rule; for example, first is currently not in Category:English numerals but forty-first is.) -- Beland (talk) 22:29, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Beland The situation was a problem for a long time I remember, but it was eventually resolved this way:

• "Numeral" is a part of speech, so it implies a specific set of rules for how the word behaves grammatically, that is specific to number words. Generally only cardinal number words are numerals, while ordinal numbers and other number-like words belong to regular parts of speech. eleventh is an adjective, for example, while twice is an adverb. This is language-specific, though. Not all languages have numerals as a part of speech, and not all cardinal numbers have the same part of speech either; Zulu -hlanu (“5”) is an adjective, while ikhulu (“100”) is a noun.
• The "cardinal number" category holds number-like words, i.e. words that can quantify a specific number of things, regardless of how they behave grammatically. The purpose of the cardinal numbers category is to cross the grammatical divide between different cardinal number words and group them together regardless. That is why the Zulu words for 5 and 100 are both in Category:Zulu cardinal numbers, despite being grammatically very different.
• The "ordinal number" category serves the same purpose, but for ordinal numer-like words. Because these are grammatically adjectives in most cases, there needs to be a separate way to group them that is not tied to part of speech.
• The base "number" category, finally, should probably not contain any entries, as it's really just a holder for the more specific subcategories. I suppose if you have some number word that is not cardinal, not ordinal, not fractional, and doesn't fall into any other category we have, then it can be placed in the bare "numbers" category. But creating a new type of category is probably the better solution.

I hope that clarified things for you. —Rua (mew) 22:45, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Rua: Ah, that's very helpful. So then is e.g. forty-eighth in Category:English numerals because fractional numbers (like 1/48th) are grammatical numerals, or is it misclassified? (It has two meanings, the other being the ordinal 48th, which if I understand correctly isn't a numeral.) -- Beland (talk) 00:45, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Hmm w:Numeral (linguistics) is citing sources that say that both cardinal and ordinal numbers are grammatical numerals, among others. I'm not sure if these are using the word "numeral" in a sense other than as a grammatical entity, or if there are just competing grammatical theories here. -- Beland (talk) 00:55, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it's misclassified. forty-eighth is an adjective in terms of its part of speech/lexical category. I think the differences lie in terminology moreso than in actual grammatical differences. Some consider numeral a subclass of quantifier, which in turn is a subclass of determiner, while others use the word "numeral" for any word referring to numbers without regard for grammatical consideration. A word like forty-eighth is not a quantifier, because it's not quantifying anything, it doesn't say how much of something there are. So it is not a numeral in the sense of being a quantifier, but it can be considered a numeral in the sense of having a numerical meaning. I suppose you could consider ordinals to be their own distinct lexical class too, but there doesn't seem to be any benefit in doing so, since for all purposes they behave like adjectives. Wiktionary, in any case, has adopted the definition of "numeral" in which it is a subclass of quantifier, so that is how our entries and categories are structured. For words that have a numeric meaning, we use the term "number" in our categories, while we do not use it as a part-of-speech header. —Rua (mew) 11:47, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Rua: OK, I'l try and clean things up. What about fractions like three-fourths? I'd say "I'd like three-fourths of an apple", but would we allow "I'd like one and three-fourths apples" it looks like the fraction can be a quantifying determiner? -- Beland (talk) 21:50, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

@Beland I don't understand what you're doing here. "Ordinal number" is not a part of speech so it should not be used as a header or as the category in {{head}}. As I said above, English ordinal numbers are grammatically adjectives. —Rua (mew) 20:23, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@Rua: Ah, sorry, I'll put in the structure you demonstrated for ordinal adjectives. Still not sure what to do about fraction that are currently classified as part-of-speech numerals? -- Beland (talk) 20:28, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: "One thirty-first" has a qualifier in front of it, suggesting that the thing it's qualifying is a noun. So I'd use the Noun part of speech for them. From what I can see, that's what our entries currently already do as well, so you don't have to change anything there. —Rua (mew) 20:31, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Hmm, there's this note on a lot of the pages I was editing which contradicts the idea that ordinals are always adjectives: "English ordinal numbers may function as either an adjective or as a noun, and almost never appear in the plural." For example, "second" appears to be a noun in a sentence like "You talk to the first-place finisher and I'll talk to the second." or "Second is a perfectly good spot". I think that's why a generic "numeral" header was being used. -- Beland (talk) 20:32, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

That's not anything special with ordinal numbers. "You talk to the old and I'll talk to the young" illustrates a non-numeric usage of this principle. In general, any adjective can used without a noun this way. —Rua (mew) 20:41, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, I'll delete that notice where I see it on ordinals and make them adjectives, and reclassify fractions like seven-eighths as nouns. It looks like they are not part-of-speech classifiers ("seven eighths of an apple" vs. "seven slices of apple"). -- Beland (talk) 20:50, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

alief

A useful word, I think. But how is it pronounced?

