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Wiktionary:Tea room Jul 18th 2013, 01:59, by Metaknowledge Revision as of 01:06, 18 July 2013 (edit) DCDuring (Talk | contribs) Latest revision as of 01:59, 18 July 2013 (edit) (undo) Metaknowledge (Talk | contribs) Line 2,749: Line 2,749:   :The only plausible objective basis for ordering senses of basic words in general use is historical. It is incredibly time-consuming to establish relative frequency of meanings. The OED provides a reference for historical ordering.   :The only plausible objective basis for ordering senses of basic words in general use is historical. It is incredibly time-consuming to establish relative frequency of meanings. The OED provides a reference for historical ordering.   :I don't know that there is any substitute for reading the glosses, at least all of those not with some restricted usage context (somehow ignoring the confusion between topic and usage context), before doing translations. I know that is asking a lot, especially if you, one of our most diligent and prolific translators, find this confusing. [[User: DCDuring |DCDuring]] <small >[[User talk: DCDuring|TALK]]</small > 01:06, 18 July 2013 (UTC)   :I don't know that there is any substitute for reading the glosses, at least all of those not with some restricted usage context (somehow ignoring the confusion between topic and usage context), before doing translations. I know that is asking a lot, especially if you, one of our most diligent and prolific translators, find this confusing. [[User: DCDuring |DCDuring]] <small >[[User talk: DCDuring|TALK]]</small > 01:06, 18 July 2013 (UTC)   +   + == [[redux]] ==   +   + We have it as a postpositive adjective, but I always thought it was a noun; see {{BGC|"a redux"}} for example. Does anyone have strong evidence either way (or a lemming test)? —[[User:Metaknowledge|Μετάknowledge]]<small><sup>''[[User talk:Metaknowledge|discuss]]/[[Special:Contributions/Metaknowledge|deeds]]''</sup></small> 01:59, 18 July 2013 (UTC) Latest revision as of 01:59, 18 July 2013 Wiktionary > Discussion rooms > Tea room WT:TR redirects here. For Translation requests, see Wiktionary:Translation requests. For guidelines on translations, see Wiktionary:Translations Wiktionary discussion rooms (edit) see also: requests Information desk comment | history | archives Newcomers' questions, minor problems, specific requests for information or assistance. Tea room comment | history | archives Questions and discussions about specific words. Etymology scriptorium history | archives Questions and discussions about etymology- the historical development of words. Beer parlour comment | history | archives General policy discussions and proposals, requests for permissions and major announcements. Grease pit comment | history | archives Technical questions, requests and discussions. All Wiktionary: namespace discussions 1 2 3 4 5 - All discussion pages 1 2 3 4 5 A place to ask for help on finding quotations, etymologies, or other information about particular words. The Tea Room is named to accompany the Beer parlour. For questions about the technical operation of Wiktionary use the Beer parlour. For questions about specific content, you're in the right place. Archives Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2003 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2004 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2005 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2006 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2007 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2008 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2009 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2010 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2011 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2012 Wiktionary:Tea room/Archive 2013 Please do not edit section titles as this breaks links on talk pages and in other discussion fora. Oldest tagged RFTs fasces quote unquote real McCoy fascinum aggravated assault Nihilarian score a brace panacherie open sunshine purgatoric on one's tod scrape put one's trousers on one leg at a time pin snitch ope potted show a clean pair of heels include me out startling see mui li hing mui meatatarian wist stand pat red face test meatgrinder sit on the fence open redline partyer it's all Greek to me szukać wiatru w polu invert honorary programing coffee something vive la différence seal make love, not war toss around measles sarcoptic mange of all take the game to mustest look who's talking naked as the day one was born seven-up autogas dilemma unwedable of a arduous scoring serve somebody right sortsa submission outcome miles ple- house hit statistics tasty superflip famously last required basicamente passage PRO odds striked western world sure leading chick plural programmer developer dark horse quite llámame me, myself and I toad rhetoric pigtail ponytail succumb mankind in bed abracadabra thon code repudii bad girl bad boy זהו allino כדאי spoken for fine kerned a lot raindrops last night Manchurian οἴκημα huh situate seeing is believing barză children at a stand antisplenetic registrabilità means strict pilot ifen gold Bos grunniens grunniens historical Portunidae affluent fidayee never change a running system conceited antivirus ausmerzen ya Ahle Hadith батыргъэн lö my rebar que rob ablauting philippinensis gagul abortionist neger the used to handle waltz Matilda be on lightning sizzurp tetratheism come clean yous hump rotary dial four foot 4-foot four-foot better place unicorn inclinator beaujolais cobhouse FSVO gehoben give over conflate Berry Blue Wacky Watermelon louche everyway beach manor fir truth Contents 1 January 2013 1.1 IPA of दुःख 1.2 reojo 1.3 ekyuma 1.4 proactive 1.5 academia - additional sense 1.6 splendid 1.7 change furniture ? 1.8 all cats are grey in the dark 1.9 ya 1.10 Ahle Hadith 1.11 body temperature 1.12 батыргъэн 1.13 He she 1.14 definition passenger kilometer 1.15 grab 1.16 quote unquote 1.17 Shraft, Shrovetide 1.18 UK usage of greenhouse 1.19 The word "fannot" 1.20 tag (in) 1.21 sennight 1.22 church 1.23 rob 1.24 disincentivized 1.25 Preposition Following 'Culminated' 1.26 lö 1.27 Gog 1.28 gorry 1.29 red scare 1.30 "it may happen that" 1.31 skittles 1.32 hurry-up wagon 1.33 rebar 1.34 que#French 1.35 User:Brian0918/Hotlist/0-9 1.36 déjeselo 1.37 gay 1.38 waitron 1.39 man- 1.40 One 1.41 ablauting 1.42 jpg 1.43 radioes 2 February 2013 2.1 Exam question 2.2 About phrases 2.3 Citations:make the going 2.4 About reading regnal names 2.5 Is star an adjective? 2.6 homographic 2.7 philippinensis 2.8 letzte / letzter (German) 2.9 6 digit 2.10 assigned female at birth 2.11 think small, live small 2.12 command 2.13 Dutch enig, Audio file file:Nl-enig.ogg 2.14 אופן is wheel? 2.15 German Nominalization 2.16 on Carryl's wordplay 2.17 superceded 2.18 bouldozeur 2.19 gagul 2.20 (aq) 2.21 Tensometer-Tensiometer 2.22 Spiritualism 2.23 Limburgs#Limburgish 2.24 abortionist 2.25 shoplifter 2.26 Citations:hoon 2.27 behaviorwise, behaviourwise 2.28 ⠰⠎ 2.29 pannekoek#English 2.30 lant 2.31 An anagram typo? 2.32 What is a pole? 2.33 louhikko 2.34 war 2.35 butter becomes harder to spread 2.36 Seven-level screwdriver 2.37 optimus 2.38 neger#Danish 2.39 rationalization 2.40 Help with scope dope citations 2.41 the 2.42 used to 2.43 Schadenfreude 2.44 handle 2.45 quote for immiseration and immiserate 2.46 'inversal' a synonym for inversion ? 2.47 Is "antidisconstitutionalisationism" a legitimate word in english ? 2.48 stairs 2.49 OROLOGION - THE CORRECT ETOIMOLOGY 2.50 Sex and joueur 3 March 2013 3.1 right pronunciation 3.2 Policy on misspellings? 3.3 turn-taking 3.4 plenty 3.5 gek op, dol op 3.6 ground 3.7 Adjective meaning "caused by a reflex" 3.8 Which definition does the use of the highlighted as in this passage belong to? 3.9 waltz Matilda and auf der Walz 3.10 grammar 3.11 Creation for the meaning/origin/language of "-bole" 3.12 SemperBlotto automated reversions on -gasm 3.13 Wikinews properly cited? 3.14 Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/só and Italic 3.15 licenced 3.16 presenced 3.17 play 3.18 religionary 3.19 casualty of war 3.20 noun 3.21 tetratheism 3.22 sex 3.23 ooh arrh 3.24 Template:ergative 3.25 ilgeç 3.26 be 3.27 buckwheat 3.28 can't 3.29 on 3.30 lightning 3.31 God 3.32 Statistical methods with Phrasal Verbs 3.33 sizzurp 3.34 Lumbancy 3.35 trough 3.36 come clean 3.37 let go 3.38 decapitalize, uncapitalize 3.39 Part of speech help (Aragonese) 3.40 yous 3.41 throw 3.42 alter 3.43 I'm yet to see it 3.44 Camiscion 3.45 Googleable and ungoogleable 3.46 positive larger 3.47 gorgon 4 April 2013 4.1 ringed, rang and rung 4.2 dilemma 4.3 sosh 4.4 Portuguese adjective template {{pt-adj/or}} 4.5 put in 4.6 on the club 4.7 hump 4.8 "I have a lot of things on my plate" 4.9 Discount house 4.10 gone to a better place 4.11 underwear 4.12 Category:English_politically_correct_terms 4.13 right-wing 4.14 stop away 4.15 Portuguese -ter verbs 4.16 Cure rhymes with cur; pure rhymes with purr? 4.17 dahaben 4.18 rotary dial 4.19 four foot 4.20 well-known and little-known 4.21 set a fire 4.22 References to dictionaries 4.23 to speak of 4.24 -wy 4.25 Meanings for the English auxiliary verb can 4.26 Idle 4.27 Weeaboo 4.28 Cast 4.29 You'd complain if you were hung with a new rope 4.30 Simple and good, adjectives for people 4.31 sunken 4.32 direkto 5 May 2013 5.1 unicorn 5.2 grammar question 5.3 Plurals that link to the page they're on 5.4 grammar question 2 5.5 inclinator 5.6 void under nails 5.7 brownout questions 5.8 ne#French 5.9 Query probable typo in entry for "an die Kandare nehmen" 5.10 -ment 5.11 beaujolais 5.12 Citations:fremish 5.13 cobhouse 5.14 ninefold decrease 5.15 Australian slang: as/az 5.16 Colonics 5.17 FSVO 5.18 gehoben 5.19 khanda 5.20 given over 5.21 give over 5.22 concede 5.23 Popper (can't find definition) 5.24 Spanish translation 5.25 זקן 5.26 Crumpet 5.27 Irregular Russian Pluralization? (голоса/копокола) 5.28 conflate 5.29 study one's own interests 5.30 hisself 5.31 berry blue 5.31.1 Berry Blue 5.31.2 Wacky Watermelon 6 June 2013 6.1 redescend 6.2 casting him up 6.3 clothing 6.4 I cannot find a word that I have only heard, do not know correct spelling ( sisspasate, cyspessate,?) 6.5 ни#Russian 6.6 antonym of monopsony 6.7 gotcha journalism 6.8 let one's hinterland show 6.9 all along 6.10 logorrhea 6.11 Definition of catharsis 6.12 drill cuttings 6.13 refactor 6.14 louche 6.15 everyway 6.16 freezing cold 6.17 Anavatos 6.18 Re-form 6.19 "(much) given to" 6.20 when 6.21 from time to time (legal use) 6.22 Pastry/ies 6.23 disambiguate 6.24 cranse 6.25 boondock 6.26 beach 6.27 Typography measurement en 6.28 face that would stop a clock 6.29 Variation on Workcation 6.30 kugelblitz 6.31 Khmer translation 6.32 A Riot 6.33 referencable -> referenceable 6.34 anyone can make mistake 6.35 A problem with "自" and"英明" pages 6.36 other meaning to "come in"? 6.37 "historicals" 7 July 2013 7.1 "you tell me", French "à toi de me le dire" 7.2 Is there a plural to Latin sodes? 7.3 Mistake in declension of derjenige 7.4 hocadır 7.5 anlamamak as the antonym of anlamak 7.6 get around 7.7 ruhig 7.8 fir 7.9 A script error 7.10 up a storm 7.11 unobstrusive 7.12 fascinum 7.13 illocutionary 7.14 check into 7.15 Latvian šūt 7.16 bernard l'ermite 7.17 chronosynclastic 7.18 Esperanto noun forms not green 7.19 quis 7.20 possession 7.21 Latvian valganums 7.22 sleep with the fishes 7.23 modality 7.24 Problem with assignment of the possessive form of the Turkish word koordinat 7.25 שבור: Nikud 7.26 truth 7.27 redux IPA of दुःख[edit] The IPA for the Hindi दुःख is [d̪ʊhkʰ], but [ʊ] is not a Hindi sound found on Appendix:Hindi_pronunciation. I don't know anything about Hindi. Is there a reason for this? --BB12 (talk) 08:46, 2 January 2013 (UTC) You would be better off looking at WT:HI TR or w:Hindi-Urdu phonology. There's a conspicuous lack of native speakers on both of the Wiktionary treatments, but I would trust Ric Laurent's judgement over JackPotte's hands down. I suspect that there's a reason the appendix uses slashes instead of square brackets- it allows for more vagueness about the actual sounds. Some of it may have to do with averaging out dialectal variation, but it might also be along the lines of the use of u and o for transliterating Japanese: it's close enough for practical purposes because it's unambiguous, but you would need to hear a native speaker to get it right. Not that I have any experience with spoken Hindi myself, so don't take my word for anything... Chuck Entz (talk) 10:01, 2 January 2013 (UTC) Thank you for the information. I'd like to know what the actual pronunciation is just for my own trivial satisfaction, but in general, it would be nice to make the issues clear on the Hindi pronunciation page. --BB12 (talk) 19:04, 2 January 2013 (UTC) The source (Ohala 1999 - a professional linguist and, I think, a native speaker) listed at w:Hindi-Urdu phonology gives /ʊ/ (and /ɪ/), so I would prefer those transcriptions to /u/ and /i/. —Angr 19:49, 2 January 2013 (UTC) I don't know how to format reojo - it is only used in the phrase de reojo. It looks like a noun, but it isn't a noun, just has a nouny feel to it. What heading do we need? Or should I just forget the heading? --Wikt Twitterer (talk) 16:30, 4 January 2013 (UTC) Adverb - sideways. SemperBlotto (talk) 16:33, 4 January 2013 (UTC) Thanks, but the question wasn't about the Spanish, but the format. --Wikt Twitterer (talk) 16:39, 4 January 2013 (UTC) If a word doesn't fit into any other part of speech, you can label it a ===Particle===; that's the header for everything that doesn't fit anywhere else. - -sche (discuss) 02:47, 5 January 2013 (UTC) Why do you say it's not a noun? Looks like a noun to me. — Ungoliant (Falai) 03:20, 5 January 2013 (UTC) Yes, it's a noun. It's the intensifying prefix re- + ojo. de reojo is an adverb. —Stephen (Talk) 10:31, 5 January 2013 (UTC) If the noun reojo is really only used in the phrase de reojo, wouldn't this be a good time to make an exception to our usual habit and make reojo a redirect to de reojo? —Angr 18:22, 6 January 2013 (UTC) A search for "el reojo" gives quite a lot of Google Books results so it seems like it is used just as a normal noun as well as in the phrase de reojo. BigDom (t • c) 18:42, 6 January 2013 (UTC) OK, then our entry needs to reflect that. —Angr 18:49, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Yeah, I'd do it myself but I know sod all about Spanish... BigDom (t • c) 19:00, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Trouble is, it seems to me you are picking up a lot of hits (no pun) for a musical band called El Reojo. I can't find (and don't expect to find) any other mentions for "reojo" outside of de reojo. I think the entry is correctly formatted, and would recommend leaving it just the way it is. -- ALGRIF talk 10:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Nope, here are some example sentences that I found: "Si las rayas asoman por el reojo siniestro, busque males del otro brazo y pierna.", "El reojo triunfal de Benito Adolfo significaba su tercera victoria nocturna.", "Rifoso ademán que recorre desde el refrán hasta el reojo del espejo de ultramarinos...". It's definitely used as a noun in all those and there's plenty more examples if you want them. BigDom (t • c) 17:33, 8 January 2013 (UTC) On the Main Page, we have "ekyúma" as our FOTW today. Yet the entry is at ekyuma, and the acute accent has never been part of the entry (it appears in the IPA, presumably as a tonal mark, but not in the orthography). What's going on here? This, that and the other (talk) 10:08, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Probably equivalent to macrons' situation in Latin. — Ungoliant (Falai) 05:20, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Or that of the accents in Serbo-Croatian or Thai transliteration. --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 05:30, 8 January 2013 (UTC) My point is that the acute accent seems to have materialised out of thin air when the word appeared on the main page. This, that and the other (talk) 00:13, 9 January 2013 (UTC) This has only one sense, which is labelled "proscribed". So is there a "normal" sense? If so, what is it? But personally, I don't see why it is labelled "proscribed" in the first place. -- ALGRIF talk 11:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC) I'm guessing that the usage note is the reason for the label? In which case, I'm not sure "proscribed" is correct - it's just that one is discouraged from overusing it (as with all words, really). But perhap I am missing something? Furius (talk) 12:45, 6 January 2013 (UTC) I'd get rid of the tag, unless we are going to put such tags on have a nice day and other expressions I find annoying. The usage note is more than enough. DCDuring TALK 13:49, 6 January 2013 (UTC) Off-topic, but I've never understood why people are annoyed by "have a nice day". Is wishing someone a nice day when saying goodbye to them that much worse than wishing them "good night" at the end of the day, or "good morning" or "good afternoon" or "good evening" when greeting them at those times of day? —Angr 18:19, 6 January 2013 (UTC) It's just the way that it is often used: mindlessly or passive-aggressively by a service person or traffic cop or […] who has just ruined your day. It seems often to be the byproduct of some four-hour service-training course. DCDuring TALK 13:33, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Yeah, it's more the tone it's usually said in than the phrase itself. --WikiTiki89 13:37, 8 January 2013 (UTC) I guess I never read that much into it. It's usually said to me by someone from whom I have just bought something, and more often than not I will have a nice day with my new purchase. So I just smile and say, "Thanks, you too!" —Angr 18:18, 8 January 2013 (UTC) I think the word has some very legitimate uses. Working in IT, I'm familiar with the distinction between "reactive support" (customer reports product is broken, you help them fix it) and "proactive support" (you remotely monitor the customer's system, hoping to catch failures before they occur). This is a useful distinction, and the pair of words reactive/proactive describes it well. Another pair of words which does the same thing is corrective/preventive, but I'm not sure how that pairing is better than reactive/proactive - it is longer. Sure, maybe some business folks overuse the word "proactive", but not all use in business is overuse. SJK (talk) 01:10, 13 January 2013 (UTC) I think that's the point: The pair is active/reactive -- I think that's also the pair used in the general industry. "Pro-active" often really seems to be Newspeak to cover up the fact that the people using it are really quite passive and reactive. No offense inteded, present company excluded etc. :) 195.200.34.51 07:59, 24 April 2013 (UTC) I added what I believe is a valid additional sense: "Continuous study at higher education institutions; scholarship." I put the example sentence of: "Not every university graduate wishes to pursue academia." IMO this is quite different to the "academic community" sense given in the original entry. However, I don't think I worded the sense very well. What do you think? ---> Tooironic (talk) 05:55, 7 January 2013 (UTC) MWOnline: "A place of instruction"; "The academic life, community or world"; a "pedant". DCDuring TALK 11:47, 7 January 2013 (UTC) Is it just me, or is this more of a Britishism? --Æ&Œ (talk) 13:42, 7 January 2013 (UTC) It's used in the US, but as more of a fancy term. --WikiTiki89 13:47, 7 January 2013 (UTC) change furniture ?[edit] How does one describe in English the act of moving pieces of furniture around in an apartment (e.g., to find a better or more pleasant arrangement) -- to change the place(s) of the furniture? to swap (pieces of) furniture? to rearrange the furniture? something else? Can one say "I changed (the place of?) the sofa and the armchair" or something like that? Thanks in advance! (The sentence I'm thinking about is the last example but one for the word mainīt.) --Pereru (talk) 04:22, 8 January 2013 (UTC) I would usually use rearrange the furniture or (simply) move the furniture. I swapped the sofa and the armchair around seems right to me also - unlike the other two, it strongly implies that the sofa is now where the armchair was and vice versa. Change the place seems unusual to me. Furius (talk) 04:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Yes, rearrange the furniture or (modernly) feng shui the furniture. —Stephen (Talk) 10:21, 8 January 2013 (UTC) But "feng shui" relates to a specific Eastern pseudoscientific practice of harmonious energy or some such — not just moving furniture in general. Equinox ◑ 11:23, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Well, he said moving pieces of furniture around in an apartment to find a better or more pleasant arrangement. We often use it just for that. Not many people know much or anything about the Eastern pseudoscientific practice of harmonious energy. —Stephen (Talk) 11:29, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Definitely rearrange or move depending on what you're trying to say. Also, the correct way to say "the last example but one" is "the second-to-last example". --WikiTiki89 13:23, 8 January 2013 (UTC) It's not universal correctness: next to last is predominant in the US; last but one in the UK. The difference is probably worth the entries. DCDuring TALK 13:42, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Oh sorry, I didn't know about last but one. In my experience, second-to-last is much more common than next to last. --WikiTiki89 13:45, 8 January 2013 (UTC) I check these things at BYU, which has BNC, COCA, and COHA, because I am often surprised by them. Also, next-to-last is twice as common as second-to-last at COCA. DCDuring TALK 13:50, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Maybe it's a regional difference or something. --WikiTiki89 15:52, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Yes, "next to last" is the only common version in my (northern UK) dialect. I understand "last but one" and "second to last" but would not normally use them. Dbfirs 18:51, 13 January 2013 (UTC) and all cats are gray in the dark and all cats are grey at night and all cats are gray at night - merge, or what? -- ALGRIF talk 11:41, 8 January 2013 (UTC) There is an Interjection sense here that says (informal) Yeah, yes. and then there is an adverb sense that says (obsolete) yea; yes I don't think there is any distinction between the two. Shouldn't they both use {{obsolete|or|informal}}? -- Liliana • 23:18, 8 January 2013 (UTC) Well the obsolete sense is spelled the way it was originally, while the modern sense can be either from German ja (used in the American Mid-West), from Dutch/Afrikaans ja (used in South Africa and usually spelled "ja") or from an internet abbreviation of "yeah" (used on the internet and in text messaging). All of those are completely independent of each other. --WikiTiki89 00:34, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I've added an Etymology at 3 to help put things into perspective a bit. I agree, Etyl_3 is EME/UK dialectal for "yes, yea". The current usage reflects the German/Dutch/Scandinavian influence in America. Leasnam (talk) 00:42, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Additionally, I have removed the snippet from Chaucer as being Middle English. Leasnam (talk) 00:57, 9 January 2013 (UTC) The Wikipedia page suggests it means something else, but I can't understand what exactly. — Ungoliant (Falai) 16:48, 9 January 2013 (UTC) First and foremost, I don't see how this can be a noun meaning "Of or pertaining to the Sunni branch of Islam". Mglovesfun (talk) 17:08, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Fixed. The creator had changed the definition, but not the POS. — Ungoliant (Falai) 17:39, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Actually, it seems it should have been 'fixed' the other way, by changing the definition; Wikipedia suggests it's any "Islamic movement[] (both historical and modern) that emphasize[s] the use of hadith in Islam". - -sche (discuss) 18:04, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I amended it. Pass a Method (talk) 20:59, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Are you sure it's only related to Sunni Islam? — Ungoliant (Falai) 21:01, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Yes. Pass a Method (talk) 21:14, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I've also seen the spelling "Ahl-e Hadith". It is a movement in Sunni Islam which emphasises the use of the hadith literature as a source of beliefs, and especially legal rulings; this compares to other Islamic groups which emphasise the works of later legal scholars (e.g. taqlid - following the opinions of a renowned scholar rather than forming your own opinions from the original texts), and yet others who emphasise the Quran over the hadith. SJK (talk) 00:48, 13 January 2013 (UTC) I think this is missing a sense. Is this used only to refer to normal temperature, or is it also for the current temperature of any body? For example you can measure your current body temperature with a medical thermometer —CodeCat 17:38, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Take a look at what other dictionaries have for this: body temperature at OneLook Dictionary Search. DCDuring TALK 17:41, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I've modified our definition accordingly. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:48, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I think they are distinct senses though. It's possible for one's body temperature to be higher than body temperature, isn't it? I suppose one sense is countable while the other is uncountable? —CodeCat 17:55, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I don't think so, no. It's possible for your body temperature to be higher than my body temperature, but just "higher than body temperature" wouldn't make sense unless it's modified as "higher than normal body temperature". —Angr 20:26, 9 January 2013 (UTC) On the talk page, no-one can figure out what plant the "Herculean" is, or what plant "батыргъэн" is. Any ideas? - -sche (discuss) 19:15, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I think he means борщевик (w:Heracleum (plant)). —Stephen (Talk) 19:46, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Are there any languages which treats he and she as a single word i.e. genderless? Pass a Method (talk) 20:56, 9 January 2013 (UTC) From WP: Indonesian/Malay, Malagasy of Madagascar, Philippine languages, Maori, Rapa Nui, Hawaiian, and other Austronesian languages, Chinese, Burmese, and other Sino-Tibetan languages, Vietnamese and other Mon-Khmer languages, Swahili, Yoruba, and other Niger-Congo languages, Turkish and other Turkic languages, Luo and other Nilo-Saharan languages, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and other Uralic languages, Hindi-Urdu, Georgian, Japanese, Armenian, Korean, Mapudungun, Basque, Persian. — Ungoliant (Falai) 21:02, 9 January 2013 (UTC) A little note on Chinese, Japanese and Korean: In written standard Mandarin there IS a distinction between he and she: 他 and 她, both pronounced as "tā". In many informal Chinese dialects (topolects) writing and speaking there is no gender distinction. In informal Japanese there IS a distinction between he and she, written and spoken: 彼 (kare) and 彼女 (kanojo). In the formal speech genderless pronouns (also considered nouns or collocations) are used instead: あの人 (anohito), あの方 (anokata). There are lot of pronouns in Japanese, most derived from nouns. Korean has similar situation to Japanese: 그 (geu) and 그녀 (geunyeo) - he and she--Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 13:03, 10 January 2013 (UTC) Can you give me a link to the article please? Pass a Method (talk) 21:06, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Personal pronoun#Gender. — Ungoliant (Falai) 21:10, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Thanks. I've always thought that genderless pronoun languages were superior because in most usages the specifying of a gender is pointless. Pass a Method (talk) 21:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC) However the page uses the past tense "have/had" indicating it is no longer genderless. Does that mean the above genderless pronouns are no longer used? Pass a Method (talk) 21:22, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Also, Tlingit, Navajo, Cherokee, Ojibwe, Yup'ik, Dena'ina, Apache, Quechua (most if not all American Indian languages). —Stephen (Talk) 21:23, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Also Abenaki and, as Stephen says, almost all Amerindian languages (which distinguish animate from inanimate instead of female from male). In English, plural "they" is attested since the 1200s-1300s, singular "they" is attested since the 1300s-1400s (including in Shakespeare and the KJV). - -sche (discuss) 21:41, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I don't know about any of the others, but Burmese can distinguish between "he" and "she" if the need arises. —Angr 21:53, 9 January 2013 (UTC) The internet and its obscurity has created a real need for gender less pronouns (possibly a neologism/new word) as the use of he/she or singular they is seen by many to be awkward. Pass a Method (talk) 21:59, 9 January 2013 (UTC) People have tried to create genderless pronouns (see w:Gender-neutral pronoun#Invented pronouns), but most people do not like them. —Stephen (Talk) 22:08, 9 January 2013 (UTC) I won't speak of the rest of the internet, but on Wiktionary, it's usually possible to reword definitions so that no pronoun is needed, but whenever a (plural or singular) genderless third-person pronoun is needed, I follow well-established English-language practice and use "they". - -sche (discuss) 22:35, 9 January 2013 (UTC) This is not entirely related, but it would be great if someone went through Category:English pronouns and double-categorised (or, if you prefer, re-categorised... though double-categorisation seems preferable) all the third-person pronouns like [[per]] into Category:English third person pronouns, the first person pronouns into their category, etc. - -sche (discuss) 22:36, 9 January 2013 (UTC) Simply put: grammatical gender isn't a universal. It's developed in a few major language families such as Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic, and has been borrowed into a few other languages, but I would suspect that most language families never had it. It's generally not a good idea to make value judgments based on linguistic characteristics- many of the most virulently sexist cultures throughout history have spoken languages without grammatical gender. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:21, 10 January 2013 (UTC) Interesting. Pass a Method (talk) 15:42, 10 January 2013 (UTC) I wouldn't say that the Bantu languages have no gender in the loose sense. Gender in Indo-European is based on a distinction in animacy, and the Bantu noun classes have that distinction too but extend it further. Grammatically, Bantu noun classes are not so different from Indo-European genders. And if you look even more broadly, the noun classifiers used when counting objects in Chinese resemble noun classes, too. As English speakers who are in contact primarily with other Indo-European languages, we naturally tend to think of gender as an obvious way to divide nouns up, but if you look around the world's languages it's really much more common to divide nouns up in some way. If you look for gender alone then it seems almost Euro-centric. —CodeCat 00:08, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Perhaps I should have said "sex-based grammatical gender". Indo-European languages are very strong in influence and sheer numbers of speakers, so we tend to take it for granted that certain linguistic features are universal, when they're anything but. Another example is our system of past, present and future tenses, which isn't even universal within Indo-European. The norm seems to be systems based on things like completed and incomplete action. As with grammatical gender, it doesn't mean that such things can't be described in languages without a given feature, just that they have to be expressed in other ways. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:18, 12 January 2013 (UTC) not sure this is the correct place for my question, first time i want to comment on a Wiktionary entry. please let me know if inappropriate, and sorry in advance then. what i stumbled upon: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/passenger_kilometer defines passenger kilometers as the result of dividing total distance traveled by the number of passengers. shouldn't this rather be the result of multiplying total distance traveled with the number of passengers? seldomuser —This comment was unsigned. Thanks for bring it up. The quantity is tabulated as the sum of the distances traveled by some defined group of passengers (eg, on a given airline for a given month). For a given transportation vehicle carrying N passengers for M miles on a given stage of a flight, the number could be calculated as N times M. As a definition: "(transportation) A kilometer traveled by a passenger, as on an airline." DCDuring TALK 19:29, 10 January 2013 (UTC) The same goes for passenger mile. --81.217.23.240 09:10, 14 July 2013 (UTC) Entry claims that grabbing something is consuming it (grab a sandwich, grab a coffee). I disagree: grabbing is the act of hastily picking it up. You could grab a sandwich and then not have time to eat it, right? Equinox ◑ 23:53, 10 January 2013 (UTC) It is certainly often used with the implication of eating something. I'm not sure if that counts. —CodeCat 23:56, 10 January 2013 (UTC) I kinda agree with Equinox. I see it as meaning the same thing as "get". Of course, your intention is to eat it, but one doesn't use "grab" = "eat" once it is gotten. Leasnam (talk) 00:06, 11 January 2013 (UTC) So do I. Of course if you grab a sandwich, you usually intend to eat it, but that's part of real-world knowledge, not part of the semantics of "grab". —Angr 00:12, 11 January 2013 (UTC) The entry does reflect a difference in meaning between I picked up a sandwich and I grabbed a sandwich. For the latter it would be very surprising to continue but I didn't have a chance to eat it, but for the former not really surprising. I think it comes from the idea of the affair being so hurried that there is no chance for an interruption. DCDuring TALK 00:31, 11 January 2013 (UTC) It seems like a US/UK difference: COCA has 75 instances of "[grab] a bite" (450MM words); BNC 3 (100MM), making it 6 times more frequent in US, despite BNC having a lot more transcribed informal speech. DCDuring TALK 00:36, 11 January 2013 (UTC) There may be a way to tell the difference. Are there any references to any kind of food that you can't physically grab, because they're liquid? Can you grab some water for example, or soup? —CodeCat 00:54, 11 January 2013 (UTC) As I understand it, it's something like "to fetch or obtain something hastily". For example, you can tell someone "grab your cellphone before leaving". — Ungoliant (Falai) 02:44, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Yes, that's a normal, more or less literal meaning, though the must literal one is "take or seize (something) with a rapid motion of one's hand". But the extended meanings include that in "grab someone's attention". With respect to prepared, ready-to-eat food, it seems to imply that the food is not just grasped or obtained, but actually consumed. MWOnline has this as "take hastily" and uses "grab a bite" and "grab a cab" as usage examples. One can also find "grab a train/ride/plane" at bgc. About other terms that are of prepared food: "grab some takeout" does not imply that the food was eaten without delay, ie, as soon as one got in the car or outside. Perhaps the completion is implied not in the verb but in the particular term: "bite", "snack", "meal". "Sandwich" and "coffee" are more ambiguous, like "pizza" etc. I think the event structure (completion vs first step in a sequence) is not inherent in the verb, but rather in at least the complete predicate if not more of the context. I don't think we should have the definition that bothered Equinox. DCDuring TALK 04:17, 11 January 2013 (UTC) The cellphone example is pertinent. If grabbing a sandwich implies eating it, grabbing a cellphone could imply making a call on it! "I grabbed my cellphone and told my boss I wouldn't be coming in." Equinox ◑ 13:38, 11 January 2013 (UTC) There is a difference. Compare "grab a cellphone and make a call" with *"grab a meal and eat it". Whether or not the associated following action is very strongly implied seems to depend on the specific word chosen and may also vary by context with many words. DCDuring TALK 15:39, 11 January 2013 (UTC) I can easily imagine a conversation like this: A: "Are you hungry?" B: "No, I grabbed a sandwich on the way over." This works for "thirsty" and "water" as well. It doesn't work with cellphone, though: A: "Did you call her?" *"Yes, I grabbed my cellphone on the way over." --BB12 (talk) 17:14, 11 January 2013 (UTC) What about the expression "I grabbed a shower"? That doesn't seem to be covered by any of our senses of [[grab]]. Or is it just an extension of the metaphor in [[take a shower]]? The fact that that's a red link suggests it's regarded as SOP, but none of our sense of [[take]] seems to cover it either. Anyway, not to stray too far from the point, I still maintain that "I grabbed a sandwich but then I didn't get a chance to eat it" is potentially a semantically felicitous sentence and that "consume" is at best part of the connotation of this meaning of "grab" but not part of its denotation. —Angr 17:35, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Should the definition be along these lines then: to take, often quickly, with the intention of using, consuming, etc. ? Leasnam (talk) 17:39, 11 January 2013 (UTC) I once got a big laugh from a coworker when he said "I think I'll go grab a sandwich", and I replied "you might as well go ahead and eat it, too". It wouldn't have been funny at all if eating weren't part of the basic meaning. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:31, 12 January 2013 (UTC) Leasnam's idea might be OK, but "quickly" is essential, IMO, for the sense that involves consumption or use. But note that it would be impossible to specify all of the encoding information required for someone to use the sense properly within the customary length of a dictionary definition. In contrast, Leasnam's suggestion is adequate for helping someone decode the usage. DCDuring TALK 14:12, 12 January 2013 (UTC) Previous Tea Room discussion here (it didn't address these questions). Is the "adjective" really an adjective, or just a particle? And how should we handle the "adverb" (if it is truly an adverb), which is separable? quote ... unquote? - -sche (discuss) 05:57, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Are these common nouns, as listed, or proper nouns, like Christmas? Even Christmas can be a common noun: see our entry, and consider "every Christmas", "some Christmases are colder than others". I have just given Shrovetide its plural. Equinox ◑ 13:33, 11 January 2013 (UTC) The difference between common and proper nouns are not always clear. The names of days, months and holidays are considered proper, but they recur every year so they are not "unique individuals". And even names for people have plurals, like in "How many Sarahs do you know?" —CodeCat 14:13, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Yeah. Looking around, I see we make a distinction between proper noun and common noun "Christmas" and PN and CN "Schrödinger's cat", we sort-of distinguish PN and CN "English" (CN: "One's ability to employ the English language", "The English-language term or expression for something" and PN: "The language originating in England"), we don't distinguish PN from CN "German" ("we spoke mutually unintelligible Germans", "we spoke German") nor, as CodeCat points out, PN from CN "Sarah". - -sche (discuss) 19:25, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Was a decision made at some stage not to include plurals of given names? I vaguely remember something like that. At least Talk:Jesuses was controversial. Equinox ◑ 19:46, 11 January 2013 (UTC) I hope not. If it was, it needs to be reconsidered. "Sarahs", "Ricks", "Emilys" etc are well-attested and not always intuitive. - -sche (discuss) 19:49, 11 January 2013 (UTC) They are not always intuitive to some: the ones ending in "y" and "s" and hyphenated ones, those from other languages that might be pluralized by the other language's rules. EP spoke against plurals of "Proper nouns" and carried the day, AFAICR. Given names and surnames can be and are routinely pluralized. Arguably the are thereby usually not being used as proper names, though in the US the Kennedys, for example, clearly refers to the US political family and arguably is a proper noun in such use. Personally, I am not at all sure that it has been a good idea to try to maintain a distinction other than an orthographic one between nouns used as or as part of proper names and other nouns. DCDuring TALK 22:56, 11 January 2013 (UTC) UK usage of greenhouse[edit] The usage note at greenhouse says, "Large commercial greenhouses are called glasshouses by professionals." I suspect that non-professionals also call them "glasshouses." (See, for example, [1], [2] and [3]. Can someone familiar with UK English clarify this point? --BB12 (talk) 09:38, 11 January 2013 (UTC) No idea, but they shouldn't throw stones. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:36, 11 January 2013 (UTC) We need a rimshot sound effect file. DCDuring TALK 16:55, 11 January 2013 (UTC) See and ye shall find: DCDuring TALK 16:59, 11 January 2013 (UTC) Well I'm not a professional horticulturist, and I would call them "large greenhouses" because "glasshouse" has several other meanings. I've heard them called glasshouses, but I don't think the usage is universal here in the UK. There are lots of adverts here in the UK for "commercial greenhouses". Dbfirs 18:27, 13 January 2013 (UTC) The word "fannot"[edit] Hello from Denmark. I Have problems with the word "fannot". What is "fannot" We are a group people who are searching for HMS Belette. she went aground on a sunken rock called "John" (or "Fannot") off It appears to be a person's name, presumably a surname. For reference, the information is cited at w:HMS Belette (1806) and w:Johns Rock, crediting Gossett, William Patrick (1986) The lost ships of the Royal Navy, 1793-1900, (London:Mansell), ISBN 0-7201-1816-6 and Hepper, David J. (1994) British Warship Losses in the Age of Sail, 1650-1859, (Rotherfield: Jean Boudriot), ISBN 0-948864-30-3 — Pingkudimmi 09:51, 12 January 2013 (UTC) I know all the old UK Marine litteratur where "Belette" is mentioned. I also know the exsact position of "Johns" knot, mentioned in the danish pilot. But it makes no sense to me at all. The problem i the word "fannot", there has to be a meaning with that word. Sorry for my bad english. tag (in)[edit] tag does not seem to contain the sense I see in http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/YPComics/~3/HnHCsXxleIo/. It seems to be derived from the children game sense. Or should this be placed under tag in? H. (talk) 18:41, 12 January 2013 (UTC) I'm not too familiar with w:Tag Team Wrestling, but that seems to be the source. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:00, 12 January 2013 (UTC) That's a good catch. No OneLook dictionary or glossary seems to have the right sense of tag or tag in. There may be other derived terms from that kind of wrestling. DCDuring TALK 19:36, 12 January 2013 (UTC) Should this word be obsolete/archaic/dated? We could compare it to the closely related term fortnight, which is rarely used in North America, but still in common use in much of the Commonwealth. By contrast, I don't believe sennight is in common use anywhere in the world, but I wanted to check with other editors their experiences. SJK (talk) 09:20, 13 January 2013 (UTC) Yes, most dictionaries mark "sennight" as archaic. I think it was dated when last used without archaic intent (by Virginia Woolf in 1928?). It would hardly be understood today by most people who don't read old books. Is there any dialect that retains the word? I don't know of any. Dbfirs 18:12, 13 January 2013 (UTC) Think Virginia Woolf wasn't being archaic eh? W∴Bro∴ Froggo Zijgeb M∴ M∴ (talk) 02:05, 16 June 2013 (UTC) Well she was a "modernist" with a very Victorian upbringing, so I wasn't sure. Dbfirs 15:26, 22 June 2013 (UTC) The current definition describes it as being only Christian, but i can think of several non-Christian religious groups who also describe their places of worship as a church, i.e. Church of Scientology, Universal Life Church, Church of Satan, Native American Church etc. Should the definitions be amended? Pass a Method (talk) 02:14, 14 January 2013 (UTC) I'd prefer that this problem be corrected by adding a by extension definition (though amending the current definitions is also a reasonable solution), because people do tend to refer to churches as the house of worship specific to Christianity, just like mosque is the HoW specific to Islam and synagogue to Judaism. — Ungoliant (Falai) 02:38, 14 January 2013 (UTC) Can you give me an example of another entry with a "by extension" definition please? Pass a Method (talk) 03:23, 14 January 2013 (UTC) alcateia, worship, google, organism, Jehovist. — Ungoliant (Falai) 03:27, 14 January 2013 (UTC) The Jehovist entry is a bad example: the two senses aren't really connected, unless one considers the biblical-writer sense as a specific case of the more general sense which is tagged "by extension". The biblical-writer sense is rather specialized and used mainly by biblical scholars, so I would doubt that the other sense was coined with that one in mind. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:33, 14 January 2013 (UTC) I agree. For now, I've re-ordered the senses to be slightly more logical, but that doesn't preclude more comprehensive cleanup. - -sche (discuss) 06:05, 14 January 2013 (UTC) Someone wrote OTRS (ticket:2013010810012259 for those who can see it) in broken English about this Romanian entry. As well as I can understand him, he seems to be saying the entry should be tagged offensive, tagged obsolete, deleted as nonexistent, or more than one of the above. I don't know the facts (and don't wish to RFV it without a clear indication from the OTRS correspondent that he thinks it doesn't exist), so I'm simply bringing it here for your attention.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:00, 14 January 2013 (UTC) What is OTRS? Mglovesfun (talk) 12:36, 25 January 2013 (UTC) See m:OTRS.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:30, 25 January 2013 (UTC) There's no need to be a grammar nazi—This unsigned comment was added by Dz572 (talk • contribs). disincentivized[edit] What part of speech is disincentivized in the sentence "Thus, both sides are disincentivized to settle." —This unsigned comment was added by RJFJR (talk • contribs). perfect passive participle? Furius (talk) 02:14, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Not it's not. It's just a past participle. Perfect passive participles don't exist in English. Beside, this doesn't really answer the anon's question. He was asking for a part of speech. It is considered an adjective here, as most past participles are. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C 02:22, 15 January 2013 (UTC) I had thought that "past participle" was just one of the acceptable names for such items - and not necessarily more accurate than 'perfect passive' given that the English past tends to be absolute, but past participles are only in the past relative to the main verb. Further, while "disincentivized" is functioning as an adjective with regards to "sides", it is functioning as a verb with respect to "to settle". Why does the adjectival aspect receive priority? Furius (talk) 06:27, 15 January 2013 (UTC) The entry on disincentivized only has the verb. I take it there is not a need to add an adjective section? RJFJR (talk) 18:05, 17 January 2013 (UTC) There is no automatic need. But in this case the relatively easy search for "very|too|more disincentivized" finds 2 clearly valid uses at Scholar and one each at Usenet and Books. Thus the more time-consuming searches for unambiguously adjectival usage (and debates over said usage) are not necessary to justify an adjective PoS section. DCDuring TALK 20:01, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Preposition Following 'Culminated'[edit] I've seen both prepositions used, but which way is preferred/more common, "culminated with", or "culminated to"? "Culminated with" seems to sound a little better to me, but I'd like to get a second opinion. Thanks in advance. Also, I apologize if this is in the wrong place, I'm not entirely sure how this all works. —This comment was unsigned. The Information Desk WT:ID is the right place for this kind of request, but this is the second best place. in is by far the most common preposition to follow forms of culminate, on BNC and COCA. With is less than 20% as common. At is about one fortieth as common. I don't see to at all. DCDuring TALK 04:29, 15 January 2013 (UTC) No no no no, this is false information and needs to be changed. 'lö' means hello? This was actually something completly new to me. Where I come from in Sweden (westcoast), 'lö' means body hair, or it can also mean junk or other fluff/fuzz junk. I've also heard it used with that meaning in other places. It may not be in SAOL, but it is common known old slang. Here is another reference (http://www.folkmun.se/definition/l%C3%B6) When it comes to IRC slang however, we often used 'lu' or 'lulu'. But that might have been completly different between different channels or networks, or just common withing one certain small group of people. --217.10.100.2 14:38, 16 January 2013 (UTC) This word is also found in islamic books. Should the biblical tag be renamed to abrahamic traditions? Pass a Method (talk) 18:10, 16 January 2013 (UTC) Do the Islamic books derive their usage from the bible or from the older Hebrew texts? Dbfirs 15:23, 18 January 2013 (UTC) I cannot tell where it comes from. It is used in the Qur'an. —Stephen (Talk) 20:46, 18 January 2013 (UTC) This should be tagged as both biblical and Koranic/islamic (we don't seem to have a template for Koranic or equivalent). Abrahamic is an obscure term that explains nothing to virtually all of our audience. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:04, 18 January 2013 (UTC) We have this interjection (per Wonderfool) as a form of "God!". I don't know, but can someone confirm this, and that it isn't a form of "golly!"? Equinox ◑ 23:28, 16 January 2013 (UTC) golly etymology 1 says it's from "god" so if it is from golly is it then from 'god' via 'golly'? RJFJR (talk) 18:07, 17 January 2013 (UTC) That sounds right. DCDuring TALK 20:03, 17 January 2013 (UTC) I always thought that this term didn't refer to the perceived threat itself, but to the reaction to it in the west. So I thought it meant "being scared of the reds". —CodeCat 03:12, 17 January 2013 (UTC) The definition is not perfect, perhaps it could be expanded, the word "alleged" suggests it's a perceived threat. Other random definitions (some amateurish but good, IMHO) of red scare I found: a period of general fear of communists. fear that communism would spread to other nations a series of actions by governments against people who were believed to be Communists. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 04:07, 17 January 2013 (UTC) From those three definitions, I don't think we should differentiate between 1 and 2. And I don't think 3 is more of a reaction to the red scare rather than the red scare itself. I would support changing the definition to a combination of 1 and 2. --WikiTiki89 04:37, 17 January 2013 (UTC) "it may happen that"[edit] Is this construction grammatically correct? I've only seen non-native speakers use it, typically at the beginning of a sentence. ---> Tooironic (talk) 07:42, 19 January 2013 (UTC) It sounds a little old-fashioned to me. About 3.3 million raw hits on Google Books. --BB12 (talk) 07:46, 19 January 2013 (UTC) Can you give some examples? Because every use I can think of seems completely natural. --WikiTiki89 15:07, 19 January 2013 (UTC) Yeah, I agree. I wouldn't blink at it, it doesn't sound at all old-fashioned to me, and I can easily imagine saying it myself. Granted, searching my Gmail history, I can't find any cases where I actually have written it, but I've come close: I once wrote, in the context of embedded Youtube videos that would stop working after a while, "It also happens sometimes that the video actually ceases to be available, but not in this case". —RuakhTALK 06:12, 20 January 2013 (UTC) The expression certainly violates no express grammatical or stylistic rule that I am familiar with. Stylistically, it seems didactic to me, but not obnoxiously so. DCDuring TALK 14:27, 20 January 2013 (UTC) "As some day it may happen that a victim must be found..." Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:18, 26 January 2013 (UTC) A skittles game is an informal game of chess played while waiting for the next scheduled tournament game to begin. It's played on the skittles tables, in the tournament's skittles room. Any idea what part of speech skittles (in this sense) is? (We're missing the sense, and I'd like to add it, but am stuck on POS.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:08, 20 January 2013 (UTC) Looks like the other sense, used attributively- therefore, a noun. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:01, 20 January 2013 (UTC) Like the other sense? You mean "a pub game in which a ball is rolled"? How is the chess sense that sense used attributively?​—msh210℠ (talk) 08:15, 20 January 2013 (UTC) I would guess that it's not the details of game play, but the social aspects of the game, that are being alluded to: an informal game played for fun in a friendly environment. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:35, 20 January 2013 (UTC) Maybe, but even if the two words are related etymologically — perhaps both originally meant "a game played for fun" — they're surely to be considered distinct senses now.​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:45, 21 January 2013 (UTC) Yes, I was talking etymology, not suggesting the senses be merged. They're clearly totally independent in current usage. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:00, 21 January 2013 (UTC) Ah, I get you now. Sorry for the, er, density. I agree it should be listed as a noun if that's its etymology and we see no further uses (viz, besides in the three phrases I pointed out above), and I agree that that sounds like a plausible etymology. But plausible doesn't necessarily mean correct.​—msh210℠ (talk) 04:12, 21 January 2013 (UTC) Well, SB's added it as "(uncountable) An informal form of chess played without a clock". Striking.​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:29, 24 January 2013 (UTC) Hi. Any of you guys know what the defn of this is? I thought it might be a horse drawn hearse, but I'm really not sure. -- ALGRIF talk 11:01, 20 January 2013 (UTC) Or it could have been an ambulance? SemperBlotto (talk) 11:06, 20 January 2013 (UTC) Usage at Google books suggests that it is archaic with the heyday of non-literary usage from 1888 through the 1920s. AFAICT, it seems to have been used originally to mean any kind of "rapid"-response vehicle, but became specialized to mean a police van (which Cassell's has) or paddy wagon. DCDuring TALK 14:41, 20 January 2013 (UTC) The entry has two senses: (countable) A steel reinforcing bar in a reinforced concrete structure. (uncountable) A grid-shaped system of such bars. This doesn't match the usage I'm familiar with. I've always heard people treating "rebar" as an uncountable mass noun, referring to a single bar as "a piece of rebar" (There's a already a citation that reflects this usage). A quick check shows usage of "rebars", so we do need both countable and uncountable, but I'm skeptical that being in a "grid-shaped system" would make the difference between the two. You'll notice, also, that both senses refer to rebar(s) in concrete. Are we to believe that no one uses the term until the concrete has been poured? I somehow doubt that we have a sheep-vs.-mutton type of distinction at play here, especially since suppliers advertise rebar all the time along with other raw materials like cement and lumber. I'm not quite sure how to structure the entry, though. It seems like the mass-noun usage I'm familiar with could be pluralized when one is talking about different types of rebar, but that would be different than the countable sense of more than one piece. I'm also not sure if the two overlap- would it be possible for a someone to ask: "could you go to that stack of rebar over there and bring me a couple of rebars?" Chuck Entz (talk) 06:48, 22 January 2013 (UTC) The "type of reinforcing bar" sense could be considered to apply to any mass noun, so we could dispense with it. Otherwise I agree with your assessment of the usage. I might even want to verify the second sense given. I think we do need indicate both countability and uncountability. We could split the uncountable and uncountable usage double the number of definitions or we could reword, indicate that both countability and uncountability apply, and have usage examples (not citations, IMO) for each sense illustrating countable and uncountable usage. An example of the combined approach: (countable, uncountable) Reinforcement in the form of steel bars typically used in a grid arrangement for concrete structures. Rebars are available in various lengths and diameters. We're going to need a lot more rebar for a taller retaining wall. Electric arc furnaces produce most of the tonnage of rebar. Especially if the second existing sense is not verified, it would not be a waste of bytes to split the definition into countable and uncountable senses, though it may not be easy. DCDuring TALK 12:48, 22 January 2013 (UTC) French-speakers! Lend me your ears. I just added a new sense of que, one which has always confused me slightly. I put together the following definition, which might perhaps be improved if anyone knows more about this construction: Links two noun phrases in apposition forming a clause without a (finite) verb, such that the complement acts as predicate. With the following examples: 1874, Barbey d'Aurevilly, 'Le Bonheur dans le crime', Les Diaboliques: —Quelle grande bête, avec tout son esprit, que votre marquise, pour vous avoir dit pareille chose! — fit la duchesse […]. 'What a beast your marquess is, for all her spirit, for having told you such a thing!' said the duchess. 1918, Jean Giradoux, Simon le pathétique: —Quelle belle fleur que la rose! dit-elle soudain, alors qu'aucune rose n'était en vue […]. 'What a beautiful flower the rose is!' she said suddenly, though no rose was in sight. I've just moved house and all my best grammar books are still in boxes, so in the meantime, can anyone comment on this 'appositive que'? Does it have a name? Should it be marked dated (I associate it with 19th-century literature)? Is the definition more or less right? Is it connected in some way with the final que in phrases like qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?, qu'est-ce que c'est que ce bordel etc.? Ƿidsiþ 09:21, 22 January 2013 (UTC) I don't know French, but shouldn't you have boldfaced the is in each of those translations? It seems to be translation of que (even though que has a different part of speech).​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:33, 24 January 2013 (UTC) In the Trésor de la langue française informatisé entry, this use is given as sense I. A. 5. c.: I. − Empl. conjonctionnels A. − Conj. de sub. 5. [Introd. une complét. en fonction d'appos.] c) [Apposée à un groupe nom. qui fait office de thème, la compl., réduite à un groupe nom., joue le rôle de prédicat] Quelle belle fleur que la rose! (v. H. Bonnard,infra bbg.). I. − Conjunctive uses A. − Subordinating conjunction 5. [Introducing an appositive complement] c) [In apposition to a noun phrase serving as theme, with the complement, reduced to a noun phrase, playing the role of predicate] What a beautiful flower que the rose! (v. H. Bonnard, in bibliography below). which more or less accords with your def. I note that in both of your examples, the sentence would work just fine without the que-phrase: Quelle grande bête, avec tout son esprit, pour vous avoir dit pareille chose! Quelle belle fleur! So I think the closest analogue in English is something equally verbless, such as: What a great fool, your marquess, for all her wit, to tell you such a thing! What a beautiful flower, that rose! By the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen it in more recent works; I think it's "literary" rather than "dated". —RuakhTALK 01:08, 27 January 2013 (UTC) Thanks Ran. I don't know if "is" is always a translation for que, because since I wrote the above I've seen several examples where the verb be is present in the French as well. Eg (also from Barbey's Les Diaboliques): C'était une hypocrite de premier ordre que cette comtesse, where the que mainly seems to be a way of shifting the subject to the end of the sentence – and I wonder if that isn't actually the primary idea of this construction, so that Quelle belle fleur que la rose is actually best translated by rearranging it to "The rose is such a beautiful flower!" Ƿidsiþ 13:21, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Irish has a similar construction using ná (in a sense that isn't added to that page yet). For example, the opening sentence of the story of Séadna is "Bhí fear ann fadó agus is é ainm a bhí air ná Séadna", which means "Once upon a time there was a man and it's the name that was on him ná Séadna". Like que it's just a way of separating the predicate nominative from the subject. —Angr 16:35, 29 January 2013 (UTC) I didn't mean that is is generally a translation of this que. I meant only that it's a translation of it in the translations above, so should be boldfaced in them (if those are the translations you're using).​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:55, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Well you may be right...but in my analysis, is is introduced to translate the construction as a whole, not to translate the specific word que, however I admit that when I write this down the distinction seems a bit vague. Ƿidsiþ 17:11, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Yeah, rethinking this with reference to languages I actually know (Hebrew and English), I realized that even though a translation seems, to someone who doesn't know the languages, to translate a certain word a certain way, it is not necessarily doing so. So kindly ignore my ideas about French, above.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:23, 1 February 2013 (UTC) Re: C'était une hypocrite de premier ordre que cette comtesse: As with your first two examples, I think the closest English translation is to map the que to a comma: "She's a first-rate hypocrite, that countess!" (Funnily enough, there are some dialects or registers of English where people use is this way, à la "She's a hypocrite of the highest order, is that countess!" — see e.g. google:"she's a tall one is" — but for sociolinguistic reasons, I don't think that's a viable translation of this use of French que.) —RuakhTALK 06:53, 1 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, I also considered this...I feel that the French is more formal, but these nuances are beyond me really. Interesting discussion, anyway. Ƿidsiþ 12:20, 1 February 2013 (UTC) According to Magali Rouquier, the que marks a topic rather than a predicate. La rose est une belle fleur. (a simple proposition) La rose, c'est une belle fleur. (definition by ce with a left dislocation) C'est une belle fleur que la rose. (anti-dislocation: reintegration of the topic into the phrase) It is therefore best translated to a comma in English, as Ruakh has already said. I have just opened a discussion at fr:Wiktionnaire:Questions sur les mots/février 2013#que. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 10:21, 5 February 2013 (UTC) Well, not so fast. French also has C'est une belle fleur, la rose, exactly as in English, and this is actually a very natural way of saying it in spoken modern French. Whereas using que sounds decidedly literary. So using a comma in English is not necessarily the most desirable translation. Ƿidsiþ 10:29, 5 February 2013 (UTC) User:Brian0918/Hotlist/0-9 only has two redlinks left: 0898 number and 24-. Let's decide whether these merit entries or not, so the page will be finished. bd2412 T 15:17, 25 January 2013 (UTC) I don't think so. DCDuring TALK 16:56, 25 January 2013 (UTC) If there is no objection, I'll delete the page tomorrow. Cheers! bd2412 T 04:18, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Did I do this right? I'm thinking about programming a bot to make a few hundred more of these Spanish compounds, and this is a start, at least. --One angry dwarf (talk) 11:11, 26 January 2013 (UTC) I wouldn't call it a compound, because it has only one lexical root. It's a verb form with two enclitics, se and lo. And to judge from some recent discussions, I'm not at all sure everyone is happy to keep things like this. Personally, I think we should have them, because they're written together and have a single main stress, indicating that they are perceived as single words in Spanish. But I know other people feel forms like this are unidiomatic "sum-of-parts" forms and so should not be included. Per WT:BOT, you have to get permission to run a bot before running it, and there might not be consensus to create entries for forms like this. —Angr 13:23, 26 January 2013 (UTC) I would love if we raised the bar on entries like this to require including attestation in the form of a quote or example sentence. DTLHS (talk) 20:48, 26 January 2013 (UTC) Spanish isn't a limited-documentation language so terms do require 3 citations to pass WT:RFV. However, with over 700 Google Books hits, this term seems likely to pass any RFV it was subjected to. —Angr 21:19, 26 January 2013 (UTC) However, as these constructions are basically imperative forms, I suggest they are included at the bottom of the conjugation table. Simple and effective. -- ALGRIF talk 11:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC) So that we don't get into a revert war, could others advise on User:Etym's recent change at gay? See further comments at User_talk:Equinox#gay. Thanks. Equinox ◑ 20:45, 26 January 2013 (UTC) I'd say hostility is definitely the wrong word. I would have said something along the lines of dislike. --WikiTiki89 20:49, 26 January 2013 (UTC) What do you mean? I'm referring to his edit stating that the offensive/insulting use of "gay" (= lame, uncool) might be directly from the "happy" sense, and not the "homosexual" one. Equinox ◑ 21:00, 26 January 2013 (UTC) I see the same thing that Wikitiki89 does. To wit, Etym's changes seem to be as follows: Editing the etymology to add the sentence "The reason behind the recent pejorative usage is not documented, though it is primarily speculated to be due to hostility towards homosexuality." Adding a series of poorly-formatted one-line citations from the Wife of Bath's Tale, together with a link to a page on Wikisource that does not seem to substantiate them. Adding a poorly-formatted list of derived terms. Personally, I would not object to a rollback. —RuakhTALK 00:29, 27 January 2013 (UTC) I was referring to this revision: [4] but I see it's now out of date. Equinox ◑ 04:37, 27 January 2013 (UTC) Look closer at that revision and you will see what I was talking about. (Hint: Ctrl+F "hostility") --WikiTiki89 05:27, 27 January 2013 (UTC) Just for info, see waitron and Talk:waitron, and ongoing discussion at User_talk:Bluewhim. Anyone happen to know about this word's origins? Equinox ◑ 03:32, 27 January 2013 (UTC) Google Books has a cite for 1982, which seems to show that it's already widespread, but that doesn't add much to the discussion. Another way to look at this is that they could be telling the absolute truth, but still be wrong about the origin of the word: People independently come up with things all the time, or hear things and forget about them, only to come up with them later without any idea where they came from. We would need evidence taking it back as close as possible to that time and that place, and not to other places at the same or an earlier time. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:34, 27 January 2013 (UTC) Given the timing, Bluewhim's explanation doesn't seem very plausible. I think it's much more likely that Ms. Beltran was promoting a term that she'd encountered and liked, and Bluewhim mistakenly thought she was introducing her own coinage. (The annals of linguistics and sociology are replete with this sort of thing — people thinking that a term or cultural practice is local and new, when in fact it's older and widespread. My own example: I went to high school in Portage, Michigan, and I was informed by classmates there that po-po was local slang for "Portage police". Turns out no. ;-)   ) —RuakhTALK 04:44, 27 January 2013 (UTC) man- was deleted as an English prefix, but two entries (manoratra, manapitra) suggest that it is a Malagasy prefix. Any takers? bd2412 T 01:37, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Presumably cognate with Malay meng- if that helps. —Angr 16:41, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Do the majority of English words have one definition of multiple definitions? Pass a Method (talk) 02:14, 30 January 2013 (UTC) Did you mean 'or' where you typed 'of' the second time? If so, then, when counting entries to answer your question, how do you wish to count things like preventing: as having one definition (because it's listed only as a participle of prevent), as having more than one (because it's a participle of something with more than one definition), or not at all (exclude from the count all words that are defined only as forms of other words)? (Same question for "common misspelling"-only words that are misspellings of polysemous words.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC) One apparently common path for an English noun to convert to a verb is to first sprout -ing and -ed as affixes, followed not long thereafter by being used in clearly verbal ways, such accepting modification by manner adverbs, appearing in an infinitive construction, etc. This has happened in the case of ablaut#Verb (which still needs a definition, BTW). What are the implications for [[ablauting]]? Diachronically, there was a time when it was not implausible to have Noun and Adjective PoS headers. We are approaching a time when both noun and adjective will probably seem redundant from a synchronic perspective. DCDuring TALK 16:01, 30 January 2013 (UTC) Defined as "a file extension indicating a file of JPEG file format; i.e., a digital picture". Are filename extensions a word in a language? Equinox ◑ 16:37, 31 January 2013 (UTC) Almost certainly not. However, although we aim to include "all words in all languages", we don't confine ourselves to just that. Maybe these should go in an appendix (it would be a big one). SemperBlotto (talk) 16:40, 31 January 2013 (UTC) When they're used that way, sure. I'm not finding [[jpg]] per se, though; just [[JPG]] ([5], [6], [7]) and .jpg ([8]). —Angr 16:44, 31 January 2013 (UTC) A search for "a jpg" on Google Books yields "a jpg", "a .jpg" and "a JPG". See [9], [10] and [11] for "jpg". --BB12 (talk) 18:18, 31 January 2013 (UTC) We should not include file extensions: they don't belong to any language. But if "a jpg" is used in running text as a noun, that's English. (I didn't check the linked-to cites.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:51, 1 February 2013 (UTC) I thought it was quite common to say (or email) "I'll send you a jpg file tomorrow". "Is a jpg file ok for you?" and so on, in the same way with pdf doc and so on. -- ALGRIF talk 11:52, 1 February 2013 (UTC) The point is that this entry doesn't define jpg as "an image in JPG format"; it defines it as a computer filename extension. Equinox ◑ 17:30, 1 February 2013 (UTC) JPEG and jpeg seem good as entries and the spelling fits the pronunciation. But I would expect folks to write "jpg" or "JPG" also, as Google searches for "a jpg" or "jpgs" confirm. So perhaps this should be just an alt form entry? DCDuring TALK 17:55, 1 February 2013 (UTC) JPEG means the Joint Photographic Experts Group or an image using the JFIF format. The words jpeg, jpg, and JPG mean only the latter. The pronunciation is always jay-peg. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 15:36, 5 February 2013 (UTC) The New Oxford Dictionary of English (2001) gives radioes as the third-person singular of radio#Verb. I'm less than convinced, though, how frequently is this used? I think it might actually be a misspelling. I can see radioes as a plural on Google Books, too. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:54, 31 January 2013 (UTC) Exam question[edit] I need help with a Proficiency Use of English question, I can't figure it out and feel dumb!: Whether you come or don't come is up to you You .............suit...............or not. --Taker (talk) 09:57, 1 February 2013 (UTC) Sometimes these exam boards can also make mistakes. The answer is "You can suit yourself" But the "or not" bit doesn't really go like that tagged to the end, in my opinion. (Always assuming there isn't a better answer that I haven't thought of!). Still, it's an exam question, so the exam board knows best (as always). -- ALGRIF talk 11:48, 1 February 2013 (UTC) Nothing with single words filling in the blanks at COCA or BNC, either. "you can suit yourself or not" cannot be found at Google Books, Google News, or even a Web search. DCDuring TALK 17:49, 1 February 2013 (UTC) The given answer was in fact "you can suit yourself whether you come or not". --Taker (talk) 18:13, 1 February 2013 (UTC) Intriguing! That sentence doesn't seem very felicitous / fluent to me, though one of the six(!) Google hits for it is the Chambers book the exam appears to have copied it from. - -sche (discuss) 18:46, 1 February 2013 (UTC) I wouldn't have gotten that one. I think a little less of Chambers for it. It seems archaic to me, as is more or less supported by Google Books, which finds it mostly in 19th century works. A comma after yourself makes it seem a bit better. Many of the more current hits in my Google Books search found a full stop/period after yourself and a full sentence begun with Whether. DCDuring TALK 21:08, 1 February 2013 (UTC) But "Whether you come or not" isn't a complete sentence. —Angr 00:34, 2 February 2013 (UTC) I think that one would be more likely to find "You can suit yourself. Whether you come or not won't make any difference." or something similar than the purported correct answer. The point is that punctuation in most modern usage, whether a period or a comma or a dash, marks the whether clause as something other than the grammatical complement of suit yourself, whereas the "correct" answer says that a whether clause can be such a complement. DCDuring TALK 01:09, 2 February 2013 (UTC) The idiom "you can suit yourself whether you [verb] or not" is a British English idiom as a single sentence, though I'm not sure whether I would tag it colloquial or dated. You can suit yourself whether you believe me or not! The exam board was presumably testing whether or not you had met the idiom before. Dbfirs 16:41, 23 February 2013 (UTC) About phrases[edit] The following idioms are they all exist ? If yes, are they strictly synonyms ? Which one, from the three choice, is the more common one ? Shall I create all this entry ? Did you use an other instead of phrase in grammar (idiom, expression, ... ?) phrasal noun = noun phrase = nominal phrase phrasal adjective = adjective phrase = adjectival phrase phrasal adverb = adverb phrase = adverbial phrase phrasal conjunction = conjunction phrase = conjunctional phrase phrasal interjection = interjection phrase = interjectional phrase phrasal verb = verb phrase = verbal phrase Thank you for your attention. V!v£ l@ Rosière /Whisper…/ 20:41, 2 February 2013 (UTC) They are not the same. With some of them, actually, I'm not sure what they're supposed to mean, but to take a very clear-cut case . . . a "verb phrase" consists of a verb and all of its complements and modifiers and so on, e.g. "began migrating to the cities in droves", whereas a "phrasal verb" is a verb plus a particle, e.g. "to give away". The former is a syntactic construct, forming part of the parse tree of a sentence, whereas the latter is a semantic construct, carrying the meaning of the action. And most of those entries should not exist IMHO. —RuakhTALK 20:47, 2 February 2013 (UTC) Sorry, I add other questions during your answer. Thank you for this explanation, because I'm quite blocked to translate the French word locution, you didn't seem really use in your language to qualify and classify idioms. e.g. : In French "train fantôme" is a "locution nominale" we use it in fr.wikt to classify word but here you seems omitted this precision, so I wonder why. It's a volontary choice to omit it or it's because you don't have specific terms to qualify that things ? V!v£ l@ Rosière /Whisper…/ 20:59, 2 February 2013 (UTC) As far as I know, we categorize phrasal parts of speech the same as regular parts of speech, because they behave the same as parts of speech made out of a single word (although in some languages the order and placement of the individual words may change). From a lexical point of view, give up doesn't differ from give, both are just verbs. —CodeCat 21:47, 2 February 2013 (UTC) Understood thank you. V!v£ l@ Rosière /Whisper…/ 22:04, 2 February 2013 (UTC) Many English phrases behave in ways that are importantly not like any particular word class, being subject perhaps to multiple inflections Category:English predicates, the insertion of a variety of optional modifiers, or perhaps being non-constituents. In those cases we sometimes simply call it a phrase. Note that many items in Category:English phrases don't belong in a dictionary, but rather in a phrasebook, which has been a troublesome area for us. Note also that we have 'Prepositional phrase' as an L3 header for English terms because almost all prepositional phrases can function as either adjective or adverb. DCDuring TALK 22:29, 2 February 2013 (UTC) Is make the going an idiom? I was not familiar with it when I stumbled across it. I am familiar with the common construction [make] the going ADJECTIVE PHRASE. The expression in question seems to mean something like get/keep the ball rolling. Both initiation and continuing sustenance seem to be involved. DCDuring TALK 14:01, 3 February 2013 (UTC) It seems to be UK. DCDuring TALK 14:09, 4 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, not particularly common in the UK, but understood to mean "forge ahead", "lead", or something similar as you suggest. Dbfirs 14:06, 7 February 2013 (UTC) Thanks. DCDuring TALK 16:39, 7 February 2013 (UTC) About reading regnal names[edit] How do you read kings' names like Robert II, Leo V in English? Do you say "Leo fifth" or "Leo the fifth"? What if the king has a by-name, such as w:Leo V the Armenian. Do you say "Leo the fifth the Armenian"? --Vahag (talk) 10:07, 4 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, you say "Leo the Fifth" (at least in British English). Ƿidsiþ 10:26, 4 February 2013 (UTC) And American.