If it is derived from a pun as the etymology section of the entry suggests (I hope that it is, for reasons that ought to be obvious if you know anything about my lingual preferences), are we supposed to assume that it is pronounced /eɪˈliːf/?

I actually didn't get it at first, because I pretty much always pronounce belief as /bəˈliːf/. I always have, too.

But, yeah, how is this word pronounced? It would be good to indicate the pronunciation in the entry as well, of course. Tharthan (talk) 23:36, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

In the essay in which Gendler coined the term (Tamar Szabó Gendler. “Alief and Belief”. Journal of Philosophy 105/10 (2008), 634–63), the word is introduced without suggesting a pronunciation; the relation to belief is completely obvious in the context:

Surely they believe that the walkway will hold: no one would willingly step onto a mile-high platform if they had even a scintilla of doubt concerning its stability. But alongside that belief there is something else going on. Although the venturesome souls wholeheartedly believe that the walkway is completely safe, they also alieve something very different. The alief has roughly the following content: “Really high up, long, long way down. Not a safe place to be! Get off!!”

(The italics is as in the original. I have made the word “alief” bold; it is the first occurrence in the text, not counting the title of the essay. By the way, I think this shows that our etymology for the verb alieve as being from the noun alief is wrong.) I would have read that text aloud with the pronunciation /əˈliːf/, with the first syllable of alive and the second of belief. However, in this video, I hear first the person introducing the speaker, and then Gendler herself (at 5:41–5:42) clearly (in spite of the bad audio) use /ˈeɪ.liːf/. Later (at 7:11), I think I hear the plural /əˈliːfs/, but at 10:15–10:16 it is again /ˈeɪ.liːf/, and also later. A video by another speaker also features a rather emphatic /ˈeɪ.liːf/ (next to a nonstandard, also emphatic, /ˈbiː.liːf/).  --Lambiam 09:08, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

The most natural pronunciation would be /əˈliːf/, in my opinion, but if it was formed in the way that we say that it was, /ˈeɪ.liːf/ would seemingly be the obvious pronunciation. If, in actual usage, the pronunciation varies to some extent, then I think that that ought to be noted in our entry. But based upon what you have just indicated, it seems that (by and large) /ˈeɪ.liːf/ would be the normal pronunciation. Do you think that we ought to note that (in the entry)? Tharthan (talk) 17:12, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Since you are embedded in an English-speaking region, why don’t you try the following experiment. Give some people the above quote to read – after explaining that this is about the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a walkway open to the public with a floor of glass, 4,000 foot above the floor of the Grand Canyon, and how some visitors avoid the centerline of the walkway and anxiously clutch the sides. Then, after ascertaining that they feel they understand the text – while carefully avoiding to enunciate the words alieve or alief yourself, ask them to read the text aloud. (If they ask how they should pronounce these words, shrug and say something like “whatever”.) If a fair number spontaneously say /əˈliːf/, I think we should record that as a secondary pronunciation.  --Lambiam 23:11, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree with this method. 99% of people pronounce "anemone" as "anenome", but that does not make the pronunciation correct. Mihia (talk) 22:22, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

falling

This is a matter that has come up several times in various discussions, but none of it has really had a conclusive outcome. At the moment, there are three headers on this page: Verb, Adjective and Noun. The sense given under the Adjective header is, in disguise, exactly identical to the participle above it. English present participles can always be used as adjectives after all, and we do not normally have a separate Adjective header for each one. At the same time, it seems wrong to label such cases "verb". Is "a falling leaf" using a verb, or an adjective? The same question could be asked about the noun: gerunds are verbal things, so should that not also go under the verb header? I would like to set a future standard for such ambiguous cases, where words are verb forms yet behave as adjectives or nouns as well. In English, we've traditionally labelled participles as "Verb", but given that they can be used as adjectives, that doesn't seem correct. I just don't know what would be a better way to do it either. For some languages, like Latin or Dutch, we have separate "Participle" headers. We could do that for English too, but then we would require a Gerund header for the equivalent noun-like verb form too. —Rua (mew) 10:44, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

A bit of déjà vu: Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2019/April#How should gerunds be handled? I am in favour of a reasonable amount of parsimony. For a speaker of language X without any knowledge of some language Y, a Y-to-X dictionary is practically useless. If it is a grammatical feature of language Y that terms whose natural or traditional part-of-speech assignment is U can generically, with perhaps the occasional exception, also function to fill slots for another given part of speech, say V, then (I feel) we may expect the user to be aware of that and not require, next to the U assignment, also the consequent V assignment to be given. For example, we do not list Dutch mooi both as an adjective and as an adverb, nor should we. Similarly, we do not have separate entries Dutch zwemmen both as a verb and as a noun. It is different if the term as a V has additional or different senses than the ones generically expected given the U senses, as is the case, for example, for Dutch eten used as a noun. In the Malay languages the plural is formed by repeating the ground form: orang means “person”, orang-orang means “persons”, “people”. Again, this is totally predictable, so I think we should not have entries for these plurals. I’d make an exception, though, for forms that, although predictable, form accidental homographs with other forms, like Turkish toplar can be a (by itself predictable) plural noun form and a (likewise predictable) present-simple verb form. This is a coincidence.  --Lambiam 12:07, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it is a deja vu. I'm kinda frustrated by not having a good general solution to this, but instead seeing wildly different treatments in different languages when there is no real reason to do so. So as long as it bothers me, my brain annoys me into trying to figure out how to fix it. And since I have no ideas, I keep asking others to help me fix it. I've posted this same question on Wikipedia and Wikidata as well now, that's how much it annoys me.

The question matters because there are some cases where a purely predictable verbal meaning nonetheless has nominal inflections, like is the case for German participles and gerunds. If we have a separate section for the non-verbal senses, then we end up having two inflection tables with the exact same forms, for what could be considered one and the same word. A case in point is obair: if we split them into a Verb and a Noun section, then they both end up with the same inflections. We'd also need a separate headword template for verbal nouns, which would be an exact duplicate of {{ga-noun}} except for the category. Moreover, not everyone is happy with such a split, User:Fay Freak was pretty adamant that we should not treat verbal forms and nominal forms as different parts of speech, but instead treat them both under Noun in the case of Arabic verbal nouns. Applying that treatment to English, in turn, would mean having to treat the participle falling as Adjective and the gerund as Noun, without any Verb header. Now, obviously these are different languages and not the language of falling, but I feel that we should not treat English participles and gerunds differently merely because they aren't inflected. So we should take the features of other languages into consideration when trying to decide what to do in English. —Rua (mew) 12:17, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Oh, another point to consider: not all participles can in fact be used as an adjective. walked can't, for example. So we can't use Adjective for all participles. I believe that if participles have additional non-verbal meanings, then the participle itself can also be adjectival, though. Are there any cases of adjectives formed from non-adjectival participles like walked? —Rua (mew) 12:40, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

False premise. Counterexamples:

• 2014, E. G. Walsh, Mary Lowe, The English Whippet, page 97:

  At a walked meeting you may walk alongside your dog if it is misbehaving and you have the Steward's permission […] .

• 2013, Alison Gazzard, Mazes in Videogames: Meaning, Metaphor and Design‎^[7], page 19:

  As recognized above, the walked experience is different from one in which we are using a vehicle, such as a car, to navigate routes.

• 2009, James R. Sills, The Comprehensive Respiratory Therapist Exam Review‎^[8]:

  Record the walked distance.

• 2008, William Aaron Scheinberg, The World Citizen‎^[9], page 23:

  After about a walked mile, I saw that kind guy coming back and offering to take me to Milden Hall.

• 2005, Ana Hernandez, Ana Hernández, The Sacred Art of Chant: Preparing to Practice‎^[10], page 79:

  It dawned on me one day that the household tasks and errands, even though productive in one sense (clean laundry and a walked dog), were in a real sense contributing to self-neglect by being the enablers of avoidance.

• 1979, Berichten van de Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek‎^[11]:

  In order to equalize this effect, the sites are divided into three categories: 1. sites lying wholly within the walked area, which applies to 38 sites; […]

HTH. DCDuring (talk) 13:23, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

It does not bother me if the treatment for different languages is different because of language-specific reasons. Also, for any given language there will be exceptions. The adverb hopefully is not simply the adverb corresponding to the adjective hopeful. What does matter is avoiding unreasonable amounts of regular and predictable duplication. For German, gerunds may be verb forms, but when used as nouns the standard orthography requires them to be written with a capital letter. That is a German-specific argument for giving them a separate entry. That argument does not make sense for English; it is just fine for me that we only have an entry for specializing as a verb form, even though the term can be used as a count noun that has a plural form ([12], [13], [14]).