​—msh210℠ (talk) 10:29, 4 February 2013 (UTC) But what if the king has a by-name? Do you say "the" twice, e.g. William the First the Conqueror? --Vahag (talk) 10:59, 4 February 2013 (UTC) Yes indeed, although in conversational English people tend to pick one or the other. Ƿidsiþ 11:03, 4 February 2013 (UTC) This is the reason that we need to add regnal names to the wiki. George V is "George the fifth" in English, but "George cinque" in French (for example). SemperBlotto (talk) 10:35, 4 February 2013 (UTC) What's fun is reading these names in German, because you have to get the case of the article right even though the article isn't written. No problem for native speakers, but we foreigners have to stop and think when we see something like "in den Zeiten von Georg V" (i.e. "von Georg dem Fünften") or "ein Brief an Heinrich VIII" (i.e. "an Heinrich den Achten") or "die Schuhe Johannes' XXIII" (i.e. "die Schuhe Johannes' des dreiundzwanzigsten"). —Angr 13:42, 4 February 2013 (UTC) The reading of regnal names follows consistent rules- we wouldn't need an entry for Bleerg XLVII to know how to read it. As for differences between languages, 2.745 is quite different in French and English, but I hope we never add entries for such numbers- especially not in English. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:06, 4 February 2013 (UTC) Is star an adjective?[edit] As you know, there's a hilariously large dispute on Wikipedia over the title of the film which I shall render in all lowercase and with no punctuation as "star trek into darkness". Among the few interesting things to come out of this dispute is the claim that, in the title, star is an adjective, trek is a verb, and trek into darkness is a noun phrase. The second and third notions are obviously erroneous and contradictory (and the second notion is furthermore incompatible with the first outside journalese), but the first is backed up by a few other dictionaries. However, those other dictionaries' examples of 'adjectival' star are of the form "star reporter", exactly the sort of thing we consider a noun+noun compound: [[star]] gives "star pupil" as an example of the noun sense "exceptionally talented person", which I've just expanded to "exceptionally talented or famous person". I'm curious: can anyone find uses of star as an actual adjective? See Wiktionary:English adjectives for some tests of adjectivity. - -sche (discuss) 18:25, 4 February 2013 (UTC) In Wiktionary parlance, I'm fairly sure that would be a case for {{attributive}}, no matter the analysis. Circeus (talk) 18:56, 4 February 2013 (UTC) It is the American dictionaries (MWOnline, RHU, and AHD) that each have two senses of star shown as adjectives. The two senses of star as adjective at MWOnline do not include one suitable for the title, of course. Their adjective sense do not include all the noun senses which are found in attributive use of star, so one is left to wonder whether they have found some true adjective uses or just include those two senses as adjectives to avoid the naive claim of incompleteness for not having them. I am not familiar with any use of star that would meet our syntax-based criteria for inclusion as an adjective. I looked at 300 bgc hits for "more|very|too star" and found none that showed star being used as a true adjective. OTOH, I could imagine such use and would not be shocked to find it, at least not in fairly small numbers, especially in a sense related to sports and entertainment. I hope that a sensible analysis of the title phrase prevailed. DCDuring TALK 19:51, 4 February 2013 (UTC) Can I get a usex or citation of the second sense, please? That would be "employing a single and separate character to represent each sound". I don't want to formally RFV it (unless the rest of you haven't heard of it, either), but I can't offhand think of how it'd be used. Maybe I'm having a blonde moment... - -sche (discuss) 01:38, 5 February 2013 (UTC) I haven't heard it, but it sounds like it could be "Esperanto's orthography is homographic." — Ungoliant (Falai) 01:54, 5 February 2013 (UTC) Why do we call this Latin? It is not verified as Latin and we seem to be as dismissive of botanical Latin as we are of legal and medical Latin. DCDuring TALK 16:19, 5 February 2013 (UTC) What would you suggest as an alternative? Note:- the neuter form exists, but I haven't checked all the other inflected forms. SemperBlotto (talk) 16:27, 5 February 2013 (UTC) Are letters from the Pope durably archived? This definitely is and is definitely Latin. I notice, however, that those are both capitalized Philippinensis. —Angr 16:42, 5 February 2013 (UTC) @SB: As always, the alternative, at least in lower case, is Translingual. @Angr: I assumed that the Vatican would have had some writings using the capitalized form for this term and for many other names connected with countries, provinces, cities that were the seat of dioceses, possibly even toponyms in parish names or for places in which parishes are located. The Vatican archives would be a rich source of usage for many Medieval/Ecclesiastic and New Latin terms, with significant overlap with components of taxonomic names. DCDuring TALK 18:12, 5 February 2013 (UTC) I suppose it really isn't too hard to find running Latin text by doing search for all three genders in nominative, accusative and genitive co-occurring with common Latin words not common in texts in other languages, like "ut|hic|haec|hoc|ille|nunc|sed". Does anyone have any suggestions for search besides these? DCDuring TALK 18:22, 5 February 2013 (UTC) Could we agree that when there exists a Latin term attested in botanical phrases/names which is identical to a Latin term attested outside botanical phrases/name except that one or the other starts with a capital letter, we'll make the botanical term an {{alternative form of}} the non-botanical term? In this case that would mean soft-redirecting philippinensis to Philippinensis. A standard usage note or context template could be added to the botanical forms so redirected. - -sche (discuss) 18:35, 5 February 2013 (UTC) To clarify: that is relevant only for specific epithets, whether botanical or zoological, which are always lower case, but which can be otherwise spelled the same as a Latin proper noun or adjective conventionally written with an initial capital. It may be tedious to confirm that the Latin term exists, so, if there is not yet an entry for the Latin term, the Translingual term can be the main entry, pending the creation of the Latin entry. If there should be a list of taxonomic names using the specific epithet, then should the Latin be burdened with the list or would that justify a Translingual entry? If the word has a distinct meaning as it used in taxonomic names, that would also seem to justify a Translingual L2 section. Somewhat relatedly, genus names (initial upper case) are often used as specific epithets (lower case). I have not made separate entries for these. In principle, both of these seem like WT:BP or WT:AMUL matters. Are they? DCDuring TALK 20:31, 5 February 2013 (UTC) We have letzte as an inflected from of letzter, but the German Wiktionary has it the other way round. Which is correct? SemperBlotto (talk) 09:50, 6 February 2013 (UTC) We normally put the lemma at the masculine nominative singular, our own entries fit that. —CodeCat 09:58, 6 February 2013 (UTC) This is less about the gender and more about the question of grammatically weak and strong adjectives. Both letzte and letzter are masculine, but letzte is weak. I recall a discussion about seven years ago where we initially decided to place a preference on the weak German forms, as in Dritte Reich (weak), but this was soon changed to strong by the majority non-German-speakers (because "strong" was thought to be a superior physical quality to "weak"), so now we have Drittes Reich (strong) as the lemma. Of course, grammatically speaking, strong is not a particular superior quality, but there you have it. —Stephen (Talk) 11:20, 6 February 2013 (UTC) I don't think it has anything to do with superior quality, but in the way the adjectives are used. The weak inflection is used with a definite article, so I suppose if a word is usually used with a definite article (like Dritte Reich and most superlatives) then it makes sense to include it that way. —CodeCat 11:33, 6 February 2013 (UTC) Precisely because weak forms are only used with determiners before them we should prefer strong forms for our lemmas. It just looks really strange - downright wrong even - to see Dritte Reich as an entry without a das before it. (Note how German Wikipedia, for example, has its article at w:de:Drittes Reich.) Likewise when I see letzte without a determiner before it, I don't think "German word for 'last'", I think "feminine singular or all-gender plural of letzter". I'm not a native speaker, though. —Angr 12:17, 6 February 2013 (UTC) I agree with Angr, it should be Drittes Reich. Dritte Reich is simply wrong. - -sche (discuss) 18:15, 6 February 2013 (UTC) And the lemma form of letzte(r)? Usually the lemma form of adjectives is the predicative form, but some German adjectives are only used attributively, such as superlatives and ordinals, and substantivized adjectives. We should come to some sort of agreement about what lemma form to use for them. I support the masculine singular weakstrong form (the -er form). —Angr 18:29, 6 February 2013 (UTC) You mean the "masculine singular strong form (the -er form)"? That's my preference as well: letzter... though I note the DWDS lemmatises letzt (while the Duden, like de.Wikt, lemmatises letzte). Ditto for vierte(r) and the other ordinals (I would lemmatise vierter, like the DWDS, and unlike the Duden or de.Wikt which lemmatise vierte). - -sche (discuss) 19:27, 6 February 2013 (UTC) Does letzt ever occur as an adjective, or only as an adverb? Judging from the table, it's not a form of the adjective itself, since it has no separate predicative form. —CodeCat 19:36, 6 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, I meant the strong form of course; now corrected. I don't think letzt without an ending can ever be an adjective. If you want to say "last" predicatively you have to substantivize it to "der letzte/die letzte/das letzte". —Angr 19:52, 6 February 2013 (UTC) It's my understanding that predicative/uninflected use of the adjective letzt was possible several hundred years ago, though it isn't possible anymore. I don't think we should lemmatise letzt even if it's attested. - -sche (discuss) 20:09, 6 February 2013 (UTC) In case you were wondering, I arrived here because I wanted to add letztem and letztes - but didn't know which base word to use. (Feel free to add them yourself) SemperBlotto (talk) 11:42, 6 February 2013 (UTC) I would prefer the strong form as lema too. Thats the form, which can be used without article. As pointed out above 'letzte' without 'der' sounds wrong. Otherwise, if we decided to lemarize the weak form, the headline should read 'der letzte'. It's also better to have the lema compatible with de.wiktionary for the sake of interwiki links. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 23:35, 6 February 2013 (UTC) Just my two cents. My preference is to use strong forms as lemma. Strong forms make the gender more obvious (feminine and plural coinciding) - neuer Tag, neue Mode, junges Mädchen, neue Bücher. Strong forms can often be used without anything (articles, pronouns, etc.) in front, especially as titles (Neues Deutschland - a former GDR newspaper, now a socialist newspaper in Germany). Showing weak forms with definite articles (der letzte, die letzte, das letzte) is not always the best option as the article could be replaced with other words (e.g. dieser letzte, jener letzte, etc.) or there could be something between the article and the adjective - die junge deutsche Frau. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:17, 7 February 2013 (UTC) I have edited Deutscher a while ago to demonstrate some usage of nominalised adjective where -er is not the same -er in "true nouns" Lehrer, Schüler, etc. The actual ending will depend on the case and what precedes the word, so "der Deutsche" is the definite form of "(ein) Deutscher". Deutsche should then also say that it's not only "female German" but a weak form of Deutscher as in the example before and a weak form of "die Deutschen" - Germans (plural). --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:27, 7 February 2013 (UTC) That is kind of curious. Dutch has the same ending in Duitser but Dutch has no -er as a case ending (as there are no cases!). It's not an adjective ending etymologically, either; it descends from Germanic *warjaz. —CodeCat 00:58, 7 February 2013 (UTC) I know it may be confusing, especially when many nationalities in German are "true nouns" - der/ein Japaner, die/eine Japanerin. Same with Holländer/Holländerin. There are a lot of German nominalised/substantivised nouns as well (Arbeitspflichtiger is another example) and care should be taken by editors not familiar with the German grammar when determining the gender, case and lemma forms for such nouns. Großer Bär may appear as (der) Große Bär in a running text, which doesn't make Bär feminine. This type of nouns should have inflection tables, IMHO. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:15, 7 February 2013 (UTC) Most of these have predictable meanings, though. An Arbeitspflichtiger is someone who is arbeitspflichtig... it's really just arbeitspflichtiger Mann with Mann left out, so the adjective assumes the role of the noun. Most languages have such nouns, although English for some reason considers them collective/plural nouns. —CodeCat 01:21, 7 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, and "ein Deutscher" is "ein deutscher Mann" with Mann left out, someone who is deutsch. So is the Russian русский (мужчина, человек) - both noun and adjective. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:43, 7 February 2013 (UTC) So it's consensus to use the masculine (strong) form as a lemma form for non-predicatively used adjectives (e.g. letzter)? (Another option would be to use the neutral letztes, but I don't really have a strong opinion about it. I do have a very strong opinion about Drittes Reich and Großer Bär to be the correct lemma form (Dritte Reich and the like is utter nonsense). As for nominalized adjectives, such as Deutscher (meaning the people) and Arbeitspflichtiger, I agree to use the strong forms, so the lemma form of the word for a male German would be Deutscher, for a female German Deutsche, and the plural form of both should also be included at Deutsche rather than at Deutschen (because this is the weak form that's only used with the definite article). The problem about those nominalized adjectives is that there isn't the genitive form we can put in the headword template. I agree with Atitarev in that we need inflection tables for those. Longtrend (talk) 12:18, 9 February 2013 (UTC) Do nominalized adjectives inflect any differently from the adjectives themselves (other than the capital letter)? Like, do they have predicate forms, mixed and weak forms? If so, then we could probably just re-use the adjective templates. —CodeCat 14:02, 9 February 2013 (UTC) The only difference is that the nominalized adjectives generally only have one gender (or two if they refer to human beings), not all three. So a man can be an Arbeitspflichtiger and a woman can be an Arbeitspflichtige, but no one is an Arbeitspflichtiges. I'm actually having trouble thinking of a nominalized adjective that doesn't refer to a human being, but there are probably some. —Angr 14:19, 9 February 2013 (UTC) There are some: Und das Gesagte ist das Folgende: „hier schläft man sich gesund." (2004, Claudia Wipprecht, Zu: Gottfried Benns "Mann und Frau gehen durch die Krebsbaracke", page 12) Some adjectives, like rot and blau and gedacht, can even be substantivised in reference to males, females and things. As you say, though, it's common for them to refer only to men and women, or only to things, not to all three. - -sche (discuss) 18:16, 9 February 2013 (UTC) Yeah, I was trying to think of nominalized adjectives with at least somewhat idiomatic meanings as nouns, like Arbeitspflichtiger or Abgeordneter have. Obviously any adjective with a meaning that can be applied to humans and nonhumans alike can be nominalized to mean "the (X) one". —Angr 22:09, 9 February 2013 (UTC) There's another problem with the declension table at letzter. The first row shows predicative uses which don't exist. (Only the nominalized forms can be used in this position: Er ist Letzter = "He ist the last one". But not: *Es ist Letztes = "It is the last one".) Could someone modify the template so it allows to hide the predicative row? Longtrend (talk) 19:02, 9 February 2013 (UTC) Done. {{de-decl-adj-notcomp-nopred}} suppresses the predicative; lemma= sets the lemma (when it is different from the endingless stem). - -sche (discuss) 19:13, 9 February 2013 (UTC) Wouldn't it be easier to just create {{de-decl-adj-sup}}? —CodeCat 19:17, 9 February 2013 (UTC) How would you say that in German then? In Dutch, you say "Hij is de/het laatste", with a definite article. The difference in the articles is a matter of part of speech: "het laatste" makes it an adverb, while "de laatste" makes it a nominalized adjective. —CodeCat 19:16, 9 February 2013 (UTC) How would you say what? "It is the last one"? You would use the definite article here, too: Es ist das Letzte. As for "he is the last one", Er ist der Letzte and Er ist Letzter roughly mean the same. Er ist das Letzte (the literal equivalent of Hij is het laatste?) does work, too, though it has an idiomatic meaning ("he is an idiot") and thus doesn't work with other nominalized adjectives. // @-sche: Thanks for fixing! I didn't know such a template already existed... Longtrend (talk) 20:02, 9 February 2013 (UTC) 6 digit[edit] Someone with 7 digits in their bank account is a millionaire. What is someone with six digits in their bank account called? Pass a Method (talk) 18:37, 6 February 2013 (UTC) Not heard of a "proper" word for this, but hundred-thousandaire has been used on many Web pages. Equinox ◑ 18:40, 6 February 2013 (UTC) I think that millionaires don't keep the money in a simple bank account. Not with today's negligible interest rates. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:00, 7 February 2013 (UTC) assigned female at birth[edit] What is the grammar of the phrase google:"assigned (female|male) at birth"? In particular, what POS is "female" in it? Is it an adverb, or an adjective in an ellipsis of "assigned to the female gender/sex", or perhaps a noun meaning "the feminine gender/sex" (a sense our entry lacks, as it only lists "an individual of the feminine gender/sex")? What POS is "female" in google:"(female|male)-assigned at birth"? "Persons who were female-assigned at birth" seems grammatically analogous to "walls which were paint-covered at the start" or "frogs which were yellowish-coloured at birth", suggesting "female" could in that phrase be a noun (with what definition?) or an adjective and/or part of a compound adjective. Is "assigned female at birth" (or just "assigned female"?) idiomatic? IMO, "female-assigned" exists in a grey area between "not a single word" and "obviously a single word" and is idiomatic; would anyone like to disabuse me of that notion before I create an entry for it? - -sche (discuss) 20:00, 6 February 2013 (UTC) "Assigned female at birth" sounds SoP to me, though I agree the grammar is a bit odd (could a fungus be "assigned vegetable")? But there are plenty of similar constructs like gender assignment and you can easily find variations like misassigned female at birth, or simply assigned female without the birth bit being mentioned. Equinox ◑ 20:06, 6 February 2013 (UTC) I think the grammar is that "female" is a normal adjective, as usual, but that "assign" is taking an adjective complement, which it usually doesn't. That is, I think this is the same grammar as in "declared female", "deemed female", and so on. (And I don't think that "female-assigned" is using the same grammar as "yellowish-coloured", since the latter is "{yellowish-colour}ed", i.e. "having a yellowish colour", whereas I'm reasonably confident that "female-assigned" does not mean "having a female assign".) And yeah, wow, this construction sounds really bizarre to me. I don't remember ever encountering it before. —RuakhTALK 06:32, 7 February 2013 (UTC) Alternative analyses are that female is a nominal, possibly a fused-head construction "female (gender)" or possibly to be read as "female" rather than female. Any term is potentially nominalizable when is used as a name for a status or category, analogous to use as a title for a work. DCDuring TALK 14:28, 7 February 2013 (UTC) I agree with Ruakh, I would consider assign a copulative verb in this phrase, similar to deep, consider or even be. —CodeCat 14:56, 7 February 2013 (UTC) "File it under female". "File it as female". "Categorize her as female". They all seem nominal to me. DCDuring TALK 17:09, 7 February 2013 (UTC) I've created female-assigned and male-assigned; I didn't read anyone's comments as opposing such a move, but it won't hurt my feelings if they're RFDed. Regarding "'yellowish-coloured' […] is '{yellowish-colour}ed', i.e. 'having a yellowish colour', whereas I'm reasonably confident that 'female-assigned' does not mean 'having a female assign'": I read "yellowish-coloured" not as "{yellowish-colour}ed" but as "{yellowish}-{coloured}", i.e. "coloured. coloured what colour? coloured yellowish (colour)", so "female-assigned" could be "assigned. assigned what? assigned female (qualities)". "Female-assigned" nevertheless seems entry-worthy to me, because even if one parses its bizarre grammar in that way or in another way, it seems idiomatic that it refers specifically to being biologically female. - -sche (discuss) 21:27, 9 February 2013 (UTC) I don't think so. Consider intersex people, they are assigned male or female depending on what they look like from the outside (at least, usually), even if the inner organs differ. -- Liliana • 23:09, 9 February 2013 (UTC) Hmm, so do you think the entries are SOP? - -sche (discuss) 07:22, 23 May 2013 (UTC) think small, live small[edit] Is "small" an adverb in phrases like "think small" and "live small"? See WT:RFV#small, and comment there to keep discussion in one place. - -sche (discuss) 04:13, 7 February 2013 (UTC) It seems to be an adverb in "live small". In "think small" it seems to me to be more likely an adjective concerning the result, "ideas". But so "chopped small" is arguably as much about the result as the chopping as well and MWOnline and others call that sense adverbial. DCDuring TALK 15:57, 7 February 2013 (UTC) A real instance: "Green Bay one again came up small". Clearly this is about a result. Is "come up", a 'light' verb I think, a copula like seem and appear (core copulas)? Or does it seem like act or turn semantically, which appears on some lists of copulas with 'subjective complements'. Live seems very like a copula when it takes small as a complement. I have long been troubled by the question of how to present these. The label copula is not really much of a help. DCDuring TALK 16:13, 7 February 2013 (UTC) Isn't the sense of "group of officers, generals, etc. in charge of issuing commands, directing a war effort, etc." (as in "high command") missing here? I don't see it in any of the senses listed in this entry. Should it be modified? --Pereru (talk) 09:10, 7 February 2013 (UTC) On page enig#Dutch, the audio file audio (file) seems to say "penig" instead of "enig". On the discussion page of enig, someone even heard "penis". So I'm not the only one to hear a "p". Or am I missing something? --MaEr (talk) 17:51, 7 February 2013 (UTC) I think the p you hear is just the sudden onset of the sound, which causes a pop. I do hear "enig". —CodeCat 17:57, 7 February 2013 (UTC) Through my cheap laptop speakers, I hear "penis" as well. Through a pair of good quality headphones, I hear "enig" with a strange beep in the middle. I think it's a bad quality recording, made worse by bad audio reproduction. The beep at the start, along with the pop CodeCat mentions, makes it sound like it starts with a "p", while the graininess turns the IPA: /x/-ish sound at the end into a sibilant. Smurrayinchester (talk) Definitely sounds like "penis" to me even through decent earphones. BigDom (t • c) 00:38, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I really don't hear an s there at all, I don't know why you hear it that way. I think the sound file is fairly clear. —CodeCat 00:44, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I hear /pinɪs/, too, when I use speakers, and /pinɪs/~/inɪs/ through headphones. I'll remove the file from the entry and put it on the talk page; if five out of six commenters hear /p~/ and four out of six hear /pinɪs/, the file is doing more harm than good. (That is, people who listen to it to learn the Dutch pronunciation of enig come away having learnt a wildly incorrect pronunciation 83-66% of the time.) - -sche (discuss) 09:55, 8 February 2013 (UTC) But how many of you are native speakers? I am and I think it sounds ok. —CodeCat 14:27, 8 February 2013 (UTC) How many native speakers need an audio file for pronunciation? I don't hear the "p", but I live on a very busy street, and it's rush hour- so my ear may be filtering it out along with the background noise. I think this may have something to do with categorical perception: our ear/brain divides up the spectrum of sounds differently, depending on the training it receives in learning language. An ambiguous sound would get nudged over into different categories depending on how our categories are set up. As a native speaker, your ear is trained to hearing the phonemes of your native language, so that's what you hear. I think we need a better audio file, both because it's not helpful to those who would actually need the help, and because it has mildly annoying extraneous screeches and pops in the background. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:48, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I also hear a pop, but I can see why people think it's a /p/. Better remove it since so many people are hearing it incorrectly. — Ungoliant (Falai) 17:04, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I've listed wheel as another meaning for אופן. It is used in this sense in e.g. אופניים (bicycle), אופנוח (recumbent, please add wovels and transliteration) and תלת אופן (tricycle), but still my English-Hebrew-English Oxford dictionary does not list this sense. I've found it only from milon.co.il searching for אופן. Can someone verify that this sense is correct, and maybe add some usage notes if it should not be used itself but only as part of other words? --Thv (talk) 09:24, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I don't have time to edit it now but I believe the wheel sense is ofán (rather than ófen as currently listed) and appears in Ezekiel's chariot prophecy.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Per Even-Shoshan: אופן ("way, etc.") is אופן \ אֹפֶן (ófen), whereas אופן ("wheel; wheel of fate, fate; an angel of a certain type; any of the piyutím recited before a holiday morning service") is אוֹפַן (ofán). It occurs in Isaiah 28:27 and Nahum 3:2. But yeah, I definitely agree that it's not nearly as common nowadays as גַּלְגַּל (galgál), at least in everyday speech. —RuakhTALK 15:32, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Not any of the poems: any of several of them. (I'm pretty sure of this, even if E-S says otherwise.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:53, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Yeah, sorry, I wrote that comment in some haste (I had only a minute or two before having to leave for work), and didn't read the defs as carefully as I should have. So, two corrections: (1) the sense that I gave as "wheel of fate, fate" is actually galgál hamazalót, [uv'hash'alá] kinúi lagorál "Zodiac, [and by extension] a term for fate"; and (2) the piyutím sense is actually kinúi lapiyutím hane'emarím bit'filát shakharít bakhagím lif'néi t'filát "v'ha'ofaním v'khayót hakódesh", "a term for the piyutím said in the holiday morning service before the prayer 'And the Wheels and the Holy Living Creatures'" (???). —RuakhTALK 08:55, 9 February 2013 (UTC) Re "???": yes, precisely, except that "v'haofaním v'chayót hakódesh" is probably better translated as "and the ofanim and the holy chayot": types of angels. The poem added to the morning service before "v'haofaním v'chayót hakódesh" is called an ofán; the one at "en elohím zulat'chá" is a zulát; and so on: they are named after where they're stuck into the prayers.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:36, 10 February 2013 (UTC) German Nominalization[edit] Many German Nominalizations are missing cause there is no uniform tag for nominalized forms (often there is reference in etymology). I looked in Category:Form of templates and there is no entry for that kind. Adjective example: every declined nominalized form of groß is missing: ein Großer (positive) einen Großen einem Großem ein Großes ein Größerer eine Größere (comperative) ein Größeres die Größte (superlative) ... The Nominalization of German verbs is often used in combination with prepositions (beim Sprechen) but right now only a few entries do exist (e.g. Laufen) And maybe the Nominalizations could talk part in the declension and conjugation tables in a new section. Greetings --Bigbossfarin (talk) 16:59, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I made a new form-of-template for nominalizations: Template:nominalization of --Bigbossfarin (talk) 18:54, 27 February 2013 (UTC) on Carryl's wordplay[edit] Good morning. Would be grateful to someone deigning to enlighten me on the meaning of the last part of this verse: The Inhuman Wolf and the Lamb Sans Gene There should be some wordplay involved, but I can't twig it. I cannot understand the possible pun in the last line, " The public bar-lamb's worst!". D'oh. (0: --CopperKettle (talk) 00:40, 10 February 2013 (UTC) The obvious candidate would be public parlance, but I don't really see the point to it. Maybe it would have made more sense in the usage of the day. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:32, 10 February 2013 (UTC) I guess it's meant to sound like baa-lamb, which for some reason we don't have an entry for, but I don't really get the pun to be honest. BigDom (t • c) 01:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC) I've run across a couple of passages in Google Books searches that seem to show "Bar lambs" as a nickname during that period for barristers- a play on baa and Bar. If true, that would make a whole lot of sense, since poking fun at lawyers has been a favorite pastime for centuries. Another, less plausible, possibility is the "Baa-Lamb School", a derisive nickname given to some poets associated with w:Charles Lamb. I haven't checked whether the time periods match up, but it doesn't ring true, anyway. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:25, 10 February 2013 (UTC) Ah, that'll be it. Just found these: "She had tried to win her father's attention and affection by writing A Bar Lamb's Ballad about his world of law"; and (another joke) "When George Lamb left the Bar to attend to his duties in the House of Commons, Poole remarked that he had ceased to be a Bar-Lamb, and had become a House-Lamb". Equinox ◑ 03:39, 10 February 2013 (UTC) I've found enough cites (here, here and here) to justify creating the entry for bar-lamb (though hyphenation is a problem). I also found cites for a second sense (here, here, and here), but maybe they should go in a bar lamb entry. I also added a baa-lamb entry, including a sense referring to submissive men that was used by w:P.G.Wodehouse. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:34, 10 February 2013 (UTC) What, by the way, is house lamb? I know I've seen it in Dickens. Might be a tender hay-fed lamb. Equinox ◑ 15:29, 10 February 2013 (UTC) From the OED, house lamb is "A lamb which, in order to ensure a tender meat, is reared in a building, typically fed on its mother's milk without being allowed out to graze, and slaughtered at between 6 and 10 weeks of age, traditionally in time for Christmas" or the meat of such a lamb. BigDom (t • c) 16:01, 10 February 2013 (UTC) (after edit conflict)"Then they let a Lamb go with its Ewe abroad grazing for a Month together at the End of which Time a Farmer would take such a Lamb into the House and suckle it as a House Lamb" [12]. It seems to be the counterpart of milk-fed veal- commercial production involved narrow pens under a roof that restricted movement in the same way as the crates that have been used in veal raising. It reminds me of the Han character for house, 家, which shows a pig under a roof. The pig part is apparently phonetic rather than semantic, but you can find references that claim otherwise. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:25, 10 February 2013 (UTC) I've been staring at it for ages and can't work it out. parlance doesn't work grammatically ("the public parlance worst"). Since the rest of the poem is hinting at the serving of lamb (with capers and sauce), perhaps it's just saying that the quality of meat served in bars tends to be awful? Equinox ◑ 01:56, 10 February 2013 (UTC) Maybe at the time, the possessive clitic 's was still assimulated to other words ending in an s-sound, so that it is really public parlance' worst? —CodeCat 02:11, 10 February 2013 (UTC) P.S. Wow, great job, thanks everybody! --CopperKettle (talk) 11:33, 11 February 2013 (UTC) superceded[edit] Since supercede is marked as a misspelling, shouldn't superceded be so marked also? SpinningSpark 16:43, 10 February 2013 (UTC) Yes and no. If a misspelling is also a headword, we generally don't mark its inflected forms as misspellings. After all, if superceded is a form of supercede and supercede is a misspelling, then that implies that all of its forms are misspellings, including superceded. —CodeCat 22:54, 10 February 2013 (UTC) I added a note. — Ungoliant (Falai) 23:00, 10 February 2013 (UTC) The pronuncuation looks a bit off to me, at least compared to the spelling. Should it have u instead of y? —CodeCat 20:23, 10 February 2013 (UTC) French Wiktionary has /byl do.zœʁ/ for bouldozeur but "/byl.do.zɛʁ/ ou /bul.do.zœʁ/" for bulldozer. Siuenti (talk) 22:36, 10 February 2013 (UTC) Pretty sure I just copied the pronunciation from the French entry bulldozer. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:59, 10 February 2013 (UTC) I've boldly added the "u" form, which is consistent with the spelling, but left the "y" version as an alternative. Siuenti (talk) 19:55, 11 February 2013 (UTC) Anyone know what a "spiffle" is? Gagul's inclusion in Category:wyi:Anatomy implies it's a body part (though the term for teardrop had also been included in that category...perhaps it's a typo for spittle?). - -sche (discuss) 22:32, 10 February 2013 (UTC) Got it here and here as a verb. It seems to mean to quickly scan a book or document. One more confirms it IT SHOULD BE THERE IN YOUR LIFE so that in your best creative moments you can spiffle through it for materials useful to your writing. May be connected to riffle. And here seems to mean to waste. And a few a I don't really understand: You see, first thing in the morning we have this spiffle- dish in the office about a high school teacher having eloped with his pupil This butter-base, herb indoctrinated chowder is a spiffle unorthodox One interjection Oh, spiffle! No body parts though. SpinningSpark 11:20, 11 February 2013 (UTC) Those two seem to mean "slight(ly)" 07:55, 14 February 2013 (UTC) However, I believe the author has mistyped spittle. This is the definition given in Handbook of Australian languages, Volume 4 (the page linked is discussing the correct language). SpinningSpark 11:46, 11 February 2013 (UTC) Great work sussing that out! Thanks for fixing [[gagul]]. I leave it to you to create [[spiffle#Verb]], if you like. - -sche (discuss) 22:07, 11 February 2013 (UTC) I started to do that, but then realised that all the citations were by, or quoting, the same poet (except the ones I don't understand) so I had it speedied as a probable neoligism that hasn't caught on. SpinningSpark 15:32, 15 February 2013 (UTC) Is "(aq)", complete with parenthesis, really the chemical abbreviation for "aqueous solution", or is it the case that the abbreviation is "aq", and it is merely set apart in parentheses, which would then not belong in the pagename? (Note that prior to my edits of last March, the entry looked like this.) - -sche (discuss) 07:59, 11 February 2013 (UTC) I imagine that the abbreviation is just aq, but that it is often used in brackets after the name of a substance. Also, it is probably medical rather than chemical in usage. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:10, 11 February 2013 (UTC) It's definitely chemical in usage (I'm currently in the third year of a chemistry degree and the abbreviation is used in chemical equations to denote the state of matter of each reagent) but I agree that the brackets aren't part of the abbreviation, they are just used to set it apart (although sometimes we just put "aq" as a subscript without brackets). Note that we also use (g) for gaseous, (l) for liquid, (s) for solid, etc. as well as (aq). BigDom (t • c) 08:27, 11 February 2013 (UTC) Tensometer-Tensiometer[edit] The definitions of tensometer and tensiometer here consider the two words to be interchangeable, is this correct? The articles at en wiki are now arranged so that w:Tensometer is exclusively an instrument for measuring tensile strength, while w:Tensiometer is now a disambiguation for one of two instruments one to measure surface tension and the second to measure the matric capacity in soil, with warnings on all pages not to confuse the three. In the related terms for tensiometer, tensiometry only refers to the measurement of surface tension. So is it a case that tensometer and tensiometer are interchangeable with no historical differences between the two save for personal preference, or is it a case that the two words are so similar that confused usage has led to the belief that they are the same.--KTo288 (talk) 20:45, 11 February 2013 (UTC) For anyone who is interested, I looked up my copy of the Concise OED and it has neither of these words but does have tensimeter.--KTo288 (talk) 13:37, 12 February 2013 (UTC) We might try to resolve this by finding three or so authors for each distinction. One might bet on tensiometer as being the best candidate to bear a distinct sense because of the extra syllable, assuming that it is pronounced, but that isn't supported by what other dictionaries say. DCDuring TALK 15:44, 12 February 2013 (UTC) Although I don't think that WP is complete, it does seem to have captured the most common uses reasonably well, if my reading of the current uses in Google Books is correct. There is some older use that I can't quite connect with the current definitions. Pictures might help a bit. DCDuring TALK 18:00, 12 February 2013 (UTC) What concerns me is not the usage which I think are correct but that the wiktionary entries for both consider them to be synonyms. The usage at wikipedia at the moment do not consider them to be synonyms. Its not my field so I don't know if this is just an easy way for Wikipedia to differentiate the topics or a true reflection of real world usage. For what its worth had a look at the OED in the local library, and the first form of the word is tensometer being described as a device to measure tensile strenght, tensiometer appears as avariant form of tensometer however the example used describes a device for measuring surface tension, not tensile strength. In other examples-the older uses you allude to?- tensiometer is used to describe an instrument to measure the deformation of a material due to temperature change; and in the context of textiles, a w:Tension meter. Personally I'm coming to the conclusion that lexicographically tensometers/tensimeter are devices that measure tension or use tension to measure regardless of the field.--KTo288 (talk) 20:45, 12 February 2013 (UTC) A standard way of measuring tensile strength is to measure strain. I believe that strain gauge/strain gauge is the same as or a correlative term of tensometer. In one class of uses, a tensimeter is used with a tensiometer (soil science sense). Also soil science is the principal, but not the only, field to measure the difference in vapor pressure using a tensiometer. DCDuring TALK 22:20, 12 February 2013 (UTC) Recently added as an apparent synonym for spiritualism (communicating with the dead), but described as a "religion". Should we just put it down as an alt form? Equinox ◑ 13:59, 12 February 2013 (UTC) Sounds like Spiritism. — Ungoliant (Falai) 17:24, 12 February 2013 (UTC) I notice that Spiritualism is usually capitalized in the corresponding WP article. In Google Books hits (using the phrase "of spiritualism was" to filter out book titles and sentence-initial position) it's written upper case almost as often as lower case (about 40/60 I'd say eyeballing it). —Angr 17:34, 12 February 2013 (UTC) The usage note says the spelling is Lèmbörgs, while the interwiki is called Limburgs, as does Limburgish Wikipedia, but the Limburgish Wiktionary calls it Lèmbörgsj. Something is not quite right here... —CodeCat 23:14, 12 February 2013 (UTC) Looks like there's no official spelling, much as in Low German Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 00:47, 13 February 2013 (UTC) No official spelling, indeed. And a dialect difference: the Eastern variants have an sj sound (IPA ʃ) where Western variants and Standard Dutch have s. --MaEr (talk) 18:49, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, there is no official uniform spelling. To get things straight: The four most common pronunciations are: /'lembœrxʃ/ (Lèmbörgsj) - /'lembœrxs/ (Lèmbörgs) - /'lɪmbœrxʃ/ (Limbörgsj) - /'lɪmbœrxs/ (Limbörgs). I'd say Lèmbörgs is by far the most common pronunciation, but because "è" and "i" are relatively close to eachother, and "è" is lacking in Dutch, "kitchen spellings" might use "i" for /e/. In the Veldeke spelling, which is used on Limburgish Wikipedia and most of the interface, it was decided to spell it Limburgs or Limburgsj, because people might find the ö strange-looking (a practise called "woordbeeld": the spelling should be as close to Dutch as possible). So, the conclusion, all three forms are correct, if they are not used in one text together :) --Ooswesthoesbes (talk) 09:59, 15 February 2013 (UTC) Until I edited it a moment ago, this has no context tags at all. I have tentatively added {{context|in right-wing discourse|offensive}}, but I solicit others' assessments. Is "offensive" too strong a word, should it be "pejorative"? - -sche (discuss) 03:51, 13 February 2013 (UTC) Not sure which sense you're referring to, but AFAIK abortionist for someone who performs abortions is not specific to right-wing discourse, pejorative, or offensive: it's simply the word for someone who performs abortions. Am I mistaken? (Or perhaps the use I describe is dated?)​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:50, 13 February 2013 (UTC) It seems plausible to me that in the sense "one who performs abortion", "abortionist" used to be neutral. Nowadays, I've only ever heard it used by partisan conservatives who think abortion is murder and often but not always mix it (the term) into various kinds of vitriol. I'm willing to be shown that my experience is incomplete and that neutral use is out there, though. Partisan conservative discourse is also the only place I've seen the "one who favours abortion being legal" sense. The term I think of as neutral for the first sense is "abortion provider". All terms for the second sense have some degree of bias in one direction or another, but the closest to neutral are "pro-choice [person]" (when used, e.g. by the news media, in conjunction with "pro-life [person]", such that the "loads" balance out) and "abortion-rights advocate" (which is, however, not precisely neutral but somewhat positively-loaded). - -sche (discuss) 07:34, 13 February 2013 (UTC) As I understood it, it's about tone and speaker. A bit like the difference between when a republican talks about "socialism" and when a... Swede (?) does. Furius (talk) 07:37, 13 February 2013 (UTC) I wouldn't accept the entry as it is now labelled without citations and I doubt that one could exclude it being used rather neutrally in current discourse, included newspapers and other media. I agree that abortion as a term in public discussion in the US is brought up mostly be those who view it as wrong and that few folks would label themselves as pro-abortion rather than using rights language. Abortionist, being a label of a person, is more likely to be used pejoratively than abortion. Outside the realm of political discourse abortion is basically neutral, though I'm not so sure about abortionist. What doctor would call himself an appendectomist? I would expect to find that someone who performs abortions uses a hypernym. Thus there may be much less neutral use of abortionist than of abortion. DCDuring TALK 14:16, 13 February 2013 (UTC) I've started adding citations to Citations:abortionist. The uses I detect are: (1) lots of pejorative use by partisan US conservatives for "one who performs a legal abortion", (2) some apparently neutral use to refer to "{{historical}} one who performs an illegal abortion", and (3) traces of use for "one who performs an abortion" in contexts that are apparently otherwise neutral. I am not yet satisfied that the term can, in fact, be used neutrally. My initial searches, which were simply for "abortionist", only turned up one citation of the "supporter of abortion being legal" sense; I'll try more specialized searches to find more uses of that sense. - -sche (discuss) 20:56, 13 February 2013 (UTC) IMO if a sizable minority of cites are neutral, or if there's a sizable minority each of positive and negative cites, then that shows that the word is neutral, and any use of it by partisans is use of a neutral word (just as those partisans use the for example). And that seems to be the case.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:46, 14 February 2013 (UTC) I'm not yet convinced that there is a "sizeable" minority of neutral use of the "one who performs abortion" sense. Even if there is, if a majority of the use is by right-wing partisans as a pejorative, I think that makes the word {{chiefly|in right-wing discourse|pejorative}} (or {{primarily|in right-wing discourse}}, if you prefer). I haven't seen any use of the "supporter of abortion being legal" sense except by partisan conservatives, and I can't accept that neutral use of that sense exists without proof. - -sche (discuss) 22:22, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Does anyone know what a neutral or euphemistic term for "one who performs abortions" is? If there is no such term, then abortionist would not seem any more pejorative than pickpocket or landlord. DCDuring TALK 23:04, 14 February 2013 (UTC) "abortion provider", as I wrote in my comment of 07:34, 13 February 2013 (UTC). - -sche (discuss) 23:17, 14 February 2013 (UTC) I have found that in medical literature the suffix -ist seems productive in forming neutral terms for the practitioner of a procedure. I was surprised to find appendectomist, less so to find arthroscopist. There is a mild tendency to use the terms so formed to refer pejoratively to someone who performs that procedure in cases where it is not needed. DCDuring TALK 23:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC) I think the entry as you had it is pretty accurate. I hadn't been paying much attention, but the word seems almost exclusively pejorative now. I have amended the context from "in right-wing discourse" to "in anti-abortion discourse". There might be better wording. DCDuring TALK 23:57, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Surgeons don't like being called "cutter," "sawbones," or "butcher," as gynecologists don't like being called "abortionist." I'm not equating the terms as pejoratives, but none is an accepted name for the profession. —Michael Z. 2013-02-14 23:58 z Why is this listed as a pejorative term? Isn't this just how people who steal items from stores are referred to? Boxieman (talk) 02:50, 14 February 2013 (UTC) The "pejorative" tag was added in 2006 by William Sayers; who knows why. I agree it should go. - -sche (discuss) 08:43, 14 February 2013 (UTC) I've removed it. It is the neutral term seen on many warning signs in shops, etc. Equinox ◑ 01:14, 16 February 2013 (UTC) I have cited an auditory sense of "to hoon", but I'm still not clear on what it means; certainly nowhere near clear enough to cite it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:00, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Are these really adjectives and not adverbs? --Æ&Œ (talk) 01:04, 16 February 2013 (UTC) No, they're adverbs. I wonder if they're really attestable, though. —Angr 08:08, 16 February 2013 (UTC) Perhaps I'm missing something, but this has left me scratching my hand head. It apparently means "-ness", but is also "not restricted to the suffix -ness"... so what does it really do, then? It is really an "abbreviation" or more of a "symbol"? This entry is very confusing and needs some attention. This, that and the other (talk) 09:26, 16 February 2013 (UTC) I think it means that it stands for the sequence "ness", and that sequence most commonly occurs as the suffix "-ness", but this glyph can stand for that sequence even if it occurs in e.g. the middle of the word inessive (where it even crosses a morpheme boundary). Many Braille glyphs can apparently be used in this way. - -sche (discuss) 09:53, 16 February 2013 (UTC) Yes. The Wikipedia article on English Braille should clarify. I had a lot of these to add, so I didn't spend much time on any one of them. kwami (talk) 20:05, 22 February 2013 (UTC) This is clearly borrowed from Dutch, but in Dutch the spelling of the word was changed to pannenkoek in 1995. Is the old spelling still the usual spelling in English? I imagine that at least a few people will have followed the spelling change in English, too. Also, the plural does reflect the new spelling, so that seems a bit odd. —CodeCat 19:32, 16 February 2013 (UTC) I would say that a recent spelling change causing a quick change in the English spelling would be evidence that it's not an English word at all.--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:26, 17 February 2013 (UTC) Is this really correct? I've just checked www.etymonline.com and www.dictionary.com, and I didn't find a reference to the "urine" meaning... --Pereru (talk) 02:02, 17 February 2013 (UTC) I'd learned that lant was the word used to describe urine collected by the nightsoil workers, which was treated as a resource as it was used extensively in processing wool and linen, among other things. Tweed still evokes allusions to smelling of wee in literature from the early half of the 20th century, for this very reason. C.f. here or the bottom of this page, under the Scouring Wool header. ... but perhaps that doesn't speak to your purpose? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:59, 17 February 2013 (UTC) Here's a book on Google Books that has a section on the word, and it closely matches our entry: [13]. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:36, 20 February 2013 (UTC) It's in Webster's 1913 but merely with the meaning 'urine', nothing about being aged or being used to flavor ale. What does the OED say? —Angr 08:50, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Here's a Google Books search that turned up several sources that discuss the lanting of ale: [14]. I think a better definition would be to add or apply lant: one could lant other things besides ale. Chuck Entz (talk) 09:03, 20 February 2013 (UTC) An anagram typo?[edit] As I was looking up furfuraceous today, I noticed an anagram, furfurcaeous, listed at the anagrams section. Thinking it odd that two words could be so similar, I clicked on furfurcaeous and discovered it had the same meaning as furfuraceous! Is this some sort of typo that got its own entry on Wiktionary? Jeremy Jigglypuff Jones (talk) 07:45, 18 February 2013 (UTC) furfurcaeous is a typo (added by an anon). I shall delete it. (Thanks for spotting it) SemperBlotto (talk) 08:09, 18 February 2013 (UTC) What is a pole?[edit] The newspapers and Internet are filled with stories about Danica Patrick winning "the pole" ([15], for example). I read three stories and none defined what the pole is. It seems to be equivalent to "the top position," but "winning the top position" doesn't quite make sense. The Wiktionary entry for pole doesn't cover this either. This article also says, "She and Gordon will each start on the pole in one of two 150-mile qualifying races on Thursday..." so it seems that "winning the pole" means "winning a position to start on the pole in the next race." So the pole seems to be an advantageous item to start on (next to?). It also seems that more than one person can start on it, but only one person can win it. Can someone who knows what the pole is add this meaning? --BB12 (talk) 20:34, 18 February 2013 (UTC) I don't follow auto racing, but I believe that's the pole position, which has to do with the arrangement of the cars at the start of the race. If I remember correctly, the order at start is determined by speed in the qualifying laps ^trials. I'm sure someone else will correct me and/or elaborate. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:45, 18 February 2013 (UTC) I've added the sense to pole. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:52, 18 February 2013 (UTC) Thank you. That clears it up a lot. My guess is that "She and Gordon will each start on the pole in one of two 150-mile qualifying races on Thursday" means that each will have the pole position in different races. I assume there is an actual pole, or was one at one time, which should be mentioned. Also, should "on the pole" be entered an idiom, or do they literally start on a pole? --BB12 (talk) 21:14, 18 February 2013 (UTC) The article at w:Pole position discusses that. The particular preposition used might render "on the pole" idiomatic, but the fact that there are multiple definitions of pole shouldn't. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:27, 18 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, "at" or "next" to the pole seem normal, "on" seems idiomatic. Also, "win the pole" means "win the right to start on the pole" not "win the pole per se." All afternoon, I've gone back and forth as to whether that's within the normal range of understanding. Does it need to be spelled out more clearly? --BB12 (talk) 01:13, 19 February 2013 (UTC) I think all the collocations follow from it being pole position. We have so many seriously defective entries that not being exhaustive seems less important to me. But, of course, we do what interests us or otherwise gives satisfaction. DCDuring TALK 15:36, 26 February 2013 (UTC) Is there an English word for terrain covered with boulders? See louhikko for a pic of the kind of terrain I mean. --Hekaheka (talk) 03:05, 19 February 2013 (UTC) I think that's technically termed a rogen moraine, although my glacial sedimentology is rather weak right now. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:32, 19 February 2013 (UTC) In Australia we often say, "you've been through the wars". It basically means the person has gone through something difficult, an ordeal. Is anyone else familiar with this slang? And how do we include it in Wiktionary? ---> Tooironic (talk) 10:36, 19 February 2013 (UTC) Very common in the UK. I would make an entry as Adverb "through the wars" and also "in the wars" including them in Category:English prepositional phrases -- ALGRIF talk 11:04, 19 February 2013 (UTC) Could someone do the honours? I'm not very confident with defining this particular idiom. ---> Tooironic (talk) 12:11, 28 February 2013 (UTC) butter becomes harder to spread[edit] Is there a word, in any language, for what unrefrigerated butter or peanut butter does in the winter, when it "thickens" due to the cold and becomes harder to spread? Maybe "thickens" is the closest word, in English. I thought Norse had a very specific word for it, but I can't find it in my dictionaries (though I did rediscover the SOP phrase þrífornt smjǫr ("butter that has been aged for three years")). - -sche (discuss) 07:04, 20 February 2013 (UTC) I would describe it as solidifying, hardening, or turning hard. I can't think of any more specialized term for it. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:24, 20 February 2013 (UTC) I can't say I've ever experienced peanut butter becoming harder to spread in the winter. As for butter, I'd just call it hardening. For molasses (do we have an entry for slow as molasses in January?) I'd just say it gets thicker or more viscous. —Angr 08:28, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Maybe it becomes unspreadable. SemperBlotto (talk) 09:23, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Personally, I would say stiffen rather than thicken. Equinox ◑ 10:38, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Butter is an emulsion of water in fat. The fat is a mixture of solid and liquid with a wide range of melting points. As it cools, different proportions of the fat phase solidify - this is what makes it more difficult to spread. So, perhaps solidify is a more precise description of what happens. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:44, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Isn't butter aged for three years rancid? DCDuring TALK 11:51, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Unless it's aged without exposure to air? DCDuring TALK 11:53, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Googling "aged butter" has revealed that it's a Moroccan delicacy called smen. I suppose that's سمن in Arabic. It's said to have . —Angr 12:25, 20 February 2013 (UTC) How about congeal?--KTo288 (talk) 02:49, 10 March 2013 (UTC) Hm, "stiffen" is probably the best term—thanks! I'm surprise "congeal" explicitly says "change from a liquid to solid state perhaps by cold"; perhaps it works, too. - -sche (discuss) 06:33, 10 March 2013 (UTC) When there is no one word that expresses exactly what you wish to say, you can use others figuratively to do so, anyway here are some others:-[[set], aged and matured, words used to describe what happens to concrete when it goes from being a slurry to a solid, and I've just noticed that aged is used in the title of one of the hyperlinks in the smen example above.--10:45, 10 March 2013 (UTC) @-sche: In the everyday sense of liquid, butter is not a liquid until it is heated to above even summertime temperatures (> 35C). Liquid butter is not "spreadable" in the ordinary. Ergo, congeal would not seem to apply to butter in the original question, which implied a bar or block of butter. It applies well to the solidification of liquified butter. DCDuring TALK 14:49, 10 March 2013 (UTC) Seven-level screwdriver[edit] In the US military, a "seven-level" is someone who has received a certain specific level of technical training. I have a bunch of citations for it, and plan to add that word. My question concerns the combined form "seven-level screwdriver". It's simply the well-known pocket 2.5-inch screwdriver with a straight, plastic handle, and it got the "seven-level" name because the seven-levels always carried one around. My question concerns whether "seven-level screwdriver" satisfies Wiktionary:Criteria_for_inclusion#Attestation. I know of its use in one novel, A Smuggler's Bible. Of the handful of academic works that discuss the book, one of them quotes the relevant sentence and then makes its own metaphor with "seven-level screwdriver". Does that second use qualify as independent? I have found one USENET posting with the term, and a few other online instances, maybe one that looks like it might have some permanence (the popular Air Force forums site). The three possibilities for attestation are (1) it's "clearly widespread" (in the military) (2) A Smuggler's Bible qualifies as a "well-known" work (3) the three citation requirement can be cobbled together from the above. Choor monster (talk) 15:07, 20 February 2013 (UTC) It might scrape through on the above. Why not start Citations:seven-level screwdriver? That can be used as a starting-point even if the word doesn't meet WT:CFI yet. Equinox ◑ 16:32, 20 February 2013 (UTC) I did not know we could do that! OK, done. I put in the two books, one USENET, and two forums that look they might have staying power. I'll wait for feedback if this qualifies for inclusion. As a side issue, in putting together seven-level citations, I noticed several references were self-published books by military guys whose life was presumably too boring for commercial publication. Are these allowed? I don't think we have any rule against self-published books, though they can be very sloppily written and I would not like to see them used to attest careless misspellings as "alternatives". I've found them useful in citing AAVE words. Equinox ◑ 17:36, 20 February 2013 (UTC) And as a second side issue, are individual meanings held to the attestation requirements? Urban dictionary (yes, I know) lists "seven-level" as short for "seven-level screwdriver", as in "pass me the seven-level". Choor monster (talk) 17:31, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, every sense needs three citations if challenged. An individual sense can be tagged with {{rfv-sense}}. Equinox ◑ 17:36, 20 February 2013 (UTC) OK, I've decided to be bold and I created the Entry, along with a Citations page. I've summarized my argument for it counting as attested, along with my doubts, on the Discussion page. Choor monster (talk) 22:24, 21 February 2013 (UTC) This was sometimes spelled optumus as well, because the middle syllable contained a vowel called sonus medius, which fell somewhere in between i and u. The pronunciation section currently says /i/ but that was certainly not true for the earlier period, where it was /ɨ/ or /ʉ/. Should this be changed or explained? —CodeCat 17:26, 22 February 2013 (UTC) We could create a template for Latin pronunciations with sonus medius, which displays something like "Possibly IPA: /ˈop.tɨ.mus/ or IPA: /ˈop.tʉ.mus/; see sonus medius." Or we could add ˈop.tⱵ.mus as a non-IPA pronunciation. — Ungoliant (Falai) 22:44, 23 February 2013 (UTC) I'd presume that the spelling optimus has the non-rounded variety, while optumus represents the rounded version? —CodeCat 22:55, 23 February 2013 (UTC) I think there was just one "sonus medius", which in earlier texts was sometimes spelled i and sometimes spelled u before the spellings settled down and became standardized. The problem is we don't know how rounded the sound was so we don't know whether ɨ or ʉ is the better way to transcribe it. I'd go with /ɨ/ just because /i - ɨ - u/ is typologically more common than /i - ʉ - u/, and at Appendix:Latin pronunciation we can explain that its precise degree of rounding is uncertain. —Angr 23:05, 23 February 2013 (UTC) Hmm, I always say ɨ, but that's probably because I have trouble saying ʉ correctly, and the fact that <i> was the spelling settled on suggests that it's more likely, as well as Angr's analysis. I really am no expert on saying things classically, maybe EncycloPetey could be arsed to put something together? Or we could just filch from 'pedia, their article isn't too shabby. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:12, 23 February 2013 (UTC) Wikipedia has good information about Latin itself, but it has no information at all about diachronic processes that affected the early stages of the language. The sonus medius is described merely as a fact but nothing is said in any detail about the vowel reduction that caused it. I think that is a shame because I am interested in that. —CodeCat 23:33, 23 February 2013 (UTC) The sonus medius could have been [y] too – Meiser (1998) assumes this. That would make sense because [y] is just rounded (due to the following labial consonant) [i], the phoneme which the neutral vowel Old Latin /ə/ (from any short Archaic Latin vowel in medial open syllables) was eventually identified with in most cases (but with /e/ in front of /r/ and with /u/ in front of [ɫ], but /o/ between a vowel and [ɫ], see w:History of Latin#Medial syllables). In any case, [ɨ] isn't rounded and therefore a quite unlikely candidate for the sonus medius, as it always appears in labial environments; it might have been a central vowel, but then certainly a rounded one such as [ʉ] or [ɵ]. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:33, 24 June 2013 (UTC) The usage notes say "Among people above 65 years old or so, the term doesn't tend to have an offensive meaning […] " This should probably be replaced with something non-numerical. Anyone here knows Danish? — Ungoliant (Falai) 00:59, 23 February 2013 (UTC) The usage note should probably be replaced with something well-referenced. This just sounds like "surely my grandpa didn't mean to offend those niggers when he called them that, he just grew up when people used that word". - -sche (discuss) 22:15, 23 February 2013 (UTC) Aren't we missing the sociological sense, ala, economic rationalization, the idea of seeing value only in things according to their economic value? ---> Tooironic (talk) 11:58, 23 February 2013 (UTC) I think it is bad lexicographic practice to try to have a meaning at [[rationalization]] for every meaning shown at [[rationalize]]. I don't think that it can be shown that rationalize has any meanings that don't have corresponding senses of rationalization and vice versa. Rationalization could have two definitions that reference each of the senses of rationalize: (uncountable) The process of rationalizing." and "(countable) An instance of rationalizing." That would lead to an expanded entry for rationalization that has twice as many definitions as [[rationalize]], which has four. (Other dictionaries have as many as seven.) DCDuring TALK 13:56, 23 February 2013 (UTC) I've added scope dope with five citations. Two of them are from somewhat famous sources The Mote in God's Eye and Failure is Not an Option. However, I cite to later paperback editions, as provided by Google, and obviously would prefer citations to the first editions (1974 and 2000, respectively). If you can confirm, along with a page number, that would be appeciated! Choor monster (talk) 19:27, 24 February 2013 (UTC) "Adverb" With a comparative, and often with for it, indicates a result more like said comparative. This can be negated with none. It was a difficult time, but I'm the wiser for it. It was a difficult time, and I'm none the wiser for it. I'm much the wiser for having had a difficult time like that. This doesn't seem the least bit adverbial to be. It just seems to me to be the as a determiner in a "fused-head construction". In the first and third usage examples one could insert person or one after wiser. In the second the "one" appears as part of none. Could anyone explain the choice of "adverb" here except as "not elsewhere classified"? DCDuring TALK 23:00, 24 February 2013 (UTC) But if these were fused head constructions, they'd be definite, and it's more idiomatic to use an indefinite noun phrase here. I wouldn't say "I'm the wiser person for it" or "I'm much the wiser person for having had a difficult time", I'd say "a wiser person". And of course you can't do it in the second sentence (*"none the wiser person") at all. I think this is basically the same the as in sense 1 of the adverb. —Angr 12:01, 25 February 2013 (UTC) This is a tricky expression, IMO. used to#Etymology 2 had been presented as a Verb, representing the "imperfect tense". I think this was wrong. The essence of this expression is past habitual or repeated (but not continuous) action. It is ambiguous as to whether the action or habit has been terminated in the sense that although the implication is that it has been terminated (ie, perfect), it is rebuttable. One can say both "I used to smoke and I still do." and "I used to smoke, but I stopped" and they are both consistent with "I used to smoke." However, I think it is the use of "I" in the examples that makes for this implication. If I say "He used to smoke.", then the possibility/likelihood is that I don't have certain knowledge of the current state of his smoking habit. If this analysis is correct, than the translations which are premised on the sense of incompletion are wrong. I think that this can also be viewed as a modal adverb of aspect rather than a modal verb of aspect, though its interaction with "didn't" might be deemed to pull it into the verb word class. It is a bit simpler to consider it an adverb, IMO. DCDuring TALK 14:18, 25 February 2013 (UTC) I find the affirmation that this is an adverb difficult to maintain. It appears to be more your personal opinion (prescriptive), rather than the general opinion (descriptive) which holds it to be a defective verb. I would like to see it changed back to being a verb until the collective opinion decides differently. If you wouldn't mind. Thanks. -- ALGRIF talk 14:41, 28 February 2013 (UTC) The presentation has nothing whatsoever to do with prescriptiveness as to usage. No assertion as to how this expression ought to be used was in any contribution of mine. The issue is which of two descriptions best describes the term, neither of which were in the previous version, which seemed simply wrong. If it is to be presented as a verb, I'd like to see it corrected to the habitual aspect rather than merely reverted. As a verb or non-constituent (depending on your view of where to belongs) it is close to the utmost point of being defective, having only a single form for many speakers and at most two, the other being use to (not the lemma in other dictionaries, only used with "did" by some speakers). I was originally tempted to put it in RfC, but that simply defers dealing with the issues for the prior version, which include: two translation tables for one sense, a claim that used to is "imperfect tense", when it is centrally past tense, habitual (or iterative or continuous) aspect, and glosses as an adverb. I brought it this forum to attract some attention, which seems to be scarce these days. DCDuring TALK 15:08, 28 February 2013 (UTC) I've never heard or read anybody describe "used to" as an adverb. How would that be justified? Not only is it a verb etymologically, but it's also used like a verb with a following infinitive... I don't know, I'm not an expert in English grammar, but I see no justification for it being an adverb. —This comment was unsigned. I don't much care about the part of speech, but I do care about it not being mischaracterized as mentioned above. Dictionaries that include it don't characterize it grammatically. DCDuring TALK 23:05, 6 May 2013 (UTC) Schadenfreude[edit] The German word Schadenfreude is listed as having no plural form. As a compound word, its second component, the German word Freude has indeed a plural form: Freuden. So, shouldn't the plural of Schadenfreude be Schadenfreuden? —This unsigned comment was added by Wmanowski3 (talk • contribs). No. Many German compound nouns are uncountable despite being formed from countable parts. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:47, 25 February 2013 (UTC) Nevertheless, a b.g.c. search reveals that the plural is sometimes, if rarely, used—mostly in older texts, but occasionally ([16], [17]) in newer ones. —Angr 16:02, 25 February 2013 (UTC) In German Wiktionary Schadenfreude [18] is a singular-only word. --Hekaheka (talk) 19:09, 25 February 2013 (UTC) One could form a plural Schadenfreuden in the sense of "different kinds of malicious joy". Colloquially that might be possible, but it's not really part of the language, certainly not the standard language. I agree that no plural form should be listed. This revision added an etymology from Cornish for the nickname sense. Nadando is not active so I can't ask him. This seems implausible. Can anyone find a source for it and assess the evidence? DCDuring TALK 23:41, 25 February 2013 (UTC) Apparently Nadando accidentally locked himself out of his account a while back, and has returned as DTLHS (talk • contribs). His latest edit was 5 days ago. There would have to be some good evidence pointing to a Cornish origin, because derivation from one of the other etymologies of handle seems quite plausible, so Occam's razor would argue against looking any further. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:25, 26 February 2013 (UTC) I forgot about the lockout and new identity. I haven't found any OneLook source that mentions the Cornish possibility, either. It struck me as preposterous, but sometimes I get surprised. DCDuring TALK 04:34, 26 February 2013 (UTC) quote for immiseration and immiserate[edit] I'd like to add quotes to immiseration and immiserate but I'm having a hard time finding quotes that are good examples of the usage. Can someone help me? Thank you. RJFJR (talk) 01:06, 26 February 2013 (UTC) 'inversal' a synonym for inversion ?[edit] I have always used the word 'inversal' as a substitute or synonym for 'inversion'; is this an acceptable word in English, since reversal is derived from reverse/revert; similarly, logic dictates that inverse/invert apply to 'inversal'.MI Apparently so (e.g. Royal Society Edinburgh, 1849, "the inversal of the law"), but it's very rare and mostly a mistake by non-native speakers, I would say. English isn't based on what logic dictates! Equinox ◑ 14:21, 26 February 2013 (UTC) ... so rare that even the big OED doesn't recognise the word ("conversal" and "perversal" aren't words either). Eight hundred years ago, Anglo-Norman had both "reversioun" and "reversaill". "Reversion" was adopted into English first, but "reversal" crept into legal usage around 1490 according to the OED. Would that English were logical! Dbfirs 22:49, 27 February 2013 (UTC) Is "antidisconstitutionalisationism" a legitimate word in english ?[edit] A very smart friend in 5th grade Primary school bragged that he knew the longest word in the English language; " antidisestablishmentarianism" (28 letters), so being very competative at least, I thought for a few seconds and came up with this 'real' sounding word: "antidisconstitutionalisationism" (31 letters); I thought I had him stumped ! What do the experts say !? Shakespeare said: "Enlish is as it is spoken".MI Nope. Zero real hits on Google book search. (p.s. Shakespeare does not seem to be a contributor to the English Wiktionary) SemperBlotto (talk) 15:03, 26 February 2013 (UTC) Our entry at stairs has the pronunciation "(RP) IPA: /ˈstɛəs/ Rhymes: -ɛə(r)s". I've never heard this pronunciation in the northern half of the UK, but I don't really speak RP, so could I ask if the unvoiced sibilant is standard in "BBC English"? Maybe I just haven't been listening carefully. Dbfirs 08:39, 28 February 2013 (UTC) This is the pronunciation given in the OED, but I agree with you that it's definitely not the way we pronounce it up north. BigDom (t • c) 12:22, 28 February 2013 (UTC) Yes, I know the difference between northern and RP vowels (and I can reproduce both), but I looked in the big OED and it doesn't give the pronunciation of the plural. I don't think I've ever heard the "s" of the plural pronounced unvoiced. Dbfirs 12:44, 28 February 2013 (UTC) So it doesn't, I was only looking quickly earlier and thought I'd seen it. Should definitely be a voiced sibilant at the end IMO. BigDom (t • c) 12:51, 28 February 2013 (UTC) That's what I thought. The pronunciation that we believe to be faulty was added some time ago by a regular American contributor, who, for all I know, might speak perfect RP, so I thought I'd better check before correcting the error. Can any other speakers of RP confirm that stairs does not rhyme (almost) with scarce? Dbfirs 12:57, 28 February 2013 (UTC) It does not. Should be a /z/. Ƿidsiþ 13:32, 28 February 2013 (UTC) Thanks. I've corrected the entry and the rhyme page. I was almost sure that RP matched the normal British pronunciation, but I thought I'd better check because the strange claim had been in the entry for so long. Dbfirs 16:34, 28 February 2013 (UTC) OROLOGION - THE CORRECT ETOIMOLOGY[edit] OROLOGION is NOT an Italian word and is nit a derivative of orologium. In fact it is the reverse Orologion is a Greek word it is comoprised by two words put together ORA it means "Hour" which nothing else but an Anglicised Greek word LOGION Another Greek word meaning "Telling" So orologion means someth9ing that "Tells the Hour" - Watch or Clock It would be more correct if Wiktionary checks the entries with professionals unsigned comment by 176.58.177.91 12:24, 28 February 2013 (UTC)‎ We don't have any entry for orologion so it's difficult to know what you're talking about. Ƿidsiþ 12:28, 28 February 2013 (UTC) There's that, and the most entirely misses the point, a word can come to a language via another language. It's a bit like saying stigma is not an English word or a Latin word, it is a Greek word. Put simply, it is all of these. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:37, 28 February 2013 (UTC) See orologio. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:56, 28 February 2013 (UTC) As far as I know, Latin second declension words normally end up with -o in Italian, so a word with -on would probably be directly from Greek without Latin as an intermediate. —CodeCat 17:10, 1 March 2013 (UTC) The absence of an "h" makes me think this might be about the Modern Greek term, which we also don't have an entry for. The English terms, as well as the Latin and Ancient Greek, all have an "h" or (or the rough breathing in Ancient Greek, which is the same). Confusing matters further, there's the constellation Horologium, which was named by a French astronomer in the 18th century, and which is called by the name in question in Greek, and there's a Greek liturgical book, also with the same name. I really wonder where they saw the etymology they're talking about- I can't seem to find anything remotely like it on Wiktionary or elsewhere. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:11, 1 March 2013 (UTC) According to the Vocabula amatoria: a French-English glossary of words, phrases, and allusions occurring in the works of Rabelais, Voltaire, Molière, Rousseau, Béranger, Zola, and others, with English equivalents and synonyms, an 1896 privately printed dictionary, there are sexual senses to various French words like joueur and jouet and phrases like beau joueur de quilles. I have no idea if these are obsolete or fanciful. A quick look at the French Wiktionary revealed nobody there knows about these meanings either. This is completely over my head. Choor monster (talk) 19:43, 28 February 2013 (UTC) jouissance means orgasm. Equinox ◑ 21:52, 28 February 2013 (UTC) It's from jouir not jouer, and I don't think they're etymologically related. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:24, 10 March 2013 (UTC) I see "right" has been given IPA|/ɹaɪ̯t/ as pronunciation. Not IPA|/ɹaɪt/ ?? -- ALGRIF talk 14:23, 1 March 2013 (UTC) I'm not sure what the /ɪ̯/ is intended to indicate, but it contradicts the three homophones and the rhyme. Dbfirs 16:57, 1 March 2013 (UTC) It means that it isn't syllabic, so it just emphasizes the fact that it's a falling diphthong and not a rising one. —CodeCat 17:03, 1 March 2013 (UTC) Thanks. If it were syllabic, there would be a syllable separator wouldn't there? Is there a policy on which IPA symbols to use? I find the basic ones sufficiently confusing for my limited understanding. Dbfirs 09:13, 2 March 2013 (UTC) I don't know if it's Policy™, but it's certainly a good idea to follow the symbols on Appendix:English pronunciation, making it /ɹaɪt/. Thanks Angr. I can't find /ɪ̯/ in that article or in any of the linked articles. I can pronounce /ɹaɪt/ with either a falling or (for a question) a rising dipthong, and I've heard it as two syllables (for another variant meaning in the UK), so I support your change back to match the stated rhyme. I think that trying to include every possible variant accent doesn't improve the entry for most users. Dbfirs 08:17, 4 March 2013 (UTC) I'm not sure you have the right idea about the difference between falling and rising diphthongs: it's not a matter of pitch, per se. A falling diphthong starts with the main vowel part and ends with the semivowel part, while a rising diphthong starts with the semivowel part and ends with the vowel part. English seems not to like rising diphthongs- the only examples I can think of are in other languages. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:44, 4 March 2013 (UTC) Yes, thanks for the gentle correction. I had misunderstood CodeCat's comment. Dbfirs 20:10, 4 March 2013 (UTC) Yeah, the only English arguably-single-phoneme rising diphthong that I can think of is /ju/, as in "use", "pure", "few", "mule", etc. —RuakhTALK 15:54, 4 March 2013 (UTC) I think a good example of the difference is -uo- which is rising /u̯o/ in Italian but falling /uo̯/ in Finnish. —CodeCat 16:58, 4 March 2013 (UTC) Policy on misspellings?[edit] I have found multiple CFI citations for sabreuer, a misspelling of sabreur. I see that certain notorious misspellings, like supercede, have their own entry, but I assume that in general this is not appropriate. I also found two citations for beau sabreuer. Notably, one citation anglicized the plural of the compound term: beau sabreuers, without the -x. Suggestions? Choor monster (talk) 17:05, 1 March 2013 (UTC) We have {{misspelling of|example}} which yields: Common misspelling of example.. What we don't have is an explicit standard for inclusion or exclusion. Mere attestability is not good enough because it is easy to find three examples of many, many misspellings, so that we might have more misspelling entries than entries for the correctly spelled words. A "common" misspelling is presumably: attestable, common relative to the correctly spelled term, common enough in absolute terms to likely to cause users to look the term up, but not so common as to be considered an alternative form (ie, not an error), not intentionally produced so as to simulate a dialectal pronunciation, and not produced by mechanical-type errors, ie, scannos. How do the facts of this term fit these proto-criteria? DCDuring TALK 17:51, 1 March 2013 (UTC) What DCDuring said, no policy just one help page; Help:Misspellings. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:02, 1 March 2013 (UTC) Thanks, but the Help page is mostly for what to do when the misspelling has an entry (like calender) because the misspelling actually means something, in English or some other language. I'm assuming adding a new entry is not appropriate here, as misspellings are everywhere, but this example does have linguistic issues. (OK, maybe all misspellings have linguistic issues.) The ending -eur has been anglicized: see talk page for four misspelled citations, two with -euer and two with -uer. I note that some words don't bother mentioning their common misspellings (eg, misspelling, while some give a Usage note calendar. Is a "Usage note: Some authors have anglicized the spelling as sabruer or sabreuer." helpful or presumptuous? Should I just delete these citations? Choor monster (talk) 19:44, 1 March 2013 (UTC) Hi! What's means the word "turn-taking" please? V!v£ l@ Rosière /Whisper…/ 00:20, 2 March 2013 (UTC) It is about the same as take turns/taking turns. DCDuring TALK 00:25, 2 March 2013 (UTC) Turn-taking can be used "attributively", like an adjective: Under Malaysia's turn-taking political tradition, whoever wins the post will be next in line for the nation's top job as head of the ruling coalition Turn-taking as a countable noun seems to mostly be used in social science discussion of dialog, referring to the alternation of speaking from one participant to the other. One can also find taking of turns. DCDuring TALK 01:13, 2 March 2013 (UTC) Thank you very much it's was the 2nd definition I looked for. V!v£ l@ Rosière /Whisper…/ 03:31, 2 March 2013 (UTC) Surely uncountable? I have expanded the gloss (adequate > more than adequate), which surely suffered from English understatement? — Saltmarshαπάντηση 07:28, 2 March 2013 (UTC) One can find instances of both countable and uncountable use of the noun. Neither is common and both seem "literary". I agree that plenty is not synonymous with adequate or enough. It denotes more. Perhaps the contributor was focused on the use of the word in circumstances where polite hospitality requires that an invitee be reassured that, magically, his consumption does not deprive anyone else of anything. I don't think that this is a feature of the lexical meaning of the term. I have RfDed the pronoun, which seems redundant to the noun. DCDuring TALK 12:24, 2 March 2013 (UTC) These both mean "crazy about". I'm not really sure what part of speech they should have, though. dol op is currently marked as an adjective, but it doesn't really seem like an adjective because it can't stand on its own. It has to modify something else, just like "crazy about" does. On the other hand, a phrase consisting of "dol op" and a noun is an adjective phrase, so it seems like this is kind of an incomplete adjective phrase, kind of like how prepositions are incomplete adverbial phrases. Is there such a thing as a prepositional adjective? —CodeCat 15:09, 2 March 2013 (UTC) It's just an adjective plus a preposition as dol can stand on its own (I presume?). I'd probably mark it as a phrase? Jamesjiao → T ◊ C 20:27, 2 March 2013 (UTC) Yes, they are composed of an adjective, combined with a prepositional phrase. However, it's not "gek" or "dol" by themselves that are idiomatic in this case, but the whole phrase "gek/dol op (something)". —CodeCat 20:31, 2 March 2013 (UTC) This reminds me of verbs with a "semi-fix" preposition, like "denken aan", "kijken naar", and phrases like "woedend zijn op iemand", "gesteld zijn op iets of iemand". I would say that "gek", "dol", "verzot" (and whatever) are adjectives, and they require a certain preposition in order to function correctly. This could be mentioned in the usage notes or in the usage examples. The whole phrase would be "dol zijn op" (etc) because the verb "zijn" seems to be required. --MaEr (talk) 12:15, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Except that it's not required. Any copula will do: zij blijft nog altijd gek op haar "she remains, as always, crazy about her". That is what makes this an adjectival phrase and not just a verb combined with some extra words. Syntactically, a phrase like is gek op chocolade would be parsed like (is (gek (op chocolade))) or like ((is gek) (op chocolade)), but not (is (gek op (chocolade))), so "op" is more like a preposition than something that belongs to "gek". The same applies to "denken aan" and "kijken naar", but those are verb+adverb combinations rather than copula+adjective. English has plenty of cases like this too... crazy about itself is, but we don't have an entry for that. We do have think about and look at, but we lack fond of and angry with. Yet I don't think that anyone would doubt that the chosen preposition in cases like these is more or less fixed, or else it's chosen from only a limited amount of possibilities. So it is certainly idiomatic to some degree. —CodeCat 19:56, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Whats the antonym of moral high ground ? Pass a Method (talk) 19:00, 2 March 2013 (UTC) Moral low ground [19]. Equinox ◑ 19:02, 2 March 2013 (UTC) Cesspool of iniquity, mire of corruption, lowest comon denominator, legislature. DCDuring TALK 19:58, 2 March 2013 (UTC) legislature is not an antonym of moral high ground. Pass a Method (talk) 11:30, 3 March 2013 (UTC) You obviously haven't hung around too many legislatures.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:52, 4 March 2013 (UTC) Adjective meaning "caused by a reflex"[edit] Is there an adjective in English that means "caused by a reflex"? For example, when you jerk your hand away from a hot stove, it happens automatically, that action is .... I thought it would be reflexive, but that entry doesn't have any definition like that. —CodeCat 20:07, 2 March 2013 (UTC) It's "reflexive", our entry is just missing both the literal (a reflexive jump back from the massive spider) and figurative (a reflexive lurch to the ring wing of the political spectrum) "caused by reflex" senses. - -sche (discuss) 20:13, 2 March 2013 (UTC) I added two more definitions. Feel free to improve. A userex for the figurative definition will be appreciated. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C 20:24, 2 March 2013 (UTC) In addition, reflex is used attributively. And there are automatic, spontaneous, and involuntary for different aspects. I note that there is usage in BNC (probably US, too) of reflexive meaning "reflective" or "reflecting", both literally(!) and figuratively. DCDuring TALK 21:01, 2 March 2013 (UTC) Which definition does the use of the highlighted as in this passage belong to?[edit] I meant to give each of you some of this to take with you," said she, "but as there is so little toast, you must have it now," and she proceeded to cut slices with a generous hand. We feasted that evening as on nectar and ambrosia; and not the least delight of the entertainment was the smile of gratification with which our hostess regarded us, as we satisfied our famished appetites on the delicate fare she liberally supplied. — Jane Eyre Chapter 8. Can't for the life of me figure out what this as is doing here. To me, the sentence is perfectly fine without it. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C 07:39, 3 March 2013 (UTC) "as" in that sentence is an elision or at least a synonym of "as if", "as though". I think that means it's the sense "introducing a comparison with a hypothetical state", which was tagged {{obsolete}}, but which I just changed to {{dated}} because I think it can still be used (and certainly, can still be understood, which makes it {{archaic}} at worst). - -sche (discuss) 07:49, 3 March 2013 (UTC) I dunno; the quotations under that sense use it in a way that genuinely seems obsolete to me, whereas Eyre's usage strikes me as merely literary or slightly archaic. I think the key difference is that the former use it with an irrealis clause ("as he were" = "as though he were"), whereas the latter uses it with just a prepositional phrase (after some sort of ellipsis, presumably). "walked as in a dream" sounds O.K. to me, too. But maybe it's the same sense, but over time it's just picked up some more syntactic restrictions? —RuakhTALK 08:48, 3 March 2013 (UTC) I am having the same problem trying to work out the difference. Clearly when followed by a full clause, it's obsolete (Coleridge, 'He looks as he had seen a ghost' – that doesn't fly anymore), but Austen's use with a prepositional phrase seems rather different and much more natural (though archaic) in modern English. But the OED doesn't seem to make a distinction and I can't pin it down. Ƿidsiþ 08:57, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Maybe it has something to do with the narrowing of acceptable subjunctive use, rather than with the nature of "as" itself. Perhaps the presence of a verb in the subjunctive requires the "if" to be explicit rather than implicit. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:57, 4 March 2013 (UTC) I don't see that the sense is even dated. I looked at COCA for as followed by on and found the following, which is almost identical in structure: "Newspapers and magazines would load their graphics, and you could doodle as on the Sony Reader Daily Edition." One might not speak it, but it seems fine to write it. DCDuring TALK 12:45, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Hmm. That example seems less counterfactual to me. —RuakhTALK 19:43, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Is there an essential difference, as, perhaps, the comma? DCDuring TALK 21:12, 3 March 2013 (UTC) I think the as if line of thought seems to fit this the best. We could further expand the sentence to this: We feasted that evening as though we were feasting/as if we would on nectar and ambrosia.. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C 02:32, 4 March 2013 (UTC) That's not quite right: it's "as though we were feasting"/"as if we were feasting"/"as we would" (not *"as if we would"). —RuakhTALK 06:00, 4 March 2013 (UTC) I removed a rather-badly-worded reference in the waltz Matilda etymology to the phrase auf der Walz, but would like to put it back- in a more useful form. The term refers to the years journeymen (in traditional practice) travel around to work for more experienced craftspeople before they can set up shop on their own. If I understand my old Duden correctly, Walz is a variant of Walze, in a sense we don't have. We also don't have Wanderjahre, the name for those years (or the corresponding singular Wanderjahr)- though we have English wanderjahr and its rather un-English plural wanderjahre. I would like to get rid of all the redlinks in the above, and tie all the relevant entries together. Any thoughts? Chuck Entz (talk) 02:44, 4 March 2013 (UTC) grammar[edit] Is the following sentence grammatically correct? "Some analysts have described Cain, son of Adam and Eve, relationship with his sister to be incestuous." Shoud it be reworded? Pass a Method (talk) 17:57, 4 March 2013 (UTC) It's wrong. It seems to mean "Cain's", but the "'s" has been removed without reason. How about: "the relationship of Cain (the son of Adam and Eve) with his sister"? Equinox ◑ 18:30, 4 March 2013 (UTC) Also "describe to be" is not nearly as good as "describe as". Thus: Some analysts have described the relationship of Cain, son of Adam and Eve, with his sister as incestuous. As incestuous could be move to after described. Relationship of Cain could be replaced with Cain's relationship. DCDuring TALK 19:52, 4 March 2013 (UTC) Creation for the meaning/origin/language of "-bole"[edit] Please further define the root(?) of hyper-"bole". "Bole" has no sub-definition in your reference as of yet. From which language does this originate? Thank you. I think it is from the Greek "βάλλειν" (to throw), via "ὑπερβολή" (excess) but I expect an expert will be along soon to give a more erudite answer. Dbfirs 08:54, 5 March 2013 (UTC) SemperBlotto automated reversions on -gasm[edit] Hello, I want to report proof and evidence that admin SemperBlotto is running a script to revert some IP contributions without actually checking the edits: The suffix page -gasm missed a link to its derived-terms category, so I added it (as well as a one-line example) with my complete addition provided as the edit summary: [20] The article for orgasm had no link to its own suffix -gasm, so just I added it with my complete addition as edit summary: [21] Yet both have been immediately reverted[22][23] by SemperBlotto with an automatic message, despite the fact they were cleary normal edits with clear edit summaries. He just undid all my edits at once. It's anti-wiki and hypocrite to claim "anyone can edit" while running some automated reverting of anon editors. 62.147.26.218 13:07, 5 March 2013 (UTC) I can't decide whether to take this seriously, but here goes. SemperBlotto isn't a bot he's just rather fast. If you look at the edit history, he reverted three minutes after you edited. But it is a bad revert and I'll re-revert. PS the idea that anyone can edit also means editors can undo others' edits. There's nothing contradictory about this, otherwise we'd get vandalized and be 'forced' to keep it. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:48, 5 March 2013 (UTC) I can see why SB reverted, though: the "Derived terms" isn't the problem so much as the "An eyegasm. A nerdgasm. " part. I think it would have been better to have removed that part than doing a wholesale amputation of the edit, but that's a judgment call. Likewise, it's a philosophical question as to whether a combining form should be listed under "Derived terms", or under some other header. As for the -gasm entry itself, I'm tempted to rfd it, since the examples arguably could be analyzed as blends rather than addition of a suffix. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:25, 5 March 2013 (UTC) See Citations:Wikinews. I can't tell if WT:BRAND has been respected. Choor monster (talk) 22:13, 5 March 2013 (UTC) The Usenet & Kissing cites fail "The text preceding and surrounding the citation must not identify the product or service to which the brand name applies" by including Wikinews URLs. The Kaye cite looks okay AFAICT.​—msh210℠ (talk) 04:40, 10 March 2013 (UTC) Personally, I don't think of a link as "text", but "formatting". Choor monster (talk) 18:12, 15 March 2013 (UTC) Don't *nom. of >ille, >illa, >illud, etc. belong here?[24]. It's much work to add them and their nonmasculine reflexes. Lysdexia (talk) 01:41, 6 March 2013 (UTC) That book is over 100 years old. Do you have anything more up to date? —CodeCat 01:45, 6 March 2013 (UTC) Wallace Martin Lindsay, The Latin language: an historical account of Latin sounds, stems and flexions (1894), Claredon Press, Oxford. 660pp.: the above Charles Edwin Bennett, The Latin language: a historical outline of its sounds, inflections, and syntax (1907), Allyn and Bacon, Boston. 258pp.: also says demonstratives hV- < *sV. Wallace Martin Lindsay, A short historical Latin grammar (1915), Claredon Press, Oxford, 224pp.: OL sam/sos/sum Philip Baldi, Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 117: The Foundations of Latin (1998), Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. 539pp: "This pronoun is not represented in any full Latin paradigm"; but calls sum/sam/sos/sas, si/sic, tum/tam. Carlos Quiles and Fernando López Menchero, A Grammar of Modern Indo-European (2011), Indo-European Language Association, Spain. 522 pp.: acc. into -t- demonstratives Lysdexia (talk) 07:47, 17 March 2013 (UTC) There are currently entries for licenced, licenced victualler, and licenced victuallers. These are incorrect. Even in British English (which uses licence as a noun) the verb form is license and so the participle is licensed in all forms of English. Consider: Wikipedia:Federation of Licensed Victuallers Associations for example. (I'd "Be Bold" and change it myself, but I've not edited Wiktionary before and so am unfamiliar with the appropriate process to follow.) -Stelio (talk) 10:40, 6 March 2013 (UTC) Would the correct move to be to add Category:English misspellings and reformat as per wierd etc.? -Stelio (talk) 10:45, 6 March 2013 (UTC) Thanks for spotting that. Fixed. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:49, 6 March 2013 (UTC) I watched your flying work in recent changes. :-) Thank you for the quick and efficient response! Should the "licenced" pages be marked as common misspellings too? (I see there is some related discussion on Talk:licence.) -Stelio (talk) 11:05, 6 March 2013 (UTC) Its here on the wikitionary, but nowhere else. In a sentence, "He presenced the fall of a nation." meaning was there for, also implying observed directly. It's a real word, right? —This comment was unsigned. Your sentence is not right. To presence is to make present, to cause to appear. It isn't to be present. Equinox ◑ 09:13, 7 March 2013 (UTC) But the word, the verb is real? It just doesn't show up anywhere else but here. Thanks for clearing up the meaning, at any rate. —This comment was unsigned. I wouldn't use it with any definition. We don't have even have three citations for it. Our sole citation shows it used in a philosophy book, about Heidegger yet. Two conventional expressions for the intent of your sentence would be: "He was present at the fall of a nation" or "He witnessed firsthand the fall of a nation." DCDuring TALK 22:32, 7 March 2013 (UTC) The verb was added by long-term editor and admin Beobach972 in November 2011. The verb is certainly very rare, and I would be inclined to mark it as "only in ..." (but I'm not sure what -- philosophy perhaps?). There's another clear use in Intersubjective Temporality: It's About Time" by Lanei M. Rodemeye (2006) "Temporalizing consciousness, however, is not only made up of the activity of presencing described above. Those retained experiences that are "flowing away" from what is being immediately presenced do not simply disappear ..." I hope you understand it better than I do! Dbfirs 12:50, 8 March 2013 (UTC) {{rare}} indeed. I'm suspicious of the existence of attestable consistent meanings for presenced or presence#Verb rather than serial nonce use, in different "senses". A great deal of philosophical and spiritual writing seems to make a point using nonce coinages to suggest that they are putting words on the near-ineffable, perhaps for the first time. With a more technical term in philosophy, as with technical terms elsewhere, it may be hard to determine the meaning, but one has hope that it can be done. DCDuring TALK 13:23, 8 March 2013 (UTC) A Google books searchsuggests possible existence of three citations for an adjective, though I am not sure with a single definition. DCDuring TALK 13:36, 8 March 2013 (UTC) OK, I admit it, I can't tell whether our definition fits the citations in the entry, let alone the range of them. Let a better philosopher than I confirm the definition. DCDuring TALK 14:13, 8 March 2013 (UTC) I feel we're missing a sense of both the verb and the noun play, namely what young animals (mostly mammals and birds) do. Sense 1 of both the verb and the noun come closest, but I wouldn't want to assume such motives as "fun", "recreation", and "amusement" for animals. —Angr 11:53, 7 March 2013 (UTC) I've had a stab at the noun sense. SemperBlotto (talk) 11:59, 7 March 2013 (UTC) It's a well-studied area of scientific interest. I have a book on the subject at home, I believe not packed in a box. If so, I'll not-exactly-copy its definition. Choor monster (talk) 17:05, 7 March 2013 (UTC) SB's first stab looks good, but older animals do play too, just not as often as young animals—and when they do play, it's mostly with the young'uns. I think that small-scale mimicking of the behavior of adults plays a role in (both human and animal) play as well. Do we maybe want to write the definition in such a way as to include humans? After all, when children play, they are also exploring their environment and learning new skills. —Angr 18:30, 7 March 2013 (UTC) I have the book with me, and will be adding to the page and its Discussion. But note that what "we want" is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Choor monster (talk) 15:34, 8 March 2013 (UTC) If possible, we should be avoiding theory-laden definitions of any type and stay close to everyday use unless we are marking the term with a specialist context. Any one book's definition may be ahead of usage. OTOH, popular theories, even mistaken ones, that lay behind usage may be worth referring to or reflecting in a definition. Most normal humans impute human-like emotion and motives to mammals, and much, much less to other forms of animals. I certainly do. Also, corresponding modifications of the verb are needed. DCDuring TALK 17:13, 8 March 2013 (UTC) Well, I've made my contribution over there. Feel free to remove it. If you think the quotation form is bad style or somehow a copyvio, rewrite it, but be careful. As I explained on the talk page, what "most normal humans" do was once the scientific norm, it disappeared from scientific usage, and has come back in a severely codified manner. This is probably relevant to numerous other human-cognition terms. For example, checking intelligent for senses that modify (network, keyboard), I see no appropriate sense. Yet smart, as in (bomb,car,card) refers to it! Choor monster (talk) 17:36, 8 March 2013 (UTC) Fixed. Choor monster (talk) 17:42, 8 March 2013 (UTC) This noun seems to have once had a second, now-obsolete meaning (besides "zealot"), but I can't quite tell what that meaning might have been. It doesn't seem to be "religionist, member of a religion", per se. Perhaps "clergyman"?? See e.g. The Present State of Europe, which mentions that "the Duke of Savoy […] declar'd, that he will no longer pay the Religionaries that were in his Service". A "religionist: member of a religion" sense may also be attested, though I'm not sure: 1992?, Lawrence Stone, Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England, 1660-1753, page 118: Unfortunately for his future prospects, during his period of education at Wadham Edward had picked up strong dissenting religious views. He called his fellow religionaries 'friends' and may perhaps have been a Quaker. (or that might be the "zealot" sense) - -sche (discuss) 00:18, 10 March 2013 (UTC) The WP article Casualty of war was little more than a list and a one line definition hence my changing the article there into a disambiguation and my creation of an entry here. However I am unfamiliar with the intricacies of formatting enteries here and would appreciate it if someone could take this entry under their wing. Of most concern to me is the question as to whether the phrase is distinct enough to merit its own entry?--03:02, 10 March 2013 (UTC) It looks as though someone's cleaned it up, and nominated it for deletion. Thanks for checking. (Striking.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 04:36, 10 March 2013 (UTC) Thanks all--KTo288 (talk) 10:31, 10 March 2013 (UTC) Whats the noun for an irreligious person? Pass a Method (talk) 20:42, 10 March 2013 (UTC) There is irreligionist. Possibly a bit dated. Equinox ◑ 21:14, 10 March 2013 (UTC) I created None. Pass a Method (talk) 12:32, 11 March 2013 (UTC) I've created none#Noun and formatted and RfVed None#Noun. DCDuring TALK 13:34, 11 March 2013 (UTC) I'd appreciate it if someone who knew a thing or two about Christian heresies could look over this entry. It was defined as "the belief that God is composed of four persons", but the references I could find all (confusingly) used the phrase "three persons" and then 'added' a fourth 'essence'. - -sche (discuss) 20:50, 10 March 2013 (UTC) It looks like the "essence" is a putative Platonic ideal associated with the object that is the trinity. The orthodox view aligns with the Aristotelean way of thinking, which does not hold truck with such ideals. — Pingkudimmi 11:18, 11 March 2013 (UTC) Should intersex be mentioned in usage notes as a third sex? Pass a Method (talk) 11:26, 11 March 2013 (UTC) Rather, if the definition is correct, it is a demonstration that the male/female split is not a strict dichotomy — some individuals may be both. — Pingkudimmi 13:49, 11 March 2013 (UTC) Hi all. Can someone have a glance at my new entry ooh arrh. We surely should have some kind of entry for this phrase, I'm just not sure how to spell it! --Dormouse3 (talk) 13:08, 11 March 2013 (UTC) When you use {{regional}}, you should add a second parameter specifying the region where the term is used. — Ungoliant (Falai) 13:33, 11 March 2013 (UTC) Is there any meaning to it at all? Or any emotion? DCDuring TALK 13:35, 11 March 2013 (UTC) It's probably somewhat like the "arr" used to evoke pirate speech (which apparently has roots in the same regional dialects)- whatever expression it might have been based on, it's now just an opportunity to use sounds characteristic of the speech variety. It brings to mind Valspeak utterances like "fer shure" and "totally", or Minnesota Scandinavian "yah, sure, you betcha", or Canadian "eh" as used in comic impressions. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:18, 11 March 2013 (UTC) There's very little on gbooks, but another usage, suggesting a noun used attributively, is: "Thrown into this puddle are a snivelling, cheap-jack hack with the verbals and strongman 'Goliath', a sensitive simpleton with an ooh-arrh accent." — Pingkudimmi 14:55, 11 March 2013 (UTC) As it's a Wonderfool addition, I'm tempted to just delete it. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:25, 11 March 2013 (UTC) I think it's usually written ooh arr. Agree that gratuitous Wonderfolly is to be zapped. Equinox ◑ 21:41, 12 March 2013 (UTC) What am I missing? Why is this somewhat obscure term (occurring only twice in BNC and not at all in COCA; not appearing in shorter English dictionaries, eg, Longman DCE 1987; not appearing in most grammars) put in front of our users as a grammatical context label? In English, we often end up splitting the sense to which this might be applied into a transitive and an intransitive sense, following the practice of every dictionary I've ever cracked. Was this intended to be a temporary expedient, to avoid the need to type in two definitions? I don't object to the category, just to the label. DCDuring TALK 19:49, 11 March 2013 (UTC) What makes ergative verbs special is that they are active when transitive, but (medio-)passive when intransitive. We could of course split that into two senses, but there are some languages like Dutch where the significance is not just semantic, but also grammatical. The active voice uses hebben ("to have") as the auxiliary verb in the perfect tense, while the passive uses zijn ("to be"). This means that a normal verb that is used without an object is grammatically different from an ergative verb that is used without an object. An example is the verb smelten ("to melt"), which is ergative. When used with an object, it is active: imperfect ik smelt de sneeuw "I melt/am melting the snow", perfect ik heb de sneeuw gesmolten "I have melted the snow". But without an object, it is passive, and the perfect therefore takes the other auxiliary: imperfect de sneeuw smelt "the snow melts/is melting (by itself)", perfect de sneeuw is gesmolten "the snow has melted (by itself)". Contrast this with a non-ergative verb, eten ("to eat"). With an object: imperfect ik eet de sneeuw "I eat/am eating the snow", perfect ik heb de sneeuw gegeten "I have eaten the snow". Without an object: imperfect ik eet "I eat/am eating", perfect ik heb gegeten "I have eaten". —CodeCat 20:31, 11 March 2013 (UTC) I know what they are and why they are special. I am interested in whether the term belongs front and center in a sense line. From what you've said so far, it seems that it is the kind of term that only certain language professionals could love. Further, whatever its merits for someone learning Dutch, they do not seem terribly relevant for English as the broader population has no familiarity with the term and few linguists seem to find it useful for English. DCDuring TALK 21:52, 11 March 2013 (UTC) But do you think that "transitive" is going to be understood that well? It is probably better known, yes, but how many people actually understand it in a linguistic sense? As a dictionary, linguistics (specifically lexicography, orthography and grammar) is our "field" and therefore we can't avoid linguistic jargon. I am not saying we shouldn't try to avoid making it too technical, but certain concepts are expressed much better with a linguistic term than with some other explanation. Besides, we do link to many jargon terms in our glossary, so that should "excuse" at least some of the uses. And in any case, if we don't use "ergative", how do we clearly express the behaviour of those Dutch verbs in an entry? Putting a usage note on each one seems excessive, as there may well be hundreds of those verbs. —CodeCat 22:02, 11 March 2013 (UTC) (...after edit conflict...) I'm not sure I fully follow. I mean, I understand your line of argument, CodeCat, I just don't think I agree.  :) In terms of the perfect / imperfect senses, Dutch and German use their respective versions of "have" when an object is involved, and of "be" when there is no object, not even an implied one. I really don't think this has to do with ergative / non-ergative -- it really looks like it has more to do with transitivity. Ich habe gegessen ("I have eaten", implied object), Ich bin gegangen ("I have gone", no object possible). The bin ("am") here is not at all passive, but rather more stative. Meanwhile, English hasn't kept this distinction, so while we can still say things like "I am gone to the market", it rings strangely and might be misinterpreted. By another analysis, one could say that verbs like "to melt", that are usually intransitive, are actually being used in a causative fashion when they take objects: I melt the snow == I make the snow melt. The use of "have" in other Germanic tongues (that I'm familiar with, anyway) always indicates an object: Ich habe geschmolzen necessarily implies an object by use of the verb "to have", while Ich bin geschmolzen certainly _could_ be passive, but not necessarily -- again, the bin here is more stative than passive, indicating a state or change in state. (Appropriate, perhaps, for the verb "to be".) Meanwhile, verbs like eat or eten are inherently transitive and can be argued to _always_ have objects, even when left unstated. I eat necessarily implies that something is the object. One cannot eat without eating something. Consquently, Ich bin gegessen indicates passivity _not_ just because of the use of bin, but because of the inherent semantic qualities of the verb "to eat" in combination with this grammatical context. I have run across suggestions that modern Germanic-language verbs that are simultaneously transitive and intransitive arose, at least in some cases, as the merger of older intransitive verbs and their causative forms. Meanwhile, I haven't run across any solid arguments for an ergative verb structure in Germanic languages. But as with anything, I reserve the right to be wrong.  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:36, 11 March 2013 (UTC) (E/C) I don't think that is true. There are also verbs in Dutch that can never take an object, like zitten or liggen, but they still take hebben as the auxiliary. Moreover, any intransitive verbs that are newly created also take that auxiliary. So from a modern perspective, the ergative verbs are clearly the exception. —CodeCat 23:03, 11 March 2013 (UTC) Dutch is, in many ways, kind of in between German and English. Is it possible that Dutch is just following the same trend that happened in English, where the hebben vs. zijn distinction is being lost in perfect forms? And even with older verbs that never take an object but still use hebben, 1) might these be early adopters of this English-y paradigm? 2) how are these ergative as opposed to nominative? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:48, 11 March 2013 (UTC) There doesn't seem to be any trend. If anything, what is happening is that zijn is becoming more strongly associated with the passive voice to the extent that it wasn't already. To understand this you really have to look back at early Germanic history. The periphrastic perfect like it exists in Germanic languages nowadays was formed like a noun phrase originally. The past participle was originally an adjective that meant to be in a state of having undergone the verb's action (it was passive in meaning). So "seen" meant "that has been seen", and a sentence like "I have seen a friend" was no different from "I have a friend who is seen". "a friend who is seen" acted as the direct object of "have". Therefore, the difference between the two auxiliary verbs was quite clear: either you have a friend who is seen (I have a friend, "seen"), or you yourself are seen (I am "seen"). This also explains why the copula is used for the passive; it is the participle itself that is passive, and the verb "have" serves to make it active and/or transitive because it is itself active and transitive. There are some cases where English has actually preserved this better than Dutch: I am forgotten reflects the original semantics, whereas ik ben vergeten additionally has the meaning of "I have forgotten" and can also be transitive. This is an innovation within Dutch that has extended the use of the auxiliary "be" to convey a sense of not being responsible (grammatically speaking, an action with no agent; i.e. a mediopassive). The implication of ik ben vergeten is therefore that you could not help having forgotten, it just happened to you. —CodeCat 00:20, 12 March 2013 (UTC) Reading more, I find I may be barking up the wrong tree -- I was arguing about the ergativeness of Dutch, English, and German, but ultimately not to the purpose. @DCDuring, Template:ergative would presumably be used for languages like Basque or Tibetan, or other languages listed at Ergative–absolutive_language. See that WP article for more about what "ergative" is and ultimately why we would want to keep this context template. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:57, 11 March 2013 (UTC) It would be necessary if the target audience for this dictionary is linguists rather than more generic users such as language learners. If linguists are our main target then we should expect WMF to pull the plug on us completely when they find out. I thought the generic case for an ergative verb in English is "I melt the snow" and "The snow melts". If so many verbs can be used ergatively. "That wine drinks best with beef." is a transformation of something like "One drinks that wine best with beef." or "That wine is best drunk with beef.". Our Category:English ergative verbs seems quite incomplete. DCDuring TALK 23:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC) Poking around, it looks like the etym for EN melt is a bit unclear, but probably related to NL smelten and DE schmelzen; for the latter two, from what I can glean, this is an older intransitive verb that melded (ha! :) with its causative form -- i.e., this isn't ergative, just a verb that can be both transitive and intransitive. If it were "I melt him" and "him melts", then sure, I'd agree that this is ergative. But the only way that utterance happens in modern English is when someone is 1) learning the language, or 2) being intentionally silly.  :::: As to whether to keep Template:ergative, my understanding about WT is that we are attempting to describe each language as it is. From my reading of Ergative-absolutive_language, these languages have constructs that cannot be clearly or cleanly described without relying upon specialized terminology. Are we to mislead users by using the wrong terms to describe these languages? I would prefer to use the correct descriptive terminology, albeit presented in as accessible a fashion as we can without dumbing things down too badly. When it comes to ergative verbs, these don't really exist in nominative/accusative (intransitive/transitive) languages like English, and require proper description and explanation. The terms used for such description and explanation should themselves be clearly defined, naturally. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:48, 11 March 2013 (UTC) Communication is not dumbing down. Failing to communicate is our inadequacy, not the users'. Why do the users need to know a technical term where our definition seems to disagree with, say Collins': "denoting a type of verb that takes the same noun as either direct object or as subject, with equivalent meaning. Thus, "fuse" is an ergative verb: "He fused the lights" and "The lights fused" have equivalent meaning" or others at ergative at OneLook Dictionary Search? This discussion seems to be providing ample evidence that this term does not belong where it can be seen by normal humans. DCDuring TALK 01:16, 12 March 2013 (UTC) I don't have access to Collins. I disagree with their definition; I think they're describing the same thing as my understanding of "ergative", but doing so poorly, such that the meaning is muddled. That said, Merriam-Webster's definition matches my understanding, and comes across more clearly (bolding mine): of, relating to, or being a language (as Inuit or Georgian) in which the objects of transitive verbs and subjects of intransitive verbs are typically marked by the same linguistic forms; also : being an inflectional morpheme that typically marks the subject of a transitive verb in an ergative language English masks how this functions, by dint of not having grammatical case for most words. Deliberately using case-bound words in English sentences makes it clear that English verbs are not ergative. Examples: If English were ergative, the above would both be correct. However, English is not ergative. English verbs have a nominative/accusative paradigm instead, and as part of this, the second sentence above is ungrammatical. I think "ergative" is a useful label -- for languages that actually have ergative verbs. English is not one of these languages, and I am dismayed to see that Category:English ergative verbs exists. (Must run now, more later.) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 02:01, 12 March 2013 (UTC) As has been pointed out in a discussion on Eirikr's talk page, there's two different senses of ergative at play here: with respect to nouns, the ergative case is used to show the subject of a transitive verb. With respect to verbs, it refers to those that can take an active form even though the subject isn't the cause of the action. You can say "I broke the window" (active), or the window was broken by me (passive), or "the window broke" (mediopassive). In the latter, "the window" is the subject, but it's not the cause of the action: "the window broke" doesn't mean the same as "the window broke itself". This is something that's not really covered by the traditional transitive vs. intransitive distinction: in the sentence "he sat", "he" is clearly the cause of the action, and yet "he sat" and "the window broke" are both intransitive verbs. It also doesn't apply to most verbs: you can say "I read the newspaper", but not "the newspaper read". It's a very real and useful piece of information about the verb, but there's unfortunately no other term that I know of for it. We just need to explain it better. @DCD: you talk about the term as if it's uniquely obscure and confusing, but it's no more so than "fused head construction", which you use frequently, without explanation- as if everyone already knew what it is. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:50, 25 March 2013 (UTC) I take your point about fused-head constructions. Though I noted that CGEL said there was dispute about the concept, I didn't realize that it is not at all widespread in linguistic scholarship. But I did not advance it as a term to be put in front of users rather than a justification for us as lexiciographers to avoid proliferating PoS sections with duplicative semantic content. I do not think "ergative" needs to be explained to the great mass of users. As imperfect as users' understanding of transitive and intransitive may be, many users have some understanding of the terms, which understanding normally doesn't lead them astray. I wonder if the fundamental problem in this and many other matters is that I am reasonably sure that Wiktionary is and ought to be direct to helping relative casual users who have no great interest in linguistics as opposed to definitions and translations, whereas others think it is for the needs of language professions. Perhaps both sets of users could be accommodated by having tags like {{ergative}} not display by default, but be displayed if some preference gadget provided other wise. That seems like something that could be easily done with CSS. It could even be varied by language, if need be. There is the difficulty that my view would require that there be two sense lines, one 'transitive', one 'intransitive' for all sense lines in English now marked 'ergative'. DCDuring TALK 01:23, 25 March 2013 (UTC) {{ambitransitive}} has the same characteristics: It puts a term usually used by linguists about languages other than English and applies it to English. I would dispute that it was of any great use to many language learners, except for those learning languages that are learned only by native speakers (not using Wiktionary or other web resources), proselytizers, and linguists. DCDuring TALK 11:43, 25 March 2013 (UTC) I'm not an expert in Turkish but I found this Turkish word to mean "preposition" rather than "particle". Even the translations in "preposition" seem to support this. Malafaya (talk) 14:12, 12 March 2013 (UTC) In addition to a wall of text, the inflection section could have a table. I started one here, but I don't know some of the forms. — Ungoliant (Falai) 14:31, 12 March 2013 (UTC) The ye-forms are in every case identical to the you-forms; a separate column is unnecessary. The negative thou forms are "art not" and "wast not"; "wilt be" is correct for the future. I don't think there are contractions for the thou forms. The first-person future, both singular and plural, should include the option of "shall be". Second plural imperative is also "be" of course, and there are no first singular or third-person imperative forms. Perhaps there should be a row for the conditional forms "would be" (as well as "should be" for the 1st person). —Angr 14:46, 12 March 2013 (UTC) Thanks. I applied your changes. It's still missing the conditional and imperative of thou. (link) — Ungoliant (Falai) 15:06, 12 March 2013 (UTC) They're "wouldst be" and "be", respectively. I can find a few instances of "thou would be" on Google Books too, but it doesn't seem to be at all common or standard (compared to other thou forms, I mean). I think they mostly come from modern authors trying to sound archaic but letting their ignorance show. —Angr 15:25, 12 March 2013 (UTC) I have added it to the entry now. — Ungoliant (Falai) 15:53, 12 March 2013 (UTC) I don't think the future or conditional are necessary, because they are formed the same way for all verbs and are not at all irregular in this specific verb. The same applies to the imperative, only the form "be" should really be listed because it's used for singular and plural, and first and third person are expressed differently. —CodeCat 16:20, 12 March 2013 (UTC) Given the highly irregular nature of this verb, I think even the regular forms should be listed so the readers know it's regular. — Ungoliant (Falai) 22:07, 12 March 2013 (UTC) A veteran Wikipedian was indefinitely blocked a few days ago for using the term "buckwheat". Subsequent discussion revealed that the term—which we and other dictionaries define only as a cereal—can be used in the US to refer to a stupid person, often but not always with racial overtones. Is this usage common enough to be included in our entry? I can't find any citations of it, but then, I'm totally unfamiliar with it, so I hardly know where to look or what to look for. - -sche (discuss) 22:21, 12 March 2013 (UTC) See Our Gang#African-American cast members and Eddie Murphy#1980s acting career. Just what level of cultural reference to individual fictional entities do we want to cover? Also, I'm not sure that the purported definition is accurate. The fictional characters were childish and childlike - because they were children. DCDuring TALK 22:48, 12 March 2013 (UTC) Well, if people can say "You Buckwheat!" or "He's such a Buckwheat" without any direct reference to Our Gang in sight, then we ought to include it. But it is probably usually capitalized, so the entry would be at Buckwheat, not buckwheat. —Angr 23:00, 12 March 2013 (UTC) Is the word can't the most confusing word in the English language? It sounds the same as can especially in dialects which have a silent T. Pass a Method (talk) 23:43, 14 March 2013 (UTC) I don't know, but other candidates for Most Confusing Word include autoantonyms like "sanction" and "dust", and words like "run" and "set" that simply have so many senses that it can be very hard to know which sense is meant. - -sche (discuss) 03:58, 15 March 2013 (UTC) I don't know any dialects that have a silent "t", so it's not at all confusing to me, but presumably the "silen" speakers distinguish by the length of the vowel? Dbfirs 09:42, 15 March 2013 (UTC) Not completely silent, but it can surface as just a glottal stop, which can make it difficult to hear the difference between the two words in accents where they have the same vowel. But in accents where can't is pronounced [kɑːnt] (like RP) or [keɪnt] (like Southern US) the difference is easier to hear. —Angr 14:12, 15 March 2013 (UTC) can and can't have different vowels in Southern England, at least. can rhymes with man, plan, tan; can't rhymes with aunt, aren't, chant. Equinox ◑ 17:09, 15 March 2013 (UTC) They're also pronounced differently (with the same vowels as down south) in Lancashire (and most of the rest of Northern England, I think) as well, although here can't doesn't rhyme with aunt, chant etc. because we pronounce those with an /a/ rather than an /ɑː/. BigDom (t • c) 17:47, 15 March 2013 (UTC) Yes, that's standard throughout the north of England. "Can't" normally has a long "a" like a southern "aunt", though I have heard it in extreme dialects with a short "a" (as in "can", but /a/ not /æ/) to rhyme with a northern "aunt". The "t" then needs to be clearly annunciated to avoid confusion, especially in the abbreviation of canst not thou to can't t' (like non-rhotic "canter" but with an extra nasal stop). Dbfirs 09:44, 16 March 2013 (UTC) The most confusing words, for me, are in and on. For native English speakers, my guess is you're. — Ungoliant (Falai) 12:43, 16 March 2013 (UTC) English is a "singing" language, where any phrase has only 1, or maximum 2 stress points, so the difference is a lot easier to hear. We normally only stress the important word in a phrase. Affirmative statements are expected, and so "can" is normally unstressed, as not carrying any actually new information. Hence it is normally heard as a not-confusing /kn/ in a phrase such as "I can play the piano" - where "piano" would probably be the important, and hence stressed, word. "Can you?" "Can" here carries a stress, being a question word. Q words are not confusing either. Then we get to "can't". It sounds different, as stated above, because it carries a stress. It is negative, and so it is unexpected and important. If English used accents, there would be one on this word. Regional differences depend on how "cánt" would be pronounced. -- ALGRIF talk 10:59, 17 March 2013 (UTC) What sense covers "a tax on X"? If none, it needs to be added, but I can't think of a decent wording. — Ungoliant (Falai) 21:26, 16 March 2013 (UTC) Perhaps sense 5 or 8 of the preposition. —Angr 21:37, 16 March 2013 (UTC) It may be connected. There seems to be the idea of the object being the target of the subject, with the subject being some kind of official or pseudo-official action or ruling, generally with a negative or inhibitory effect on the object. I have a hunch that "a ban on", "a moratorium on", "a prohibition on" are all the same sense, and perhaps also "a war on (from declare war on?), as well. It seems to me like there may be an underlying metaphor of placing something heavy on the object. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:19, 16 March 2013 (UTC) Among the 26 senses and subsenses that MWOnline has for on as a preposition: "used as a function word to indicate reason, ground, or basis (as for an action, opinion, or computation) <I have it on good authority> <on one condition> <the interest will be 10 cents on the dollar>". We have 19 senses, but three are mathematical senses of a type I think MW does not cover. I also suspect that not all of our senses are as distinct as they ought to be. But prepositions are among the toughest terms to define. {{n-g}}/{{non-gloss definition}} is useful to give license to an explanation rather than a gloss. DCDuring TALK 23:34, 16 March 2013 (UTC) MW's definition above includes sense 8 of ours ("Because of, due to") @ChuckEntz: MW has a distinct sense for "ban on" etc.: "used as a function word to indicate the object of collision, opposition, or hostile action <bumped my head on a limb> <an attack on religion> <pulled a gun on me> Almost all of the senses have an underlying metaphorical unity that doesn't require a complete knowledge of OE, ME, EME and all of Modern English to grasp, but that doesn't necessarily help a learner or someone who is stuck on a word choice issue. DCDuring TALK 23:52, 16 March 2013 (UTC) We currently have two senses, "a discharge of atmospheric electrical charge" and "a flash of light caused by a discharge of...". I cannot think of a way to use the senses contrastively / to use one sense without using the other. Other dictionaries combine them and have only one sense, "a brilliant (i.e. flash-of-light-causing) discharge of...". Can anyone think of a reason we shouldn't combine them? PS, if any of this is worth saving, save away! - -sche (discuss) 02:59, 17 March 2013 (UTC) You could think of it as a register difference or reflecting different states of knowledge in the speaker/audience. The discharge sense is merely encyclopedic from an everyday experience point of view. The word itself is much more evocative of the surface phenomenon, the direct experience. Lightning(flash) is caused by Lightning(discharge), as is thunder, the blasted remains of a stricken tree, the fresh smell(ionization), and a fire on the dry timber or prairie grass. DCDuring TALK 03:23, 17 March 2013 (UTC) ummm... hello, these two existing ones are logical nonsense. can we at least work (simplify) on the two additions I added??? I'll go grab and bring over. :) Borealdreams (talk) 03:27, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Definition 1 - The visible form usurping the entirety of the thing discussed * A general and well accepted name for the visible portion of a complex phenomena which equalizes areas of spacial polarity within the atmosphere. "Lightning" is often used to describe the entire process, given the near instantaneous time of the visible event, but the multiple strokes of electrical current cause the visibility to which it is attributed. "Lightning" is composed of invisible portions happening over a much longer period of time and the sum total of a single event is termed a flash. Definition 2 - The physical properties of lightning & what they can cause or lead to * A general term used to describe and simplify the electrical and physical properties of a complex phenomena which equalizes areas of spacial polarity within the atmosphere and also to the earth. Often "lightning" erroneously accepts larger responsibility than its much smaller and simpler brother, a spark, ignoring the fact that without oxygen or fuel, lightning would go relatively unnoticed. TBDH, I would settle for this, to take the place of the other two existing... "a complex phenomena which equalizes volumes of spacial polarity within the atmosphere. "a giant spark in the atmosphere which may or may not be entirely visible to an observer —This comment was unsigned. Could you find three citations that would show that folks using the word lightning actually mean the first sense above. What kind of people are they? DCDuring TALK 03:52, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Easy enough.... and they would be scientists, people who work in the industry, meteorologists, etc. #Example #1 - Written by one of the foremost expert on lightning formation in the world. #Example # - Industry publications #Example #3 - Those involved dealing with all the "ignored" properties, just thinking of it as "flash of light" or "thunder maker" Borealdreams (talk) 04:04, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Good, but we require that citations be from books, magazines, newspapers, or Usenet. Google offers ways of finding such citations fairly easily. If you can't find them, I'm sure someone would be willing to try to help. DCDuring TALK 04:09, 17 March 2013 (UTC) So I'm not getting what you are looking for. 1) No other wiktionary pages have citations, the citation page for lightning would need to be created. 2) Lightning is complex and varied, you will not find a concise 10 word explanation of what is. It will have to be orig sync, no? Borealdreams (talk) 04:23, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Many do. We also accept definitions copied from out of copyright dictionaries, those that are consistent with modern dictionaries or the experience of a consensus of editors. Whenever there is a sense that is disputable citations help show how a term is actually used. In fact the best original definitions start with citations. As I said, I'm sure someone could find them for you if the definition is challenged. DCDuring TALK 04:29, 17 March 2013 (UTC) (after edit conflict) 1) Lots of other pages have citations. Theoretically, they all should, but in practice they're only required when there's a question as to whether something is actually in use. 2) This is not an encyclopedia or a technical work. We can't deal with all of the multitudinous dimensions of a given phenomenon. This is a descriptive, not a prescriptive dictionary: we describe language as it's actually used in the real world, where the vast majority of people don't know what on earth you're talking about. Dictionary definitions don't have to be theoretically rigorous and complete- even if these were, they would useless to someone trying to master the full implications of the technical concepts, which require considerable background knowledge. Although we don't want to be actually wrong (no reference to projectiles hurled by gods or to dragons running around in the sky, for instance), we have to simplify our definitions to the point that it reflects what it means to most speakers, and also is comprehensible to people who are looking up the word. If only the tiny fraction of a percent of English speakers who truly understand the technical details of the phenomenon have a given definition in mind, it's very inaccurate to substitute it for the definition as understood by everyone else, as if hundreds of millions of people were well-enough-trained in the physics of high-voltage electrical discharges to make the distinctions you're describing. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:59, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Alright, I'm gonna use the Be:Bold principle and just insert the two above. A simple Google search of "lightning definition" results in at least 3 dictionary listings that are 1000 times better than the garbage current here, and closely resemble that which I have prepared. One even has a part a) & part b), as was agonized over above. The largest problem I find is ambiguity of words in this field... "discharge" being one of the worst, "flash" a close second, and "stroke" pulling in number 3... all of which are technical words used to explain what lightning actually IS, and all 3 have lots of other meanings which can be used to describe observational properties of lightning. And "lightning", we can't forget about that... it trumps them all while being able to be used with them too. As to Chuck, I understand your point, but reality of it is, the two existing definitions mean absolutely nothing and are not even in agreement with other definitions online. *sighs* Borealdreams (talk) 05:13, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Several comments: 1) If terms have different meanings in everyday speech and in specific scientific fields, e.g. meteorology, both meanings are welcome. 2) If, however, there is only one meaning — and everything that laymen call "lightning" is indeed "lightning" according to the scientific definition, even if the laymen think of it as a flash and the scientists describe it in terms of polarity/ionisation/etc — then as Chuck notes, the definition needs to be intelligible to the laymen, and should be relatively concise, because Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia or a technical reference work. That said, 3) the problem with the definitions you added earlier wasn't that they were overly scientific—they weren't—it was that they were more like jumbled commentaries on the use of the word "lightning" than definitions of lightning. (For example, this entire paragraph has no definition in it at all: "A general term used to describe and simplify the electrical and physical properties of a complex phenomena which equalizes areas of spacial polarity within the atmosphere and also to the earth. Often "lightning" erroneously accepts larger responsibility than its much smaller and simpler brother, a spark, ignoring the fact that without oxygen or fuel, lightning would go relatively unnoticed.") - -sche (discuss) 06:22, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Here's a look at how other dictionaries define "lightning": Merriam-Webster: the flashing of light produced by a discharge of atmospheric electricity; also: the discharge itself Oxford: a. the occurrence of a natural electrical discharge of very short duration and high voltage between a cloud and the ground or within a cloud, accompanied by a bright flash and typically also thunder; b. literary: a flash or discharge of lightning (as, the sky was a mass of black cloud out of which lightnings flashed) dictionary.com: a brilliant electric spark discharge in the atmosphere, occurring within a thundercloud, between clouds, or between a cloud and the ground Collins: a flash of light in the sky, occurring during a thunderstorm and caused by a discharge of electricity, either between clouds or between a cloud and the earth The Free Dictionary (1): a. an abrupt, discontinuous natural electric discharge in the atmosphere; b. the visible flash of light accompanying such a discharge TFD (2): a brilliant electric spark discharge in the atmosphere, occurring within or between clouds, or between a cloud and the ground TFD (3): A flash of light in the sky caused by an electrical discharge between clouds or between a cloud and the Earth's surface. The flash heats the air and usually causes thunder. Lightning may appear as a jagged streak, as a bright sheet, or in rare cases, as a glowing red ball. Based on that and on how the words are commonly used, I've modified the definitions. As I wrote above: if, in meteorology, "lightning" can denote phenomena other than the (typically flashy) discharge of atmospheric electricity, that will need to be addressed. - -sche (discuss) 08:31, 23 March 2013 (UTC) The 4th entry needs an update. Deists dont believe god is omnipotent. I propose "initiator of the big bang (as in deism)" Pass a Method (talk) 10:10, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Citations supporting this proposed definition? DCDuring TALK 10:50, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Your update makes it much worse, as the defining factor of what deists call God is that he created the universe, not how he did it. If "omnipotent" is the problem, the definition can be rewritten without it, like "The being who created the universe (as in deism)." — Ungoliant (Falai) 12:27, 17 March 2013 (UTC) How about this cite? Pass a Method (talk) 12:28, 17 March 2013 (UTC) The idea of God existed way before any notion of a "Big Bang". Furthermore, some theists believe in God, but not in a Big Bang. Equinox ◑ 12:30, 17 March 2013 (UTC) @Ungoliant, actually since the Big Bang is currently largely a scientific fact, todays deists generally see "the creator of the universe" and "initiator of the big bang" to be synonymous. Pass a Method (talk) 12:31, 17 March 2013 (UTC) " […] todays deists generally see […] " Yep, generally, not always. But even if all did, the important thing for deism is that what they call God created the universe, not how he created it. Suppose, for example, that scientists convinced every deist that the Big Bang never happened. Deists wouldn't stop being deists, they would just consider that God created the universe in another way. On the other hand, if the scientists convinced them that the universe wasn't created by God, they wouldn't be deists any more. — Ungoliant (Falai) 13:05, 17 March 2013 (UTC) I vestedly agree that the deistic model of "God" need not include omnipotence. An excellent resource for this discussion is Charles Hartshorne's Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism. While I would dispute Harteshorne's conclusions, he does outline characteristics accorded "God" under many theological models -- Pantheism (for which "God" is simply another name for Nature and its laws); Pandeism (for which "God" simply becomes Nature); Deism, Theism, Panentheism, etc, etc. And Hartshorne distinguishes degrees of onipotence and omniscience, some of which fall short of what traditional theists would understand to be accorded to "God." DeistCosmos (talk) 04:21, 12 April 2013 (UTC) I think the senses should be combined into one general sense that incorporates them all. Something like "The (male) creator or sustainer of the universe or sustainer of mankind, or any similar being". With a usage note indicating that use varies widely by belief. Having a separate definition for each belief system (which seems to be the approach the entry and previous commenters here are taking) makes sense, too, except that we can wind up with thousands of definitions.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:05, 19 April 2013 (UTC) Statistical methods with Phrasal Verbs[edit] A discussion has started at Appendix talk:English phrasal verbs#Statistical methods with Phrasal Verbs about determining if a given word couple/group is recognized as being a Phrasal Verb in statistical analyses of corpora, and whether this could be a useful criteria in resolving some of the innumerable RfDs for Phrasal Verb entries. I believe there is an essential tool here, not only for Phrasal Verbs, if we can agree how to use it. -- ALGRIF talk 11:08, 17 March 2013 (UTC) Is it time to recreate sizzurp (codeine-laced cough syrup/soda mixture)? I'm not sure what the deletion log "no usable content" was referring to. It's in the news again. It's listed in this 2008 dictionary, Vice Slang. Choor monster (talk) 15:57, 18 March 2013 (UTC) Feel free to create Citations:sizzurp anyway. —Michael Z. 2013-03-18 19:29 z Well, it seems easier to just create the entry. Google books on "sizzurp" gives numerous use citations, way more than three. I mean, I see Shatneresque sitting there without any citations. They're certainly easy to find! Basically, I have no idea of what "no usable content" means here. It doesn't mean lacking citations, so I'm not sure what toes to not step on. Choor monster (talk) 20:38, 18 March 2013 (UTC) Well in the case of the deleted sizzurp entry, I guess it means that it looked like a prank. Why don't you enter some citations? —Michael Z. 2013-03-18 21:25 z We just like to have citations for questionable terms, especially those not in reputable dictionaries. See sizzurp at OneLook Dictionary Search. And, sometimes, citing something one creates surprises in terms of when the term came into use, multiple meanings, etc. Among Google Books and News and Usenet (Scholar?) there should be some citations. DCDuring TALK 21:29, 18 March 2013 (UTC) Like I said, there are lots of them. I've done the legwork for difficult terms like seven-level screwdriver and number 2 (meaning the pencil). But here, it's shooting fish in a barrel. Heck, the OneLook entry you suggested links to Wikipedia Purple drank, which begins with a list of synonyms and five citations for "sizzurp", including WSJ, ABC news, USA Today. Five years ago it may have been dodgy, but it seems to have gone mainstream. Choor monster (talk) 22:32, 18 March 2013 (UTC) But are they good citations? The LA Times one just used it in the name of a song (which brings up questions of independence from other sources that may just be quoting the song) and quoted in the lyrics, spelling it differently. If it's a clear as you say, it shouldn't be that hard to find 3 good citations.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:22, 19 March 2013 (UTC) @Choor monster: I don't have enough contact with this main stream you speak of to be able to tell. DCDuring TALK 01:51, 19 March 2013 (UTC) "No usable content given" is specifically about the content of the deleted version, not about whether the term itself meets CFI. In this case, the entire entry consisted of a couple of ungrammatical sentences. No language header, part of speech header, formatting, or anything else. They didn't even bother with capitalization or punctuation, and the example sentence used a different spelling. When we see that kind of thing we just delete it- it would take longer to fix it than it would to just create an entry from scratch. Whenever you see that deletion message, you should just proceed as if the other version had never existed, and base your decision about creating an entry on whether the term itself meets CFI- not on the entry's edit history.Chuck Entz (talk) 06:37, 19 March 2013 (UTC) Lumbancy[edit] The inability to smell? is that what it means???"1?? Google Books has never heard of the word. Neither had Wikipedia until you added it to the article anosmia, which I have now reverted. Wikipedia requires edits to be verifiable on the basis of reliable sources, and Wiktionary requires evidence of actual usage of the word in durably archived sources. I can't find evidence of either. —Angr 16:24, 19 March 2013 (UTC) This entry has "/trɑːθ/" listed as an alternate US pronunciation. Really? Sure, there are plenty of lects where θ->f, but I don't think I've ever heard of it going the other way, except for a few individuals who pronounce every word word with /f/ that way. I thought I'd better check, though, since I'm not exactly an expert on regional variation. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:04, 20 March 2013 (UTC) Yes, I'm not doubting that Teh Rote heard this pronunciation (possibly at camp when he was 15?), but I would regard it as non-standard, so not appropriate for the entry. He no longer edits here, so I expect he won't mind if we revert. Dbfirs 09:47, 21 March 2013 (UTC) In the absence of any support, is it OK to delete the mispronunciation? Dbfirs 16:23, 1 April 2013 (UTC) No-one has objected, so I'm deleting the strange pronunciation. Dbfirs 19:27, 11 June 2013 (UTC) Sorry I didn't notice this thread till now. Kenyon and Knott say that trough has an alternative pronunciation in /-θ/ which is "esp. freq. in N Engd.", but the vowel is /ɔ, ɒ/, not /ɑː/. K&K are known for listing some very old-fashioned pronunciations though; even if troth was a common pronunciation among rural New Englanders in the 1930s, that doesn't mean it still has any currency. BTW, there's no rule that nonstandard pronunciations are disallowed here, is there? —Angr 20:15, 11 June 2013 (UTC) Just checked all my American dictionaries: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, Webster's Third New International, and Random House College all include /tɹɔθ/, marking it "dialectal". (Webster also informs us that American bakers tend to pronounce it /tɹoʊ/ and British bakers /tɹaʊ/.) I think this is enough lemming support that we can include it as a variant pronunciation. —Angr 20:24, 11 June 2013 (UTC) That's fine if the pronunciation is widespread in the US. I'd be inclined to say that including all the possible non-standard dialectal pronunciations in our entries just makes them very messy and unfriendly to users, but there's no rule against inclusion as far as I know. I removed it only because it seemed to lack support. The OED doesn't seem to have consulted British bakers in compiling their dictionary. Dbfirs 21:44, 11 June 2013 (UTC) "Widespread" is probably an exaggeration, but it apparently does occur. The "troth" pronunciation isn't mentioned in Kurath's Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States, but maybe it's in one of the other dialect atlases. —Angr 08:07, 12 June 2013 (UTC) I'd just like to comment that we omit British pronunciations that are very widespread. I'm not intending to add them. They rightly belong in a Wikipedia article. Dbfirs 08:29, 13 June 2013 (UTC) I think many, maybe even most, Wikipedians would disagree with you, saying that detailed pronunciation information belongs at Wiktionary since it's information about the word, not the concept. Maybe we should introduce some sort of collapsible box for regional pronunciations so they don't take up too much space, especially since people are already complaining about the amount of info they have to wade through before they get to the definition. If this is an idea other people like, we could include just the "big two" pronunciations (GenAm and RP) above the box and then include things like Scottish, Australian, and regionalisms inside the box. —Angr 09:10, 13 June 2013 (UTC) I think many Wiktionarians would disagree with you as well. Things about the word belong on its page, and that includes every pronunciation variation.