The only mechanism we appear to have for establishing accepted project-wide guidelines is by voting, but such guidelines cannot be hard and fast rules but can only help to provide guidance, and many editors do not like rules that require some exercise of judgement (just look at the arguments for the Oppose votes in the ongoing typo/scanno vote). So I expect that road to be closed. What we can do is start a policy think tank, like was done for Code-switching, but this time on avoiding redundancy.  --Lambiam 20:28, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

• It is in my opinion not desirable to list English present participles separately as adjectives just because they can go in front of a noun to mean that the noun is doing that thing. This is a standard feature of present participles that does not need to be treated separately each time. However, some present participles have attained the status of "proper" adjectives and should be listed as such; for example, "caring" as in "she is a very caring person" or "tiring" as in "this job is very tiring". In contrast, I would say that "falling" is not a true adjective. Mihia (talk) 19:27, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

  And there are standard tests for adjectivity: comparability/gradability, predicate use, modifiabiliy by too and very, distinctive meaning. Most participles don't pass any of these, though many common participles have senses that do. DCDuring (talk) 20:20, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

nonbereaved

Any particular reason why this specific "version" of this term has a psychological and sociological nuance? I don't see the hypothetical form "nonbereft" come up in any (serious) search results (at least through DuckDuckGo), but how is this term any different than unbereaved and unbereft in what it indicates?

Does "non-" have some special meaning in the jargons of the more specialised social sciences (psychology and sociology in particular)? I also see nonlonely, nonround, nonself, and nonconserver. Forgive me for my ignorance, here. I only have a slight bit of knowledge of sociology, and but a basic knowledge of psychology. Tharthan (talk) 17:43, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

It looks like unbereaved is rather uncommon.  --Lambiam 19:38, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Strange enough, bereaved is not that popular either.  --Lambiam 22:26, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Oops, Google Books Ngram Viewer interprets (non-believer + nonbeliever) the same as (non + nonbeliever - believer); the hyphen is taken for a minus sign.  --Lambiam 22:45, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Imagine a psychologist or sociologist designing a study into some aspect of people who are characterized by X. For hypothesis testing, a control group is needed, and what is then easier to label the subjects in that group as being non-X. I think that suffices to explain the titles of scholarly articles like “The measurement of grief: bereaved versus non-bereaved” and “Psychological morbidity among suicide-bereaved and non-bereaved parents”. No psychological or sociological nuance is needed for that.  --Lambiam 02:36, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I created the entry. It evidently seemed to me at the time that "non-X" had a formal, scientific flavour: it's hard to imagine an everyday gossip about the local community where Betty says "of course, Dave was a different man back when he was nonbereaved". Equinox ◑ 21:50, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

But Betty saying "Of course, Dave was a different man back when he was unbereft" would be any more likely in that scenario? I'm not sure that I buy that, personally. Tharthan (talk) 00:56, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

ecclesial (and ought we to have an "ecclesial community" entry? It's well attested)

This is listed merely as a synonym for "ecclesiastical", but what of the term "ecclesial community" (which I've noticed even has a page on Wikipedia, for what that is worth)?

The Wikipedia article is fairly adequate (although in my opinion slightly passive-aggressive), but if you don't already know, "ecclesial community" is the term used in Catholicism to refer to a Christian "sub-faith" (for lack of a better term, as the term denomination, even if potentially appropriate here, tends to be looked at differently in Catholicism than it usually is elsewhere) that is not set up with what are considered (by us) to be the elements inherent in a Christian church. So, for instance, the Church would note the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Nestorian/Persian Church (also called "the Church of the East"), the Oriental Orthodox Church, etc. but would note "a Protestant ecclesial community" (this used to exclude Anglicanism, which was considered a church proper until 1896, but now it does not). One would not use (in Catholic speech proper) "A Protestant church".

(I'm merely defining this here, not trying to get into "keyboardicuffs".)

I do not believe "ecclesiastical community" is used in this way in official parlance, so I am left with (potentially) two questions:

1. Ought we to have a Wiktionary entry for "ecclesial community"? I personally can't see why not. It is well attested and would be helpful to have an entry so that if people ever looked it up here, they could find a definition for it. However, I would prefer to not put the article together myself, as I feel that I have a bit of a conflict of interest in this area. If a definition were created that seemed a bit off (and by "off" I don't mean neutral, I mean "off") or the like, I might consider making a minor edit or something.

, and if so

2. Ought we to add potential clarification to "ecclesial" (a usage note, perhaps?) clarifying that it would not be usual to substitute "ecclesiastical" for "ecclesial" in the case of "ecclesial community"? Tharthan (talk) 00:46, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

The etymon ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía) of English ecclesia means “assembly”, “congregation”, and was used in Early Christianity for local groups congregating for worship, and by extension for a local group also when not gathered. The term is used today as a self-designation by communities of Christians attempting to emulate the practices of the early Christians, in particular the communal joint exercise of ministry. While ecclesiastical summons the connotations of a hierarchically organized institution, with arch-thises and arch-thats, ecclesial essentially means “pertaining to an ecclesia”, without that vertical baggage. Used in that sense, “ecclesial community” is somewhat pleonastic, since it is then synonymous with “ecclesia”. Without going into all that detail, I think we can safely use the definition “pertaining to an ecclesia” and state in the usage notes that this term is preferred over “ecclesiastical” by Christian religious groups that prefer a grassroot organization to the hierarchical organization of the institutionalized Churches. If we take this approach, I think we do not need a separate entry for “ecclesial community”.  --Lambiam 02:22, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I think that that is not a bad approach.

Also, I just noticed that our entry particular Church uses "ecclesial community" in its definition. I noticed this because my browser's autocorrect sent me to Wiktionary again instead of Wikipedia as I had intended without me initially realising it [I was going to Wikipedia to see if there were other language entries for "ecclesial community", because I had a hunch that the reason that this term may be used is because of the use of cognates of ecclesia to mean "church" in other languages. It seems that it is used, although Wikipedia didn't help me find that out: Spanish "comunidad eclesial", for instance.])

EDIT: One potential problem that I actually see with that is that, out of the 3,000-whatever (I don't know the exact number, but I think that it is somewhere around there) 'denominations' of Protestantism, I doubt that all of the ones that are grassroots, so to speak, would use (or even approve of) the term "ecclesial community". I know that it is used by some (although I have only personally seen a small number that do) but many regard its usage as something akin to Catholic bigotry. So that could potentially present a bit of a problem. Tharthan (talk) 02:43, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Fun fact: the Holy Father Francis (aka the Pope) himself has used the designation “ecclesial community” for the Catholic Church. Wikipedia uses the term “ecclesiastical community” for a so-called “particular Church”; see Catholic particular churches and liturgical rites. I think we at Wiktionary should do the same: these ecclesi[astic]al communities are hierarchical in accordance with Catholic canon law. Many of the “ecclesial communities“ as meant in the corresponding Wikipedia article are evangelical and more than a few are Pentecostalist or close, and quite different in Spirit from particular Churches. I think that they are unlikely to apply this Catholic terminology to themselves, but they might self-identify (also pleonastically) as an “ecclesia community” or “ecclesia church”.  --Lambiam 09:46, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

'fore, 'less, 'cuz, etc

Many such forms as 'fore (before), 'less (unless), unlike 'cuz, haven't been added yet --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:18, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

ne bis in idem/non bis in idem

Are both variants grammatical in Latin, and do any authorities proscribe or prefer one variant?__Gamren (talk) 21:20, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

In Latin proper, ne and non aren't used in the same syntactic contexts. However, as 1) this is "international Latin", and 2) it's used absolutely (i.e. there's no grammatical context), I think we can safely treat them as variants of one another. That's what this book does, in any case. Chignon – Пучок 21:31, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I can't answer the second question, but the answer to the first is that both variants are grammatical in Latin, but they mean slightly different things (ne means "so that... not" and non means simply "not"), so one would have to see them used in a complete sentence to determine which is correct in a given context. —Mahāgaja · talk 21:34, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

Ah, so, in older works we should expect a distinction, but since most current writers aren't sensitive to Latin's distinctions, they will probably use them interchangeably? Maybe one of you would add a usage note?__Gamren (talk) 21:40, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

Some of these legal doctrines using Latin are complete sentences (res ipsa loquitur) or noun phrases in the nominative case (beneficium inventarii), but other traditional ones require a context in which they are embedded to make sense, grammatically; they probably arose by copying some core snippets, verbatim, from judgements expressed in full sentences in Latin. Jurists who are also Latinists may be inclined to replace them by a less context-sensitive phrase (e.g. Scottish nolumus prosequi instead of traditional nolle prosequi). I suspect that the replacement of “ne” by “non” is a similar needless “correction”.  --Lambiam 08:01, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

玫瑰花

玫瑰花 is translated simply "rose". Does it refer to any rose or specifically to Rosa rugosa? Does it refer to both the flower and the shrub bearing the flower (as in English)? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 00:19, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't really speak Chinese, but I know roses fairly well by sight. When I do a Google search on "玫瑰花", I see lots of images of hybrid teas, floribundas, etc., but nothing so far that I can definitively recognize as Rosa rugosa (I mostly go by the leaves, which are quite distinctive, though some rugosa hybrids aren't like that). This page is especially interesting, because it gives the taxonomic and English names for Rosa rugosa, but there are lots of images that look like non-rugosa roses. It may be one of those names that can be used generically, but has a very specific identity when contrasted with other specific identities. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:06, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

See %E7%8E%AB%E7%91%B0 at wuu.wikipedia. DCDuring (talk) 02:00, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

See 玫瑰 mei gui at Flora of China. DCDuring (talk) 02:43, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Apparently 花 just means "flower" in this context. DCDuring (talk) 02:47, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

changing out from under them

Saw this the other day: "Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways." I get the gist but the construction doesn't quite make sense to me. Comments? Equinox ◑ 06:27, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

I've also heard this. For me it invokes the idea of something changing in such a way that it's pulling the rug out from under (someone). (Compare also cut the ground out from under, an attested form of what we currently have only as cut the ground from under someone's feet.) - -sche (discuss) 06:55, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

The worst is to have not only the rug but everything pulled out from under you ([15], [16], [17]). Or it is just your potential targets, but now they are yanked out from under you. Apparently it’s become a bit snowcloney: [verb] [definite noun phrase] out from under [someone], in which the verb denotes a way of causing to vanish. Or there may even be no active agent; what vanishes out from under you is the subject, like when it is your life that slides out from under you like a slowly releasing avalanche.  --Lambiam 09:54, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Surely it is out from under#Preposition that most merits an entry. A couple of lemmings show the way at “out from under”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring (talk) 12:03, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

The meanings given there are completely unrelated.  --Lambiam 20:00, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

The Dictionary.com definition for an adverb (of the type called by CGEL (Cambridge)) an intransitive preposition) is semantically the same as the prepositional sense in these longer expressions. I expect that the number of expressions with closely related metaphorical meanings is large, possibly even an open set, ie, one can come up with new forms indefinitely. Following are some metaphorical uses of out from under from Google Books.

Here's how these rolling temporary files have helped us climb out from under a household of paper piles.

And now he plots to steal my property out from under me.

They want to create this new agency so that Revenue Canada can get out from under the inconvenient restraints of the Treasury Board […] .

people may not have as their ultimate goal getting out from under a trusteeship or getting out from under a consent decree

this industry is not trying to get out from under safety standards for its employees.

a bland ideologue who had never managed to come out from under Deng's shadow.

We have before us now a proposition to take out from under the civil-service laws the appointment of certain officials

Note that there are a few different verbs and a variety of nouns (only one pronoun). For a native speaker it is trivial to discern the metaphorical meaning. The object of the phrasal preposition is invariably something oppressive or restrictive, not something neutral, even possible positive, as is more usual in the more literal, physical use of the term. DCDuring (talk) 22:06, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

I doubt that the person perceiving a threat of their property being stolen saw themselves as something oppressive or restrictive. Also, the senator speaking in the last quotation did not see these civil-service laws as unduly burdensome, since he spoke in favour of striking out that provision. The metaphorical sense in which the object of the phrasal preposition is a burden that is removed (which is a Good Thing) and that in which the object of the embedding phrase is a support that is removed from the object of the phrasal preposition (which is a Bad Thing) are in my opinion sufficiently distinct to warrant their not being lumped together, even if they are metaphors deriving from the same physical type of event.  --Lambiam 07:50, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

You are right. They may be combinable with sufficiently careful wording, but quite likely not. DCDuring (talk) 16:42, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

the day's anniversaries

Is such a phrase addible? --Backinstadiums (talk) 18:50, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

I say not: it means what you’d expect it to mean, so it is not idiomatic.  --Lambiam 19:56, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@Lambiam: I meant both the possessive and the singular day (and possibly the definite article?) --Backinstadiums (talk) 21:02, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@Backinstadiums — I don’t understand. I thought you were asking about adding the noun phrase the day's anniversaries, which, as far I can see, means: “the anniversaries of the day”. What is the phrase you were thinking of, and how should it be defined?  --Lambiam 06:42, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Lambiam: which of the two meanings of the day applies here? BTW, can you explain the first meaning mean of the day? --Backinstadiums (talk) 13:49, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Backinstadiums: The term the day is listed as being archaic Scots. The phrase "the day's anniversaries" isn't [[the day]][['s]] [[anniversaries]], it's [[the]] [[day]][['s]] [[anniversaries]]. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:28, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: What meaning of day applies here then? why is anniversaries in the plural, vs singular the day? --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:52, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

To start with, your example sentence is a translation, and those tend to emphasize getting the meaning right rather than grammatical correctness. "Anniversary" isn't normally used that way: a day is the anniversary for multiple events, and will have multiple anniversaries- one per year. In this case, "anniversaries" seems to refer to the multiple events that the day is anniversary for, which sounds odd to me. I would say that it's not decipherable from the sum of its parts because it's simply indecipherable, not because it's idiomatic. As for "day", it's the day that is being looked up in the almanac, whatever sense that is, and as for the singular/plural bit: a possessive noun gets its number from that of the possessor(s), not from what's possessed. It's no different than Spanish in that respect: dias de la semana, not *de las semanas. Not everything that you don't understand is something new that's missing from the dictionary- sometimes it's just nonsense. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:33, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

evangelship

There is a word that is growing in popularity in my particular sphere of people known as evangelship. Technically it is not a word yet, but it does have a definition. In the same way that discipleship is the role or condition of being a disciple, and in the same way that servantship is the role or condition of being a servant, evangelship is the role or condition of being an evangelist. (evangel for short) This term, evangelship, could technically be applied to someone who has the role of sharing good news of any kind, but typically it would be the role of sharing the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ. I would like to formally propose that evangelship should be added to the wiktionary with the following definition: The role or condition of being an evangelist, especially in relation to the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ. — This unsigned comment was added by Tomm Bacon (talk • contribs) at 20:08, 28 April 2019.

The term seems to be attested; I've added an entry with two cites. - -sche (discuss) 22:35, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

customs

The context labels are kind of confusing here. The noun is a plurale tantum and is given no singular form, yet the two senses are labelled singular and plural. It can't lack a singular form and then have a sense labelled singular, that makes no sense. —Rua (mew) 21:42, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

The labels concern the noun-verb number agreement, as also shown in the usage examples. As we use it, plurale tantum is only concerned with the form of the noun, not with any grammatically meaningful fact of its use, thus requiring labels such as those in this exemplary entry. DCDuring (talk) 22:23, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

If there are actually uses that take singular agreement, then I would say that those are in fact using the singular form of the noun. It just happens to be the same as the plural. —Rua (mew) 23:22, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Go look it up in a dictionary. DCDuring (talk) 01:49, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

I did, that's why I'm here. —Rua (mew) 09:57, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

I think the entry is wrong too. I would arrange it like swipes, which is a plural ("the cat made two swipes at the string") but also a singular for bad beer ("swipes isn't good for you"). Equinox ◑ 10:03, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

The singular sense "toll, tax or tribute" is labelled archaic, although it has a biblical (1769) attestation.— Pingku^dimmi 12:04, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

I labelled it archaic and uncountable yesterday, based on books usage. Customs ("import duties") is plural in form, uncountable, and takes a plural verb, eg, "How much customs are due?". I don't see how "plurale tantum" or even "plural only" ensures that a user would know that. Of the three attributes, "plural in form" is the least important and is usually indicated in English by the presence of a terminal s. Also, I don't think that uncountable nouns are said to have a plural form the same as their singular form. In fact, many also have a true plural form, eg, rice, flour, rock, water. DCDuring (talk) 16:35, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

"How much customs are due?" sounds just wrong to my ear: if it's "how much" then it's uncountable which means "is". Neither this nor "...is due" can be found in Google beyond one or two scant hits. Equinox ◑ 17:55, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring: This is the first time I see much and a verb in the plural applying to the same noun; can you add a contrastable real example where this also happens? --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:54, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

It seems to be a poorly chosen example for current English. Much was used with plural nouns in the 18th century and before, where we would use many now. I didn't find any other examples in current English, but there might be some. They would be rare exceptions, if they exist. DCDuring (talk) 17:52, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by 'contrastable'. What contrasting behavior are you looking for?

Examples of the phenomenon:

• We can actually quantify how much earnings are enough to maintain a....
• She noted that in spite of the generous discounts rolled out to consumers, not much sales were made.
• She noted that in spite of the generous discounts rolled out to consumers, not much sales were made
• It was during that interim that not much sales were going on.
• Knowing your numbers requires owners and managers of every construction company […] determine how much sales are required […] .

None of these sentences sound good to me, but they are examples. DCDuring (talk) 18:03, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

• Presently the second sense reads:

2. (in the singular) The government department or agency that is authorised to collect the taxes imposed on imported goods.

Customs has pulled us over on our way for an inspection.

This does not reflect fairly common usage in BrE (especially) whereby departments, companies etc. may be treated as plural for purposes of verb agreement. For example, see Google Search results for "customs have seized". Mihia (talk) 22:17, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't hear enough BrE, so I miss that kind of thing. I do hear AAVE, Irish English, Canajan, and Slavic-accented English. The Brits that I know have lost most of the distinctive bits of British grammar. DCDuring (talk) 13:23, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

ἐλαχύς

The headword line shows a different form from the page name. A mistake, maybe? —Rua (mew) 12:36, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

The genders were rotated: ἐλαχύς is the masculine, ἐλάχεια the feminine, and ἐλαχύ the neuter form of the nominative case.  Fixed  --Lambiam 12:59, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Mona Lisa

We have a US pronunciation /ˌmoʊnə ˈlaɪzə/. I've never heard anyone say this. Can it be sourced? Ultimateria (talk) 20:24, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Added in this diff by a user who is a non-native English speaker and who has made many mistakes in the past involving languages he does not know sufficiently well. Therefore removed pending sourcing. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:44, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

back of

Currently the entry is in back of, but among others such as Webster's, Encarta dictionary shows:

at the back of or behind something (of which, by the way, I'd like to know the difference that seems to be implied); The phrase back of is standard and in back of is its informal variant. Both mean "behind," and in back of is formed on the direct analogy of in front of: There was a swimming pool (in) back of the house. --Backinstadiums (talk) 12:49, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

MWOnline has entries for both in back of and back of. I don't see other entries at either “back of”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. or “in back of”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. Which Webster's are you using? DCDuring (talk) 16:01, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring: This one. Secondly, why both meanings are given, at the back of or behind? --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:45, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I only see "behind" at that link. DCDuring (talk) 21:08, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I think "in back of" is more deserving of an entry than "back of". "in back of" is an unpredictable idiomatic phrase, while "back of" is more of SOP fragment. Mihia (talk) 22:11, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

But arguably in the back of ⇒ in back of ⇒ back of. The first is clearly SoP because back includes the relevant sense. The others are natural shortenings, but back of is less transparent because of the intervening step. DCDuring (talk) 12:18, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't personally see "in back of" as a natural shortening. While "in the back of" is predictable SOP, "in back of" seems idiomatic because of the unpredictable dropping of the article, plus it doesn't quite mean the same thing anyway. (In fact, "in back of" sounds incorrect to me as a BrE speaker, but I am taking it on authority that it is a correct expression in AmE.) Mihia (talk) 17:46, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Is in back of beyond an alternative form of in the back of beyond? Chignon – Пучок 18:02, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

In BrE, no. I'm not sure about AmE. Mihia (talk) 19:15, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Pronunciation of antiquity

Re the pronunciation of antiquity, I can believe /ænˈtɪ.kwə.ti/ (or /ænˈtɪ.kwɪ.ti/), I can even accept /ænˈtɪk.wə.ti/, but I balk at /ænˈtɪk.kwə.ti/. (Same issue at antiquities.)  --Lambiam 15:43, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

There's psycholinguistic evidence that consonants are ambisyllabic in English in contexts like that, so that the /k/ is both in the coda of the preceding syllable and the onset of the following one, but that doesn't make it a geminate. Since there's no convenient way to show nongeminate ambisyllabicity without resorting to tree diagrams (which heaven forbid in a dictionary pronunciation section), it's conventional to show the consonant in question as belonging only to the coda of the previous syllabe, thus /ænˈtɪk.wə.ti/, /ænˈtɪk.wɪ.ti/. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:29, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

fist pump

"The forward thrust of one's fist, as in celebration."

Forwards, or upwards? I've always thought that it was upwards.

May seem quite minor (it is), but wouldn't thrusting one's fist forwards be different than thrusting one's fist upwards? pump one's fist also uses "forward". Tharthan (talk) 17:13, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

As a disco move the preferred direction is upwards, I think, while as a spontaneous emotional release both forward and upward movement seem common. In this video (the last three seconda) the motion is definitely forwards. The fist-pumping winning reactions in this video go in all directions.  --Lambiam 19:14, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

The (acted) fist pump at 02:11 in this video, which I saw just now, is also forwards. But making this part of the definition appears too limited.  --Lambiam 19:34, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Well, it isn't commonly "downward", "backward", "leftward", "rightward", "sideways", "in circles", or "at random". DCDuring (talk) 21:12, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

But it can be upwards, so perhaps that ought to be added to the definition. Tharthan (talk) 01:37, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

It can be at a slight but unmistakeable angle downward from horizontal; in some disco moves the dancer pumps their fist sideways. (Tutorial video; see the “side-on” fist pump at 1:12–1:56.) What about hedging it like this: “The thrust of one's fist, most commonly forward or upward, as in celebration”?  --Lambiam 08:11, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

That satisfies me, because in my experience it is principally in celebration and, when in celebration, almost exclusively forward and upward. Otherwise, we would be stuck with a definition like "the pumping of one's fist", with pumping referring to some elastic definition of pump DCDuring (talk) 12:13, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring This is just a guess, but perhaps the reason for the ambiguity might be that the original "fist pump" was the thrusting downwards of one's arm/fist (resembling a "pumping motion". Thinks of, say, pumping air into a bicycle), but then the air punch was conflated in usage with the "fist pump", leading to the modern ambiguity. Again, just a guess. Tharthan (talk) 15:26, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

quatercentenary

What meaning of quater applies to quatercentenary? --Backinstadiums (talk) 01:07, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Four times.  --Lambiam 08:02, 1 May 2019 (UTC)