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:43, 16 June 2013 (UTC) By what definition is this a phrasal verb and clean a particle? It's an idiom, not entirely SoP. I thought particles were limited to prepositions and adverbs and that clean is a complement. Is every noun or adjective complement of a verb potentially a particle and the phrase a phrasal verb? DCDuring TALK 17:29, 20 March 2013 (UTC) Whatever else this may be, it is NOT a phrasal verb as we and all the dictionaries I've looked at (all those on phrasal verb at OneLook Dictionary Search) define it. I'm deleting the category memberships and the category Category:English phrasal verbs with particle (clean). DCDuring TALK 11:35, 22 March 2013 (UTC) Quite rightly, too. -- ALGRIF talk 19:35, 24 March 2013 (UTC) By what definition is this a phrasal verb and go a particle? The phrase certainly has idiomatic senses. DCDuring TALK 17:35, 20 March 2013 (UTC) Whatever else this may be, it is NOT a phrasal verb as we and all the dictionaries I've looked at (all those on phrasal verb at OneLook Dictionary Search) define it. I'm removing the category memberships and Category:English phrasal verbs with particle (go). DCDuring TALK 11:35, 22 March 2013 (UTC) I have also deleted other similar categories that would require that clear, even, and open were particles. DCDuring TALK 12:06, 22 March 2013 (UTC) First of all, "decapitalize" is missing an economic sense. Secondly... both words claim to mean "to convert a word or character string from incorrect to correct capitalization, especially to convert the first letter from uppercase to lowercase". This means that one could "decapitalize" "germany" by changing it to "Germany", which I highly doubt. I think "decapitalize" and "uncapitalize" mean "to convert the first letter (or more) of (something) from uppercase to lowercase". Any objections to modifying the def? - -sche (discuss) 05:42, 23 March 2013 (UTC) No, no objection here. I think you have it spot on. Leasnam (talk) 05:49, 23 March 2013 (UTC) Agreed. The citations at uncapitalize clearly show it as the antonym of capitalize, never a synonym. Dbfirs 08:58, 24 March 2013 (UTC)  Done - -sche (discuss) 20:12, 24 March 2013 (UTC) Part of speech help (Aragonese)[edit] I can't figure out the PoS of the Aragonese word pas. It is used to emphasise negative sentences: "pero no pas superficial, asperamos" - but not at all superficial, we hope "No ocurre pas debant de f-" - It does not occur before f- — Ungoliant (Falai) 20:29, 23 March 2013 (UTC) Operating from complete ignorance of the language and no formal linguistic training, but based on how such a function word would be classified in English, I'd say adverb. DCDuring TALK 20:32, 23 March 2013 (UTC) Looks like the same as French pas. The development of using the pas in French without the ne is a recent development, it used to be the opposite where the ne was needed and the pas was optional. You'll find quite a lot of that in Chroniques by Jean Froissart, which is the text I'm coming to the end of now (volume 1 anyway). Mglovesfun (talk) 20:37, 23 March 2013 (UTC) Catalan (on the same page) has the same usage: further evidence that it's not restricted to French. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:11, 23 March 2013 (UTC) Thanks. I added it as adverb. — Ungoliant (Falai) 22:44, 23 March 2013 (UTC) This entry has a noun section consisting of: {{plural of|you}} 1992, Robert Dubin, Central Life Interests: Creative Individualism in a Complex World (page 10) Most of your life after babyhood has been played out by the several yous. 2010, Patrick M Morley, The Man in the Mirror: Solving the 24 Problems Men Face (page 36) There are two yous — the visible you and the real you. The visible you is the you that is known by others. There's no noun sense at you, nor is there any pronoun sense there that fits the quotes. My question, so I can fix it: is this really a noun, or is it a pronoun used as if it were a noun? This particular construction can be used with just about any noun or pronoun: "Who is the real John Smith?". "The Las Vegas nobody sees"."Each has his own particular reality". "This is the real me". Are we opening ourselves up for a whole new class of senses? On the other hand, the quotes show an easily-cited usage that doesn't seem all that much like that of a pronoun. I'm not sure whether to delete the noun sense or add a corresponding one to the singular. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:49, 24 March 2013 (UTC) The pronoun and singular and plural nouns don't seem as much of a waste of bandwidth as the separate entries for the plurals of proper nouns (though a user might like to see the plural of Mary at [[Mary]]). Some users might become confused on seeing such a usage or wonder whether another language would translate using a similar principle. DCDuring TALK 03:48, 25 March 2013 (UTC) I recommend William Arthur Deacon The Four Jameses. Choor monster (talk) 15:59, 25 March 2013 (UTC) Note somewhere#Noun and somewheres#Noun; they seem at least somewhat similar. I added the "unspecified or unknown (unlocated) place or location" sense as a noun because it had a plural and seemed more like a noun than anything else, but if we decide to handle you not as a noun, we might decide to handle somewhere similarly... - -sche (discuss) 03:40, 28 March 2013 (UTC) What does it mean when people say "throw herself at somebody"? Wyang (talk) 23:04, 25 March 2013 (UTC) To make an embarrassingly desperate attempt to get someone's romantic attention. One old form of this can be found in Chaucer: "For as a spaynel she wol on hym lepe" (she will leap on him like a spaniel). Equinox ◑ 09:34, 26 March 2013 (UTC) I added spaynel and lepen. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:02, 1 April 2013 (UTC) throw oneself at seems idiomatic to some lexicographers, but not others. See throw oneself at at OneLook Dictionary Search and throw at OneLook Dictionary Search. MWOnline's efforts to cover the construction at their entry for throw don't seem adequate to me. We need the entry I think. DCDuring TALK 22:55, 1 April 2013 (UTC) Apparently this word as a noun has a technical jargon meaning in social network theory and likely in related fields. 'This article from BMJ' says, in the Glossary, "Alter: a person connected to the ego; this is the person who is potentially influencing the behaviour of the ego" (and "ego" is itself a technical term, not used in the psychological but a network sense of an individual node). I'm not in this field but found the use, with no explanation, in the article 'Network Structure and Information Advantage', e.g. "In addition, the greater structural awareness of actors in constrained networks (Coleman 1988) may enable alters to differentiate their information flows from one another," so it has probably become an accepted technical term. It would be helpful if it could be added to the Wiktionary. Is alter ego synonymous in this sense? Equinox ◑ 11:15, 26 March 2013 (UTC) I'm yet to see it[edit] Which senses of yet and to are used in "I've yet to see it"? What about in "I'm yet to see it"? (For those who haven't heard the latter, it's semantically synonymous with the former.) The usexes suggest adverb sense 1 of [[yet]] is intended to cover such phrases, but subbing it into the sentence results in "I have [thus far, up to the present] to see it", which doesn't seem intelligible to me. - -sche (discuss) 04:37, 28 March 2013 (UTC) The OED has an extra sense: "Followed by an infinitive referring to the future, and thus implying incompleteness (e.g. yet to be done, implying 'not hitherto done'; I have yet to learn, implying 'I have not hitherto learnt')". Does this cover your examples? Dbfirs 12:53, 28 March 2013 (UTC) The MWOnline handles it: "up to now : so far <hasn't done much yet> —often used to imply the negative of a following infinitive <have yet to win a game>. DCDuring TALK 16:32, 28 March 2013 (UTC) Thanks! The OED definition seems especially good. I've added a sense based on it, though it could probably be worded better than I've worded it. - -sche (discuss) 18:25, 28 March 2013 (UTC) I think this can only occur after forms of certain stative copulative verbs: be, seem, remain, and similar, not become. "I am yet to be convinced" (yet in this new sense) transforms to "I have not yet been convinced." (yet in first sense). "Hitherto" confuses the deixis in the time reference, I think. This could still use some work. DCDuring TALK 23:39, 1 April 2013 (UTC) Is it acceptable to nest templates in the manner that I have in this entry? (it seems to work more or less, the word being added to the two correct categories) SemperBlotto (talk) 10:34, 28 March 2013 (UTC) p.s. In case you were wondering - it is from Dante's Inferno. It is confusing. Is it an apocope of Camicione, or is it an apocope of an alternative form of Camicione (this form being used during the Middle Ages)? — Ungoliant (Falai) 16:46, 28 March 2013 (UTC) It would be an apocopic form of Camiscione, but we haven't got an entry for that yet (but it seems to be an Italian surname itself). SemperBlotto (talk) 16:52, 28 March 2013 (UTC) In a word, no. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:01, 28 March 2013 (UTC) OK - I've made it an orthodox entry. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC) It looks good now. FWIW, I have sometimes combined {{alternative form of}} with other form-of templates or with itself, but only by writing {{alternative form of|foo|nodot=1}}: {{other form-of template}} or by doing things like this, not by nesting. Another way of formatting this entry might have been something like {{context|archaic}} {{acopic form of|Camicione}} {{defdate|during the Middle Ages}}. - -sche (discuss) 18:16, 28 March 2013 (UTC) Googleable and ungoogleable[edit] We prefer googleable over Googleable, but unGoogleable over ungoogleable. This seems inconsistent. Do we have any guidelines on capitalization of verbs that incorporate proper nouns? If not, any suggestions? Kaldari (talk) 21:57, 28 March 2013 (UTC) Having X as "alternative form of Y" should not be understood as a preference of Y. It is just a way to avoid duplicating the content. In that light, I don't think we have any guidelines. Common words with multiple common spellings (e.g. color, colour) tend to have two synchronised full entries because otherwise patriots would go nuts. Equinox ◑ 22:57, 28 March 2013 (UTC) Yeah but no one is patriotic for the monstrosity unGoogleable, and like it or not, people do interpret "alternative form of" as meaning "less common/preferred form of". —Angr 09:19, 29 March 2013 (UTC) For about a year now, I've been slowly reducing content duplication on en.Wikt; as part of that, I've been reducing the number of entries which were theoretically supposed to be synchronised. (I do that by editing two pairs of spellings at once and making the US spelling of one pair the host of its content, and the UK spelling of the other the host of its content.) When I started, there were 13 pairs of supposedly synced entries, not a single one of which actually was or had even recently been synced; there are now only two pairs: colourful/colorful, which may be consolidated at some point, and color/colour (which, NB, are synced—only because I synced them), which I've been content to leave as a monument to failure, a reminder of naïveté, a proof for anyone who, in the future, ever finds it hard to believe that people would have attempted such a thing as the total duplication and perfect synchronisation of content across dozens of pages. Let all view the entries' edit histories see that Wiktionary did once try that, and that the entries did indeed spend much of their time out-of-sync! - -sche (discuss) 02:16, 30 March 2013 (UTC) In this case, I say make [[ungoogleable]] the lemma. - -sche (discuss) 02:16, 30 March 2013 (UTC) positive larger[edit] I heard an interesting sentence on NPR yesterday. It referred to "other larger cities" and after spending time trying to figure out 'larger than what' I realized this is a case of larger being positive rather than comparative. Here's a sample sentence I found at google books "As shown by experience in New York and other larger cities, these towering buildings tend to aggravate conditions..." It seems to be a positive adjective meaning something like big. Before I add it does anyone have any insights into how general this is (and is my interpretation correct)? RJFJR (talk) 13:11, 30 March 2013 (UTC) The standard for comparison is a vague notion of the prototype to the noun modified. I think it's more part of "universal semantics" that all or many or frequently used comparatives can be used in this way. It's certainly common in English. DCDuring TALK 13:51, 30 March 2013 (UTC) It's common in other languages like Latin and German, too. In fact, my impression is it's more common in German than in English, which is why I usually render it "rather X" or "somewhat X" when I encounter it in a German text I'm translating into English. —Angr 14:05, 30 March 2013 (UTC) Sounds like it's being compared to an implied "average city." — Ungoliant (Falai) 15:16, 30 March 2013 (UTC) There's nothing to add. This is a pretty normal use of the comparative. Ƿidsiþ 16:36, 30 March 2013 (UTC) Shouldn't the mythological noun be Gorgon? SemperBlotto (talk) 15:18, 30 March 2013 (UTC) Both are citable, but upper-case seems to be more common. Gorgon isn't the name of one specific creature, but a class of creatures. — Ungoliant (Falai) 16:27, 30 March 2013 (UTC) None of these make clear that they are only the past of "ring" for certain sentences, e.g., for a telephone, the past tense is "rang". 4.238.1.43 04:20, 1 April 2013 (UTC) The lemma form ring makes it clear which meanings have the past tense ringed and which have the past tense rang; it doesn't seem to accept rung as a past tense for any meaning. —Angr 09:06, 1 April 2013 (UTC) Yes, all senses of etymology 2 use rang and rung. The use of rung for the simple past is rare (according to the OED), but possibly retained in some dialects. It's difficult to distinguish between dialect and error in many examples. I've made a few adjustments to make misunderstanding less likely. Dbfirs 16:05, 1 April 2013 (UTC) The telephone sense is certainly attestable with rung as simple past: 1906, page 229:  Mr. Seibels, in his testimony, said I rung him up to see about labels. He is very much mistaken. I rung him up to see about bottles. DCDuring TALK 16:42, 1 April 2013 (UTC) Thanks for the cites. The OED says rare, but I thought after I'd added that tag that it's actually quite common (in both senses). Dbfirs 17:05, 1 April 2013 (UTC) It can be fun citing things. I found a sense of ring up that I hadn't heard of and haven't found in any dictionary in the course of the effort. DCDuring TALK 17:26, 1 April 2013 (UTC) Interesting! I've never heard that sense. Is it just American? Dbfirs 21:10, 1 April 2013 (UTC) I hadn't either. It might be US. Two of the four cites were baseball, one US basketball. The other was probably from a US author. DCDuring TALK 21:25, 1 April 2013 (UTC) Tagged but not listed: (disputed) A difficult circumstance or problem. I can see what's going on here; while dilemmas are often difficult circumstances, not all difficult circumstances and problems are dilemmas. Thoughts? Mglovesfun (talk) 14:41, 2 April 2013 (UTC) Fastidious users would not use it in the "disputed" way. Garner's Modern American Usage puts it at Stage 4: "Ubiquitous, but […] ". Perhaps we should have a usage label {{loosely}} for definitions such as this. DCDuring TALK 15:32, 2 April 2013 (UTC) We have about 30 terms that already link to that ought-to-exist template. Seven entries link to {{disputed}}. I am not sure whether that template should exist. "Loosely" could be applied somewhat objectively to characterize senses that are non-metaphorical broadenings of more specific senses, but still applying to referents of the same general conceptual type and in the same register and usage context. "Disputed" begs for identification of the disputants, which we often don't provide. DCDuring TALK 15:44, 2 April 2013 (UTC) This entry, meaning 2, is problematic. My original definition consisted of a list of terms that all begin "social" and end up abbreviated to "sosh", for example, "socialist", "social studies", "social security number", "social climber". (There's also "sociology", as in the college department.) There are others that I have been unable to find CFI attestation, like "social engineer" and the "sosh cut" hair style. This definition was a mess, and it was changed recently to an "abbreviation of social", which was less messy, but not quite accurate—that's the etymology!—so I've changed it to an "abbreviation for various terms beginning 'social'". But ultimately, that's just a cop out on what was wrong with my original definition. The different meanings are of course all different senses, yet "sosh" seems to have an innate productivity or flexibility that listing multiple senses doesn't convey. (Personally, I had come across the word a few times and instantly forgot it, then thought I had learned the word for life as an abbreviation for the verb "social engineer" in Michael Connelly Chasing the Dime, but that memory seems to be delusional, meanwhile, when I later heard a government bureaucrat on the phone ask me for my "sosh", I knew instantly what he was asking for.) In contrast, "chem", for example, abbreviates "chemistry", but not "chemical engineer" or "chemical reaction". Or simply contrast the first meaning of "sosh", an abbreviation for "association store". No related abbreviation seems to exist. Presumably there's a linguistic or grammatical concept here, something backwards from the word-building capability of particles like "-gate", but I'm grasping at straws here. By the way, is this sosh cut CFI usable? Choor monster (talk) 18:32, 3 April 2013 (UTC) Obviously, I prefer the brief "abbreviation of social" with some kind on {{non-gloss definition}} thereafter. But increasingly we have all kinds of usually unsupported research notes under "Usage notes", "Etymology", "Pronunciation notes" etc. DCDuring TALK 09:23, 5 April 2013 (UTC) Your approach was definitely superior—I only tweaked it. And I try to support my research: the "association store" etymology is taken from the References, and has been there from the creation of the article. Meanwhile I'm sitting on more citations for some of the senses. I've posted here because I'm hesitant to go forward. This term seems to fall between some cracks. Sense 2 is really Etymology 2. But breaking up 2 into proper CFI senses is going to succeed with some while leave a remainder put in a "miscellaneous" bag, either explicitly like done now, or implicitly, see "Citations". That has to be wrong. But to not refer to the social→sosh productivity also seems wrong. That's what I'm stuck on. To phrase it differently, Sense 1 (the Scottish co-op), based on Etymology 1, is from a dead, non-productive etymology. Sense 2 needs to be split up into senses, while its etymology should be indicated as still live. That's what I was getting at with the -gate indication above, which has one permanent usage and endless numbers of temporary usages. Choor monster (talk) 19:25, 7 April 2013 (UTC) Portuguese adjective template {{pt-adj/or}}[edit] I think that the feminine plural should be -oras rather than -ores. See, as an example, pt:contentor or pt:traidor. SemperBlotto (talk) 21:35, 3 April 2013 (UTC) Fixed. — Ungoliant (Falai) 22:23, 3 April 2013 (UTC) 1913, D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, chapter 5: "Mrs. Morel was full of information when she got home from Nottingham. The three sat round till bed-time, listening, putting in, arguing." -- does this mean "interrupting each over"? --CopperKettle (talk) 06:46, 5 April 2013 (UTC) Yes it does. It emphasizes the contribution rather than the object of the interruption however. It is not too unlike chime in, which is even more positive. Macmillan shows it as transitive with the nominal in their usage example being a quotation. It could also be a "that" clause or a noun phrase like an objection. Intransitive use is no surprise though. Collins has "to intervene with (a remark) during a conversation", both transitive and intransitive, presumably dropping the "with". Our entry for put in has only three senses, one SoP, somewhat short of the eight Macmillan has, the nine Collins has (splitting the 2 senses that are both transitive and intransitive), and the six that MWOnline has. DCDuring TALK 09:07, 5 April 2013 (UTC) Thanks! --CopperKettle (talk) 07:45, 6 April 2013 (UTC) And another one: what does "on the club" mean here? " Then he crept up the stone stairs behind the drapery shop at the Co-op., and peeped in the reading-room. Usually one or two men were there, either old, useless fellows, or colliers "on the club"." (from the same chapter) --CopperKettle (talk) 06:55, 5 April 2013 (UTC) Collins has: "(British, slang) away from work due to sickness, esp when receiving sickness benefit". I'd never heard it in the US. DCDuring TALK 09:18, 5 April 2013 (UTC) Thank you, DCDuring! Will keep tabs on Collins now too. (0: --CopperKettle (talk) 09:48, 5 April 2013 (UTC) It seems to me that their coverage of UK expressions is probably the best supplement to ours. DCDuring TALK 10:23, 5 April 2013 (UTC) Sense: "A deformity in humans caused by abnormal curvature of the upper spine." Why do we limit our definition to this cause? Why do we talk about cause at all? Is "deformity" essential to the definition? Both questions have implications for other definitions of other nouns. Including cause can be essential to a definition, but often isn't. Inclusion is often symptomatic of a confusion of the purpose of a dictionary and with that of an encyclopedia. DCDuring TALK 10:13, 5 April 2013 (UTC) I recommend something like "A protruding portion of a back" and merging it with the camel sense.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:56, 19 April 2013 (UTC) "I have a lot of things on my plate"[edit] Do we cover this idiom anywhere in Wiktionary at present? ---> Tooironic (talk) 05:37, 6 April 2013 (UTC) As we lexicalize everything (for the benefit of machines incapable of analogy and metaphor), we should have something for this. I join Collins and vote for on one's plate. DCDuring TALK 11:41, 6 April 2013 (UTC) But for most normal dictionary-using humans a line at plate such as this from MWOnline "a schedule of matters to deal with <have a lot on my plate now>" should support the major syntactic variations on the metaphor much better. The variations include "have/get a full plate", "plateful", "a lot on one's plate", and "one's plate [be] full". DCDuring TALK 11:53, 6 April 2013 (UTC) We have this at [[plate]] already.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:51, 19 April 2013 (UTC) Discount house[edit] I looked up discount house in a British financial dictionary but I think I'm missing something in the definition. "Discount house: A city institution specializing in discounting bills of exchange." (p. 121, Oxford Dictionary of Economics, John Black, 2nd edition Oxford University Press, 2002.) What does it mean that it's a 'city institution'? RJFJR (talk) 19:45, 6 April 2013 (UTC) The City is the London equivalent of Wall Street. DCDuring TALK 00:27, 7 April 2013 (UTC) Thank you. It's actually a sense at city. RJFJR (talk) 02:07, 9 April 2013 (UTC) gone to a better place[edit] When I saw the new entry for ir dessa para uma melhor, I thought I would add a link to the equivalent term in English- but we don't seem to have it. I've seen both "They've gone to a better place" and "They're in a better place, now" in discussing someone's death. Both could be interpreted as euphemisms for death, or "a better place" could be interpreted a an indirect way of saying "heaven". It's not completely equivalent to heaven, since it's generally used when discussing how bad it was for the deceased before they died, so there's a literal element to the phrase- but it's understood that the "better place" isn't a physical one in the present world, such as Hawaii. My question: which is best for the lemma: "gone to a better place" / "in a better place", "a better place", or some option I've overlooked? Chuck Entz (talk) 22:15, 6 April 2013 (UTC) better place accommodates all the varied forms and would be my preferred choice. DCDuring TALK 00:30, 7 April 2013 (UTC) There's even "left us for a better place". DCDuring TALK 00:34, 7 April 2013 (UTC) Created; please tweak as needed.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:46, 19 April 2013 (UTC) This has the two definitions "clothes worn next to the skin, underneath outer clothing" and "(euphemistic) men's underpants". It's trivial to find references to women's underpants / panties and bras as "underwear". Should the second sense be changed to simply "underpants", or should it be removed entirely? - -sche (discuss) 08:58, 7 April 2013 (UTC) Perhaps change to 'underpants'? The first definition includes the undergarments of other cultures (e.g. loincloths); but this is not the sense in which 'underwear' is commonly used, hence the second definition. --Hyarmendacil (talk) 09:26, 7 April 2013 (UTC) This category seems to contain almost any gender-neutral occupation name, e.g. firefighter, fresher, reporter, receptionist, assistant, diplomat. Surely these are not PC words! The only ones that strike me as PC are where a traditional -man ending has been self-consciously replaced with -person, as in craftsperson, anchorperson. Equinox ◑ 17:56, 7 April 2013 (UTC) The name of the category strikes me as much more of a problem than the content, but I'm not sure that I could come up with a better-worded substitute. The gender-neutral terms seem fairly homogeneous and also a relatively stable group. Perhaps they should be in distinct category. The ethnic- and disability-group terms seem less stable in that what seems neutral in one period becomes pejorative in another or even a badge of pride. It seems to me that the ethnic and disability terms belong in an Appendix so that there could be some sufficient descriptive verbiage. DCDuring TALK 19:22, 7 April 2013 (UTC) Yeah loads of this just looks like baloney to me. I think I noticed this at the time in the recent changes but considered it too minor to get involved, with respect to the amount of other things that need doing round here. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:34, 7 April 2013 (UTC) "Expert"? "Grandparent"? Yeah, this needs lots of trimming, if it is to be kept. - -sche (discuss) 20:05, 7 April 2013 (UTC)  Done I have removed all of the terms that were generic gender-neutrals (sibling, soldier, tailor, etc.), as well as polite (probably added mistakenly for police) and synthetic (didn't make sense to me here). I have left the self-conscious -persons (e.g. anchorperson), the X-challenged and X-impaired, underresourced (poor), differently able, etc. Equinox ◑ 18:55, 19 April 2013 (UTC) Are the words "right wing" and "conservative" interchangeable? Pass a Method (talk) 20:50, 7 April 2013 (UTC) Not always. See sense 1 at conservative: the existing status quo (in some regions) might be liberal/left. Equinox ◑ 20:54, 7 April 2013 (UTC) And right-wing could be non-incumbent fascists. DCDuring TALK 21:15, 7 April 2013 (UTC) stop away[edit] Does stop away merit an inclusion? Macmillan has it. The meaning is "to stay\keep away from a place". Or would the quotes fit nicely under the "stay" meaning of the "stop" article? 1913, D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, chapter 9 There was a silence. "And if I ask you to come down any time, you won't stop away, will you?" --CopperKettle (talk) 11:19, 10 April 2013 (UTC) It is a curious juxtaposition to my ear. If it is regional we might want it. DCDuring TALK 11:29, 10 April 2013 (UTC) Supposed to be British vernacular usage. Dickens has it, and E.M.Forster too. --CopperKettle (talk) 08:22, 11 April 2013 (UTC) I don't know how others feel about it, but it might be just idiomatic enough to merit inclusion. DCDuring TALK 15:00, 11 April 2013 (UTC) Portuguese -ter verbs[edit] In Portuguese verbs such as conter the third-person-singular present tense is given as -ten in our templates, but as -tém in the Portuguese Wiktionary. Which is correct? SemperBlotto (talk) 11:21, 10 April 2013 (UTC) Fixed them. Template:pt-verb/ter is only for the verb ter;for verbs derived from it, the conjugation should use Template:pt-verb/ter2. — Ungoliant (Falai) 15:23, 10 April 2013 (UTC) Cure rhymes with cur; pure rhymes with purr?[edit] In our pronunciations, under RP, we have cure rhyming with cur and pure rhyming with purr as an option. Are there many dialects in which this is true? (possibly some Irish?) Should we mark this as rare? Dbfirs 11:54, 11 April 2013 (UTC) It's very common in North American English, and at both cure and pure it's marked (US). —Angr 20:44, 11 April 2013 (UTC) Thanks, I wondered if that was so. It's also so marked under RP, which I doubt, (sorry, see Angr's reply below, I must not have been seeing straight!) but perhaps I just haven't heard it. Dbfirs 08:48, 12 April 2013 (UTC) I find both pronunciations odd. I think there is a regional US distribution, but it would be nice to be able to specify it more narrowly. It might, for example, be "Appalachian", which is quite restricted. DCDuring TALK 12:28, 12 April 2013 (UTC) Dbfirs, I'm sorry, I'm just not seeing that. The RP line at cure says "/kjʊə(ɹ)/, /kjɔː(ɹ)/" and the RP line at pure says "/pjʊə(ɹ)/, /pjɔː(ɹ)/". No rhyme with cur/purr is indicated there; only in the lines labeled US. DCDuring, I don't think this pronunciation is regional. At least, it sounds fully natural to me and I'm not from Appalachia. For me, original /ʊəɹ/ can be replaced by /ɝ/ in almost any word where it's preceded by one of the palatal or palatoalveolar consonants /j, ʃ, tʃ, ʒ, dʒ/. I have free variation between /ʃʊɹ/ and /ʃɝ/ for sure, and /kjɝ/ and /pjɝ/ are also in free variation with /kjʊɹ/ and /pjʊɹ/, though the latter are probably more common in my speech. In multisyllabic words, however, /ɝ/ is even more common; I'm more likely to use it in curious and purity than I am in cure and pure, and I'm quite likely to rhyme fury and jury with furry and hurry. Insurance and Europe are also at least as likely, if not more likely, to have /ɝ/ in my speech as /ʊɹ/, though both sounds are possible in all the words I've mentioned. —Angr 18:40, 12 April 2013 (UTC) What does one use for facts in this realm of discourse? Where are the oral corpora? None of the OneLook references have pronunciations shown as "pyoor" or similar, with no differentiation. We sure could use an RfVP process. DCDuring TALK 19:43, 12 April 2013 (UTC) When I'm unsure of a pronunciation I search for that word at YouTube. Often I find several videos in which someone pronounces that word. Of course it's much harder if you're looking for a pronunciation specific to one dialect (group) and it doesn't really give you an idea as to how common one pronunciation is as opposed to another, but at least it helps you confirm that a certain pronunciation exists. —Angr 20:06, 12 April 2013 (UTC) When is Google going to transcribe and index YouTube for us? DCDuring TALK 20:34, 12 April 2013 (UTC) That would be cool! In the meantime, though, the recorded speaker at Wordsmyth.net has [ɝ] in pure, as well as in cure, fury, curious, and furious but [ʊɹ] in jury. —Angr 21:06, 14 April 2013 (UTC) The current definition of this isn't exactly helpful. What does "have in" mean? —CodeCat 15:38, 11 April 2013 (UTC) According to [25], this verb has two meanings: "to have on hand, to have available" and "to have visiting". I don't know which of those meanings "have in" is supposed to be, though the second seems more likely. Are there dialects of English where it's possible to say, "We've had my mother in for two weeks"? —Angr 20:53, 11 April 2013 (UTC) I'd say it was more like the first of those: you could say "I'm going to the shop because we don't have any food in" or something like that. BigDom (t • c) 22:03, 11 April 2013 (UTC) You could? In what dialect? Certainly if I were editing a text, I'd change that to "I'm going to the shop because we don't have any food" without thinking about it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:24, 12 April 2013 (UTC) Use of "have in" as a gloss is an example of a not uncommon problem. Verb + particle constructions, whether or not one considers them SoP or entryworthy, are highly ambiguous out of context. Rarely should they be the sole definiens. DCDuring TALK 19:48, 12 April 2013 (UTC) I tried to clarify the definition, hope it's fine now. BTW, "have in" seems to have been taken from an online dictionary. Longtrend (talk) 10:35, 15 April 2013 (UTC) Looks much better now, thanks. —Angr 21:21, 17 April 2013 (UTC) Maybe have in should also be an entry? —CodeCat 21:25, 17 April 2013 (UTC) An entry which doesn't know whether it's a noun or adjective. First definition is worded as an adjective, second definition is worded as a noun. -- Liliana • 19:17, 12 April 2013 (UTC) Until the introduction to push-button controls, there was basically only SoP use of rotary + dial ("The [phone/radio set] was equipped with a rotary dial."). Rotary dial has been used to differentiate the older type in rotary dial phone/telephone. Rotary dial alone is not commonly used as a noun ("He still had on of those rotary dials."). Strictly speaking, I think all of the use as a nominal is a fused-head construction with the fused head being obvious from context. But contributors get so much fun from this kind of entry, why not have it anyway? It needs an {{rfi}}. As to the PoS, I don't think its usage shows much adjectivity apart from attributive use. OTOH there is some predicative use, certainly more than three instances. DCDuring TALK 20:26, 12 April 2013 (UTC) A rotary dial is the thing on the front of the phone that you turn when you dial. The fact that it turns, instead of being fixed like the dial on an analog wristwatch, is what makes it rotary. A rotary-dial phone is one that has a rotary dial instead of push-buttons, and is thus attributive use of the noun, "rotary dial" being a variant stemming from failure to hyphenate. Of course, etymology doesn't dictate usage, so it may have been reanalyzed as a compound adjective: one can speak of either a rotary phone or a dial phone (both with the same meaning as "rotary dial phone"), so it might be a pleonasm like hot water heater. It looks to me like we need to add a noun sense to rotary dial to cover the dial itself- unless it's SOP. The entry at rotary phone assumes that we already have one. If there really is an adjective sense, then the second sense in the current entry could be either a nominalization of the first sense, or a synechdoche based on the rotary dial phone's main feature. It also wouldn't surprise me if there were both adjective and attributive-noun variations in use- both hyphenated and non-hyphenated examples are fairly common. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:12, 12 April 2013 (UTC) We have entries at four foot for a rail transport term and 4-foot for a curling term and four-foot as an alternative form of both. I've fairly crudely linked them as alternative forms of each other as a quick glance showed they're both used for both. It would be good though if someone could take a look at them, and maybe see whether the entries are actually at the most common form for each meaning or if it would be better to put both on the same page? Thryduulf (talk) 13:03, 15 April 2013 (UTC) Oh and there are the related terms six foot (rail transport), 12-foot (curling) and 8-foot (curling). I've not looked around all the other forms of these, but they should probably be handled similarly. Thryduulf (talk) 13:06, 15 April 2013 (UTC) I've added the missing "=" in the header for 4-foot. I don't know which should be the main form. How many more are there of these? Dbfirs 07:26, 18 April 2013 (UTC) I only know the rail transport uses of four foot and six foot, I found the curling senses when adding the numerical form as an alternative version. I don't know of any others, other than occasional uses of things like n foot (with the meaning of the space between the rails) on railways of different gauges where the gauge is rounded down to the nearest who number of feet, although at least in Britain "four foot" is also when the gap is less than four feet. I don't have citations for any of that though. Thryduulf (talk) 15:54, 4 May 2013 (UTC) well-known and little-known[edit] We have an entry for well-known, but not little-known. Should these be considered words? WordNet includes both of them; Merriam Webster has 'well-known', but not 'little-known'; Same for Oxford English. Seems strange to me that we would only have one though. Kaldari (talk) 02:07, 18 April 2013 (UTC) The OED includes little-known amongst its "little" compounds. Dbfirs 07:23, 18 April 2013 (UTC) Dbfirs 07:23, 18 April 2013 (UTC) COCA has 26 hyphenated terms with at least three uses (ie, easily attestable) that are headed by known in which it is modified by an adverb. I think most of them are not entry-worthy because they represent only orthgraphic clarifications of what the adverb modifies. Little-known and well-known are apparently considered more entry-worthy by some lexicographers probably just because they are more common and the definitions of these adverbs as used in these terms "not much" and "fully") are not widely known in contemporary English apart from these and very similar terms. DCDuring TALK 13:59, 18 April 2013 (UTC) set a fire[edit] Is the sense of set used in she set several fires covered by our entry [[set]]? Am I correct in analysing set as suggesting more criminality than start? (Can one set a fire in a fire pit at a summer camp so that children can roast marshmallows over it, or can one only start such a fire? I know one can either start or set a fire in a house so as to burn it down.) - -sche (discuss) 23:18, 22 April 2013 (UTC) I hardly speak English, but for me the "set" in "Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb. Engineer: Somebody has planted a bomb." didn't mean a criminal act, but an intentional act. I think that's because I would understand "she set fire" to mean "she intentionally lit a fire", not "she criminally lit a fire". --80.114.178.7 02:43, 24 April 2013 (UTC) I don't think it's criminality so much as destructiveness: you set fire to something as an attempt to burn it up, not just to light it. Of course, there's considerable overlap between criminality and destructiveness- but they're not the same. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:29, 24 April 2013 (UTC) "Somebody set us up the Internet" wouldn't be seen as a destructive act at first. --80.114.178.7 03:45, 24 April 2013 (UTC) ... and, in older UK usage, to "set a fire" is to arrange the combustible materials in a grate ready to be lit. Dbfirs 07:38, 24 April 2013 (UTC) References to dictionaries[edit] Should editors really provide references (not citations or user examples) to dictionaries for word definitions, e.g. see cartomancy or 左利き? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:59, 24 April 2013 (UTC) I don't see why not. — Ungoliant (Falai) 01:13, 24 April 2013 (UTC) It's like admitting that the source is not the editors themselves but "stolen" from another dictionary. Firstly, it seems a bit unethical or there could be a copyright issue, secondly, entries may change significantly from the original version and not match what the dictionary says. We don't provide references to translations either. I just want to verify the exact policy on this, if it exists. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:36, 24 April 2013 (UTC) I am not a lawyer, but I don't see how citing one's sources can be a copyright problem. Try asking User:BD2412 for more about US copyright law. Adding dictionary references seems like a good thing to me, and can only help us keep reliability and accountability higher. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:03, 24 April 2013 (UTC) Thanks. Can we then (if it's OK to use commercial dictionaries) import or digitise and enter here existing commercial dictionaries in bulk, including their definitions, usexes, etc.? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 02:46, 24 April 2013 (UTC) No, because exact phrasing of a definition (unless it's just "Wörterbuch — dictionary" or something obvious like that) or a usex is intellectual copyright in US law. (Wiktionary's servers are in the US, so US law applies.) But again, ask BD2412 for more. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:13, 24 April 2013 (UTC) Not the same. It's one thing to paraphrase a definition and cite where you got the information from, it's another thing entirely taking definitions en masse. You can't really copyright any single piece of information, but the expression of that information or the collection of it as a whole can be copyrighted. In the case of definitions, it's arguably a gray area, because it's hard to show that one has added something new with a short and somewhat stylistically-constrained piece of text. At any rate, it's perfectly legitimate to use another dictionary as the source of the concept behind the definition, as long as we express that concept in our own words. If we do that, then there's nothing illegitimate about showing our sources. There are practical issues such as the ones you mentioned, but they're the same for any references on any wiki. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:22, 24 April 2013 (UTC) Plagiarism, while distasteful, is not illegal. So long as the amount copied is small enough to qualify for fair use, no citation to source is required by law. However, it should be required by our policies, unless the definition is so simple that there is really no more concise way to put it, and it would have ended up that way whether copied or not. Cheers! bd2412 T 04:39, 24 April 2013 (UTC) I think I have "immoral" and "illegal" slightly confused :) As long as our current methods are legally blameless, it all sounds good to me. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:35, 24 April 2013 (UTC) Anna Russell can help you there. In her analysis of Die Walküre she says that Siegmund "falls madly in love with Sieglinde, regardless of the fact that she's already married to Hunding, which is immoral, and she's his own sister, which is illegal." Anyway, I agree that while we shouldn't be copying other dictionaries' definitions word for word (even if they're out of copyright, which is legal), there's nothing wrong with providing links to other dictionaries so that users can verify our definitions and see what other dictionaries have had to say on the topic. —Angr 07:57, 24 April 2013 (UTC) Thanks for all the replies. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 11:03, 24 April 2013 (UTC) Coincidentally (or I think it is) I reviewed Wiktionary:References. I'd like some input on it, please. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:08, 24 April 2013 (UTC) I think we should most often use the heading "External links" rather than "References", unless the dictionaries were used to actually source something, such as etymology. This is already the practice in many entries. As regards Wiktionary:References, I think it should have remained a redirect to WT:ELE; what happened to the page is the characteristic policy or guideline creep that happens to Wiktionary namespace pages uncontrolled by WT:VOTE. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2013 (UTC) By the way, this is a Beer parlour subject, as it does not pertain to a single word. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:12, 24 April 2013 (UTC) "He has no money to speak of." I'm surprised we don't have an entry for "to speak of", a very common idiom. I would put it in the requested entries page but I think this urgently needs to be created. ---> Tooironic (talk) 04:11, 25 April 2013 (UTC) I think it is a type of adjective, and means significant, of significance, worth mentioning. —Stephen (Talk) 20:05, 26 April 2013 (UTC) Not sure how to categorise this. Is there a template for egyptian suffixes? Hyarmendacil (talk) 03:07, 26 April 2013 (UTC) When there isn't a specific template, you should use {{head}}. — Ungoliant (Falai) 03:16, 26 April 2013 (UTC) Meanings for the English auxiliary verb can[edit] The English auxiliary verb can currently has only two translation glosses but I know of at least 4 words in Finnish that can be glossed from can and they are mostly not interchangeable. I have therefore suggested (here) that the current two translation glosses be extended to four. Are there any polyglots out there who would like to comment on my suggestion as to how this word should be glossed for translation or check over some of the existing translations (at least one of which seems to be wrong). The other problem is that I don't think it should be split up only if this is only a problem for Finnish, so I am wondering if the same problem of translation exists in other languages. If it does, then maybe four translation are needed. 80.223.105.147 09:33, 26 April 2013 (UTC) All languages have this problem with some words. If the split is simple and straightforward, you could list the two translations along with qualifying comments. I think some cases are too complex for this strategy, and it is better to just put one translation, and then on the page for the translation, the other cases could be clarified with usage examples and links to those other possibilities. —Stephen (Talk) 19:56, 26 April 2013 (UTC) I see this example : "My computer goes idle after 30 minutes without use." What does this mean ? It means that it goes to sleep. —Stephen (Talk) 19:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC) Yes, the technical term is hibernate. Strictly speaking, your computer is "idle" when you are not giving it anything to process, so it is technically idle for 30 minutes before it goes into hibernation mode (to save power). I've corrected the colloquialism that you saw in the idle entry. It was misleading. Dbfirs 20:16, 28 April 2013 (UTC) Weeaboo[edit] Hi! Isn't this word from a 90's video game where you slap a duck and it would say "weeaboo"? Shikku27316 (talk) 02:54, 27 April 2013 (UTC) No. weeaboo has the correct etymology.--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:55, 27 April 2013 (UTC) I'm guessing you read this page [26] which appears to be made up. Equinox ◑ 10:55, 28 April 2013 (UTC) So someone just randomly made up sounds and gave it that meaning? Or maybe it is linked to "Wapanese" somehow? Shikku27316 (talk) 05:23, 18 May 2013 (UTC) See the etymology we already have on the word's page. Equinox ◑ 05:24, 18 May 2013 (UTC) But it just says it was made up, it doesn't say it's made up sounds or anything. Shikku27316 (talk) 03:44, 24 May 2013 (UTC) 4chan randomly chose this word to replace "wapanese". The word itself is taken from the Perry Bible Fellowship comic, which was created by Nicholas Gurewitch; you would have to contact him to learn more about its origin (but know that he had no idea his word would become used for "wapanese" by others). Equinox ◑ 13:00, 26 May 2013 (UTC) I don't see this use of cast in the noun section of cast. I'm not sure how to define this use, I think it may be more general than I'm thinking of it. "This vanilla ice cream has a yellow cast from the egg yolks." It seems to be sense 10 of the noun. —Angr 15:51, 27 April 2013 (UTC) You'd complain if you were hung with a new rope[edit] Indicating that somebody is never content. What's the correct lemma form for this? "You'd", "someone would"...? There are many different forms, too, e.g. "hung/hanged", "complain/bitch/gripe". Equinox ◑ 10:54, 28 April 2013 (UTC) Should really be hanged I suppose. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:48, 28 April 2013 (UTC)  Done Created you'd complain if you were hung with a new rope, with usage notes. Equinox ◑ 13:31, 26 May 2013 (UTC) Simple and good, adjectives for people[edit] Dear Sirs and Madams, I wish to ask you what is the adjective for a person to tell he/she is uncoplicated, because "simple person" in English means "stupid person". I also ask you if telling "good person" is the same as "nice person/good sort". Best regards 1. Not certain what you mean, but possibly straightforward or down to earth. 2. A nice person acts pleasantly and kindly. A good person does good deeds. Equinox ◑ 15:34, 28 April 2013 (UTC) We are missing the common sense of "sunken eyes/cheeks". Anyone care to add it? ---> Tooironic (talk) 08:53, 29 April 2013 (UTC) Why was direkto deleted? I've recreated it for Esperanto and found that all the conjugations existed. Looking at the log, it existed for 5 years before it was deleted, so I'd like to see what was there in case there was something that can be merged into the current bare bones entry. I tried to restore it, but it looks like that just made things worse. Weird. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:32, 30 April 2013 (UTC) Never mind. It just took a minute to come back. At any rate, Neskaya (talk • contribs) was deleting (presumably bad) Hiligaynon entries, and there was some collateral damage. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:38, 30 April 2013 (UTC) The definition is "A mythical beast traditionally represented as having the legs of a buck, the body of a horse, the tail of a lion with a single spiral horn on its head; a symbol of virginity." We have a 17th century painting that shows exactly what I would expect; a horse with a horn. I don't want to just delete it, but this "traditional" (whose tradition? when?) representation is not the normal representation of a unicorn.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:38, 1 May 2013 (UTC) Not quite. If you look at the right foreleg in the painting you can see it has a cloven hoof, so its legs are more goat-like than horse-like. (It also means that if unicorns chew their cud, they're kosher.) The tail isn't lion-like, though. This picture also shows cloven hooves and a somewhat ambiguous tail. For more on this traditional representation, see w:Unicorn#Heraldry and the sources it cites. —Angr 10:36, 1 May 2013 (UTC) grammar question[edit] Is this sentence correct: "Recently he has had a lot of bills to pay. Besides, he has lost a lot of money gambling." Specifically, is there a problem with the use of "besides" here? Thanks. ---> Tooironic (talk) 04:07, 1 May 2013 (UTC) It's definitely colloquially correct. I think you need a NP after besides to be more formally correct: Besides which, he has lost…. But get confirmation of that.​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC) I don't think it is used much in formal English, but it is definitely "correct". Our entry for besides seems reliable, based on my reading of MWDEU and Garner's Modern American Usage 3rd, both of which discuss the beside/besides alternations and distinctions. DCDuring TALK 15:49, 3 May 2013 (UTC) Same as my comment below, not incorrect just not optimal. I suppose moreover is better but much more formal, so wouldn't work well in a colloquial conversation. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:52, 3 May 2013 (UTC) Plurals that link to the page they're on[edit] Greetings. I recently noticed that on the series page, because the plural of series is series, it gives you a link to the page you're already on where it normally has the plural of the word (just below the "Noun" heading). Also, there isn't a meaning on the page stating that "series" can also be plural. Is there any guidelines for how Wiktionary normally deals with this (words who's singular and plural forms are identical)? Thanks. TeragR (talk) 22:18, 2 May 2013 (UTC) I don't know about a written guideline, but I believe the most common practice is if an inflected form is a homograph of its lemma form, then the inflected form (1) isn't listed separately and (2) appears in bold rather than being linked in the headword line and any inflection table. See for example series#Latin, where the vocative singular and nominative/accusative/vocative plural aren't listed separately and are bold in the inflection table. I'd say the plural ought to be bold rather than a link in the English section as well. —Angr 23:30, 2 May 2013 (UTC) Understood. Thanks! TeragR (talk) 03:31, 15 May 2013 (UTC) grammar question 2[edit] Is this sentence incorrect? "House prices have soared in the last few years." To my ears it sounds wrong - shouldn't it be "over the past few years"? ---> Tooironic (talk) 11:26, 3 May 2013 (UTC) Stylistically, I'd prefer during or over, but in is common and correct. "Soar over" might start a reader on the wrong track, the more literal meaning of soar over. DCDuring TALK 15:52, 3 May 2013 (UTC) The preposition could also be omitted: "House prices have soared these last few years." (I think I would say "these" for some reason.) DCDuring TALK 15:56, 3 May 2013 (UTC) I would say "over the past few years" but I'd also say it (the initial phrase) is not incorrect, just not optimal. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:12, 3 May 2013 (UTC) When looking for cites for this word, I found several results that seem to be related to a use in marine biology, probably with a different etymology. I wasn't able to work out a meaning though, so if someone else who knows more about that field than I do (not difficult) wants to take a look that would be good. Thryduulf (talk) 15:45, 4 May 2013 (UTC) Hmm. I think it is a muscle that causes a fish's fin to bend (somewhat akin to an "erector", "depressor" etc. It can also mean "a metal framework that holds a carboy, allowing it to be inclined for pouring", and an alternative form of "inclinometer". SemperBlotto (talk) 16:00, 4 May 2013 (UTC) The fish muscle and carbody senses are presumably from incline + -ator? Is that likely to the be the etymology for the "inclinometer" sense too? Thryduulf (talk) 17:40, 4 May 2013 (UTC) void under nails[edit] Is there an English noun for the space under the free margin of one's fingernails (which has the tendency of collecting dirt)? --Hekaheka (talk) 13:13, 5 May 2013 (UTC) Not that I've ever heard. When someone is said in English to "have dirty fingernails", it is that dirt-filled void that is meant. Metonymy at work again. DCDuring TALK 16:42, 5 May 2013 (UTC) It is sometimes called the subungual space in scientific literature. Equinox ◑ 16:43, 5 May 2013 (UTC) Searching for unguis, I didn't find that term in anatomical atlases. The closest I found was free margin for the edge of the nail under which said dirt can readily accumulate. DCDuring TALK 16:50, 5 May 2013 (UTC) Where did you find that? Just in the OP's question of four hours ago? —Angr 17:15, 5 May 2013 (UTC) All right, thanks for your help. I'll include this info in the entry on kynnenalus. --Hekaheka (talk) 22:49, 5 May 2013 (UTC) Sometimes, under the fingernails, you can find not only dirt but the truth :). See подноготная. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 04:34, 6 May 2013 (UTC) Yep. Sometimes in the form of DNA evidence... —Angr 18:52, 6 May 2013 (UTC) I added a sense to brownout: a temporary firehouse closing. I have not bothered adding citations, other than one to the NYT on the Discussion page. It's very easy to Google multiple newspaper articles on the subject. I'm unsure about certain minor issues. The alternative form brown-out simply refers back to brownout. But the alternative form brown out repeats the already existing two senses—I have not added the new sense, and uniquely includes the verb sense. It seems from the upkeep point of view this should all be on one main page. There is a reference to the Wikipedia article Brownout. But this article is simply a redirect page. Should the individual articles be separately referred to over here? (Note that I created a redlink appropriate for the new sense.) If not, and we refer to the disambiguation page, should we follow WP's recommended style here, linking to the explicitly named Brownout (disambiguation) redirect? The rationale doesn't actually apply here: this cross-wiki linking is from one kind of disambiguation page (multiple definitions) to another kind (multiple links), so perhaps no one is fooled. Over on Wikipedia, the Brownout disambiguation page refers back here, to four variants. I assume this should refer to one entry, and the alternative spellings given as part of the article directly. Should rolling brownout get a separate entry? I added it as a Usage note. Thanks for any suggestions. Choor monster (talk) 16:59, 6 May 2013 (UTC) With regard to your first minor issue, there is a rule for such compounds (I can give no authority, but it is a rule /I/ use) that the hyphenated form is a noun, while the two-word form is a verb; e.g. a soccer match starts with a kick-off, when the team that won the toss will kick off. If this rule applies, brown-out and brown out are not really alternative forms, but noun and verb respectively; brownout probably covers both. I wish you luck with editing the entries to reflect this! Peter Kenny —This unsigned comment was added by 80.189.159.121 (talk). I've made the noun section of brown out use {{alternative form of}} Actually it's good that they have a disambiguation page, otherwise we'd have to create a link to three entries. Does it make a difference? That's their problem. I'd fix it, but they'd probably revert. Certainly. But note that if "temporary closing of a fire station" is only used as rolling brownout (I don't know if it is), it should only be at rolling brownout, not at brownout. — Ungoliant (Falai) 23:00, 8 May 2013 (UTC) Could someone who speaks French check this edit and, if Echtio is right that the usex was not grammatically correct, remove it? The version Echtio added doesn't contain the headword. google books:"je n'ai jamais vu" suggests that string is well-attested (but dated/archaic?). - -sche (discuss) 20:22, 7 May 2013 (UTC) "je n'ai jamais vu" is perfectly modern, standard French. His point (gonna assume male until told otherwise) is in this particular construction, it would mean "the biggest cake that I have never seen" (not "that I have ever seen"). I tend to agree but I'm not sure enough to remove the example and definition that goes with it. I didn't think this construction took the subjunctive either, so "le plus grand gâteau que j'ai vu" (instead of "que j'aie vu"). Clearly this needs sorting out using evidence and not removed unilaterally. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:55, 7 May 2013 (UTC) The definition is clearly wrong and should be removed. In the case of "the biggest cake I have ever seen", the correct French translation is « le plus gros gâteau que j'aie jamais vu ». The original example, « le plus gros gâteau que je n'ai jamais vu », does mean "the biggest cake that I have never seen" (and not just litteraly). I also have doubts on the second definition. Who wrote this, and based on what? Dakdada (talk) 19:58, 8 May 2013 (UTC) This seems like a not-uncommon use of 'expletive ne' to me, maybe I'm crazy....I easily found some examples on line though: Singer décrit ce film comme le plus ambitieux et le plus grand qu'il n'ait jamais fait. here J'avais eu un réel coup de cœur pour cette émission, notamment pour le décor, le plus grand que je n'aie jamais vu sur un plateau de télévision. here. Ƿidsiþ 12:01, 9 May 2013 (UTC) Also this from Dumas's La Dame aux camélias: 'Ajoutez que Marguerite était revenue de ce voyage plus belle qu'elle n'avait jamais été.' Ƿidsiþ 12:03, 9 May 2013 (UTC) Those would go under the third sense (expletive ne). In this case, ne is usually not mandatory, and it is not negative. The fourth sense and example are still wrong. Dakdada (talk) 15:59, 13 May 2013 (UTC) Query probable typo in entry for "an die Kandare nehmen"[edit] Hello I'm new to this and not sure how to handle it, so apologies if I've got it wrong. The entry in the English Wiktionary for the German phrase "an die Kandare nehmen" says "to put a tight reign on." The word Kandare means a curb bit for a horse, so surely it should be "a tight rein"? It would still be a red link, but it would be correct. For future reference, could I have gone ahead and edited this myself, as with any Wikipedia entry, or are there more formalities with Wiktionary? I don't expect to be able to make many corrections - I'm just a regular user rather than a dictionary creator - but if it does happen I will create an account. Thanks for advice Peter Kenny Hi, thanks for pointing that out, I fixed it. And of course you can always go ahead and fix things yourself (you don't even need an account for it). Longtrend (talk) 13:03, 8 May 2013 (UTC) Thanks. Just a minor nit-pick about your edit. By including the word 'someone' you restrict the application to a person. The original context in which I found it was: "Singapur nimmt die heimischen Banken mit neuen Regulatorien an die Kandare." (Handelsblatt press summary, 8 May 2013), which shows a wider use. I think it is better with 'someone' deleted, so I have done that; hope you agree. Peter Kenny That's right, thanks for fixing. Longtrend (talk) 21:15, 9 May 2013 (UTC) The IPA pronunciations that we have claim that this pronounces itself as IPA: /mənt/, but to me it usually sounds like IPA: /mɪnt/, sometimes IPA: /mɛnt/. For this reason and others, I'm starting to worry that I have dysacusis. --Æ&Œ (talk) 18:29, 8 May 2013 (UTC) No, I don't think that's the problem. It depends where you've heard it. I've heard all three. You are probably correct that BBC English is slowly moving away from IPA: /mənt/ towards IPA: /mɛnt/, but I don't think we should change our entry yet. Dbfirs 17:32, 23 May 2013 (UTC) I was looking beaujolais (which may or may not have an English meaning) and found "A red AOC wine from Burgundy, France". Okay, so what does AOC mean? It's not a British military wine, and the French definition looks about right. Then either AOC needs an English definition along the lines of the French, or beaujolais needs its definition rewritten to be all in English.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:16, 8 May 2013 (UTC) The definition is of the French word, therefore the French definition of AOC is understood. Anyway, it is a trivial matter to remove it. Done. SemperBlotto (talk) 21:21, 8 May 2013 (UTC) I don't see why the French definition is understood; definitions in the English Wiktionary should be in English.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:28, 9 May 2013 (UTC) Appellation d'origine contrôlée. — Ungoliant (Falai) 11:28, 9 May 2013 (UTC) There was an RFV for this, but I think I've found enough citations to recreate. Some of them are not really Modern English, so I'd like to get input before I create it. If it doesn't warrant {{archaic}}, then there's a case for filing it under Middle English; there's another Prose Merlin cite around if it needs it, which would make three. Hyarmendacil (talk) 08:27, 10 May 2013 (UTC) There's not three modern English cites there; there's an 1859 one and a 1954 one. 1500 is the ISO dividing line between modern English and Middle English; except for Widsith, who doesn't believe in Middle English, the editors with an opinion on it have generally felt that's as good a division as any. Your Merlin cites aren't independent, I don't think, but Middle English only needs one anyway.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:20, 10 May 2013 (UTC) (PS, it's not that I "don't believe in" ME, I just think it's more academically normal, and more useful, to treat it as a historical stage of "English" rather than a separate independent language. Ƿidsiþ 11:33, 10 May 2013 (UTC)) I am inclined to agree. It's really English with a slightly different grammar and pronunciation. I think many have even given up making ME entries because they're basically the same as English ones. Leasnam (talk) 16:21, 14 May 2013 (UTC) That's true for many pairs of languages. They're certainly not spelled the same, which makes a lot more difference for us then it does the OED. In any case, the Middle English cites couldn't be used to cite fremish because they weren't spelled that way, and adopting English's three-cites-with-that-spelling rule for Middle English would really hurt the ability to cite any Middle English.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:45, 14 May 2013 (UTC) Middle English is not "really English with a slightly different grammar and pronunciation". The grammar, spelling, and pronunciation are greatly different, and (most importantly for a dictionary) a lot of words have significantly different meanings to modern English. It would be tedious for both editors and readers if all of these senses were listed under the ==English== header and marked {{archaic}} or even {{context|Middle English}}. Much better to treat ME as a separate language. Also, keeping them separate allows ME to have a separate CFI threshold than ModE. —Angr 22:16, 14 May 2013 (UTC) Oops sorry, I saw the citation page and recreated the entry, not having seen this discussion. Feel free to redelete if necessary (although it looks good to me). Ƿidsiþ 11:30, 10 May 2013 (UTC) I went looking in the OED 1 for Fremish and found As you can see, all cites are before 1500 and neither of them are spelled fremish.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2013 (UTC) I've added a third cite from Usenet. The Middle English should probably go to pages that match their spelling; Middle English is a pretty strong argument for merging spellings like the OED does.--Prosfilaes (talk) 12:10, 10 May 2013 (UTC) Merriam-Webster offers a couple definitions for this word, but searching for google books:"cobhouse" and google books:"cobhouses" seems to entirely turn up hits for a different sense or two. Can anyone demonstrate that either of the M-W senses are citable, or figure out what the BGC sense(s) is/are? Thanks —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:18, 11 May 2013 (UTC) I think we miss some sense of cob, such as MW 1913's: "A lump or piece of anything, usually of a somewhat large size, as of coal, or stone." I think it would need to specifically include wood, too. DCDuring TALK 03:17, 11 May 2013 (UTC) I've taken a run at some definitions. DCDuring TALK 03:19, 11 May 2013 (UTC) ninefold decrease[edit] Hi! If I want to say that a company's profit has fallen and is nine times lower now, is it OK to write "a ninefold decrease" or "it took a ninefold tumble to.." or do -fold words only apply to growth? What's the alternative? --CopperKettle (talk) 02:47, 13 May 2013 (UTC) P.S. How does one write about a profit that is 2.5 times lower? "Fallen 2.5 times" seems unnatural. --CopperKettle (talk) 02:52, 13 May 2013 (UTC) It is clearer if one says that profits are 60% lower than what they were or 40% of what they were, for the "2.5-fold decrease", at least in business and non-scientific contexts. It seems to me that "X-fold increase" and, especially, "X-fold decrease" are mostly used in scientific and engineering contexts. DCDuring TALK 04:13, 13 May 2013 (UTC) It's confusing, because it isn't clear what it's nine times or 2.5 times of. I would say instead (if I understand what you meant) that it's fallen to one-ninth of what it was, or two-fifths/forty percent of what it was. Thank you! (yes; a decrease from a previous period); --CopperKettle (talk) 06:24, 13 May 2013 (UTC) I agree. I have trouble intrepreting "nine times lower now", let alone "ninefold decrease" or "ninefold tumble". I'd say "reduced to one ninth of what it was" or "reduced by eight ninths" or "reduced by 89%". Multiplication by a number greater than 1 makes things bigger, not smaller. —Angr 12:10, 13 May 2013 (UTC) The trouble is that the Russian language allows it easily, and original texts are peppered with with X-кратный (fold) decreases, especially in today's choppy economy. --CopperKettle (talk) 15:54, 13 May 2013 (UTC) I think of "X-fold decrease" as marketingspeak. It seems designed to give an advertiser a way of using a large number when expressing a product improvement (?) that is naturally expressed as a reduction of something considered bad. If I say I "reduced waiting time by 4 seconds", "cut waiting time from 8 to 4 seconds", or even "cut waiting time in half", it doesn't sound as impressive as a "twice as fast" or "double the speed" or "200% faster". DCDuring TALK 16:39, 13 May 2013 (UTC) The translator's job is not to slavishly follow the source language but to make the text understandable in the target language. A profit that's "nine times lower" than it was has fallen 88.9% (or "about 90%" or "almost 90%" if the "nine times" is approximate rather than precise); one that's "2.5 times lower" than it was has fallen 60%. Even DCDuring's example, though, the "twice as", "double", "200%" examples are all being used to describe something that has increased, namely the speed. It's the whole formula of "n times less X" that bothers me, because (as I said above) multiplication by a number greater than 1 makes things bigger, and using it with something that's getting smaller is just going to baffle people. —Angr 17:03, 13 May 2013 (UTC) n-fold decrease is valid (and common) even for non-integer n. You can get 2.5-fold decrease and 4.1-fold decease and even down to two decimal places. In a non-technical context you might say "[property] has suffered a 250% decrease", but this isn't standard beyond 1000%. It would be better then to say 'a factor-of-10 decrease' or '10-fold decrease'. 'n times less X' is easy to understand when you interpret it as a factor-of-n decrease - i.e. just divide by n (except where n < 1!). Hyarmendacil (talk) 21:48, 17 May 2013 (UTC) Common, yes, but certainly not standard to anyone who tries to think precisely! Dbfirs 17:10, 23 May 2013 (UTC) I've added twice as less, no marketing talk examples. Choor monster (talk) 16:59, 13 May 2013 (UTC) One of the citations, "men and women with higher qualifications were twice as less likely to be...", is IMO "twice as {less likely} to..." rather than "{twice as less} likely to...". - -sche (discuss) 19:43, 13 May 2013 (UTC) I'm having a hard time seeing the difference. The meaning becomes "half as likely" either way. (I can't bring myself to type in "much" here.) I think what's really going on is that "twice as ..." means "half as ..." when the blank is reduction. The cited Orr book, in its preface, mentions "twice as small as". For what it's worth, Orr specifically says these usages are from BEV. Her book begins by explaining how she learned, the hard way, that standard idioms and prepositions frequently meant different things to her math students. Choor monster (talk) 19:57, 13 May 2013 (UTC) P.S. Thank you all for a very interesting discussion! Got busy and forgot to check up on it. --CopperKettle (talk) 07:44, 19 May 2013 (UTC) Australian slang: as/az[edit] On Australian TV, I hear people say things like "I thought this wedding was going to be boring as, but..." It seems to imply "as hell" or something like that. I believe the title of the show "Beached Az" is the same usage. Is that right? Or am I mishearing that? 76.100.115.189 Yes, I've heard it too. Not sure whether the word is omitted out of decency (e.g. "boring as f--k") or just to save time speaking. Equinox ◑ 00:53, 14 May 2013 (UTC) I've heard it a lot. I'd argue it's an entity in its own right, and not an abbrevation of a profanity - though that's likely to be its origin. Certainly, using it wouldn't be considered profane in any way. Hyarmendacil (talk) 01:35, 14 May 2013 (UTC) It's common colloquial Australian English (mainly used by younger people). "The concert was sick as!" There is a stress on "as". The expression isn't thought of as an abbreviation of a profanity. This, that and the other (talk) 03:01, 18 May 2013 (UTC) It reminds me of the UK expression "it's as near as, damn it", which should be at least mentioned somewhere, if not given its own entry. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:31, 18 May 2013 (UTC) Colonics[edit] Are there side effects of to having a colonic? —This comment was unsigned. You'll have to ask your doctor. We're a dictionary and can't help you with that. —Angr 17:29, 14 May 2013 (UTC) I've just created the FSVO intialism ("for some values only"), but we really need to define the meaning of "for some values only". It has a literal meaning in mathematics ("for some values of x"), but in internet slang usage it also has an indiomatic menaing, e.g. "FSVO "responsible, caring and kindly."". What part of speech is it though? Thryduulf (talk) 22:43, 15 May 2013 (UTC) Is the expression abbreviated for some values only or for some values of? The first seems to function as an adverbial adjunct. The second would seem to function as a preposition. DCDuring TALK 23:42, 15 May 2013 (UTC) As far as I know, it's short for for some values of, suggesting those "values" (or "meanings", "examples") were handpicked to promote/show/use a non-standard value/meaning/w:WP:POV. --80.114.178.7 20:45, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Compare http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1382/does-2-2-5-for-very-large-values-of-2 --80.114.178.7 03:10, 18 May 2013 (UTC) This has as its sole definition "(linguistics) elevated", but our entry on elevated doesn't contain any definition pertaining to linguistics, so the definition doesn't make any sense. Is the definition incorrect/inexact, or are we missing a definition on elevated? -- Liliana • 13:50, 17 May 2013 (UTC) What is meant by "elevated" is probably sense 2b here: "formal, lofty". I don't know if the label "linguistics" is really adequate, but it does refer in particular to a lofty way of talking/writing and I don't know if any of the existing senses of elevated covers that. Longtrend (talk) 14:09, 17 May 2013 (UTC) This entry has some errors in it, because "pra" is not a valid language code. "Prakrit" is not a single language, but rather a collection of languages. What should we do in this case? —CodeCat 14:44, 17 May 2013 (UTC) pra is a valid ISO 639-2 and -5 code, just like the other codes for language families and subfamilies, so there's no reason we shouldn't have {{pra}} just like we have {{cel}} and {{gem}} and {{ine}}. But obviously it can't be used with {{term}}; we need a real language for that. —Angr 15:03, 17 May 2013 (UTC) Oops, i see those are all red links, while {{etyl:pra}}, {{etyl:cel}}, {{etyl:gem}}, and {{etyl:ine}} are all blue. In the case of khanda, I found the Sanskrit origin at Wikipedia (and will confirm it with Monier-Williams when I get home tonight, if I remember), but the only thing we can do more generally in such cases is try to find a specific language the term derives from. —Angr 15:08, 17 May 2013 (UTC) Of the other English terms derived from Prakrit languages, Afghan uses {{term}} without specifying a language, beryl uses a bare link, and Dravidian uses {{term|lang=und}}. —Angr 15:38, 17 May 2013 (UTC) This kind of problem is not uncommon: I came across gumbo yesterday, and didn't know what I should do to fix it. This, that and the other (talk) 02:56, 18 May 2013 (UTC) What do you reckon? Worth categorising with Category:English irregular past participles? give over = "(intransitive, with with) cease" apparently. I have providing quotations for the sense in the entry, but under a different definition: "(usually in the imperative) To stop fooling around; to stop being annoying; to stop saying silly or flattering things." This seems overly specific, but it is claimed to be UK, idiomatic". I am not familiar with this usage. Is give over used intransitively without with? DCDuring TALK 13:13, 19 May 2013 (UTC) Yes. Usually just on its own as an interjection: 'Oh, give over!' Ƿidsiþ 13:33, 19 May 2013 (UTC) Thanks. The interjection seems to be what's left in speech of what was once much more common and not limited to the UK. I've left the usage example in the imperative, but reduced the definition to intransitive "stop" in line with usage over centuries. If you think the colloquial use is distinct from that sense, feel free to enter or reenter a correct current definition if it is more specific, perhaps as a subsense. DCDuring TALK 14:32, 19 May 2013 (UTC) "I told him to give over" sounds wrong; it's quite hard to use it other than as an imperative. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:56, 22 May 2013 (UTC) It doesn't sound wrong to me because I've often heard it. (Sentences such as "he gave over smoking" and "she's given over doing that" are also found colloquiallySorry, these are the transitive usage.) I think the colloquial usage is the same sense (not just in the imperative), but heard less often by modern speakers. Dbfirs 17:14, 23 May 2013 (UTC) In the etymology for concede, con- listed as "wholly" --- but linked to "with" or "together"? I know very little about how to read these variations; is there a way to decide between the two readings in this case? Dedeo sfi (talk) 20:58, 19 May 2013 (UTC) I have corrected con-#Latin. It is the sense of "thoroughly, wholly". DCDuring TALK 21:46, 19 May 2013 (UTC) Popper (can't find definition)[edit] I'm trying to find the definition for popper (or something similar; I'm not sure of the exact spelling) in regards to a person living in the Elizabethan era (in the 1500's or 1600's), probably in England. (E.g., "He was a popper.") I've looked at popper and poper, and neither of them seems to have it. Any idea where it might be? Thanks. TeragR (talk) 16:58, 22 May 2013 (UTC) I can't find it. Could it be a typo or scanno? Do you have a specific, extended quotation that you could provide? Or perhaps you could explain the context. DCDuring TALK 19:46, 22 May 2013 (UTC) Unfortunately, I don't have it spelled out in a piece of text, I just heard it spoken (in a video). It talks about how actors in this time period (the Elizabethan era, like I said above) weren't highly regarded, and it says they fell in social status somewhere between popper and assistant popper. I thought it was just a level of status in their society, but it could also be an occupation. (I don't see a sense like that though, either.) TeragR (talk) 20:46, 22 May 2013 (UTC) pauper. Actors did not receive a wage, but just passed the hat round. They were effectively beggars. SemperBlotto (talk) 20:49, 22 May 2013 (UTC) Yes, that's it. Thank you!TeragR (talk) 03:35, 23 May 2013 (UTC) The transcript of what you must have heard is here. DCDuring TALK 08:55, 23 May 2013 (UTC) I don't see how anyone can be an assistant pauper (though perhaps a joke was intended). Dbfirs 16:53, 23 May 2013 (UTC) Well, it is from a TV show, albeit PBS. DCDuring TALK 17:06, 23 May 2013 (UTC) Spanish translation[edit] Discussion moved to Wiktionary:Translation_requests#Spanish_translation. This entry cautions that it refers only to elderly humans and animals, while יָשָׁן is used to refer to old inanimate objects. What about plants? What word describes an old tree? - -sche (discuss) 08:19, 26 May 2013 (UTC) Most languages that make animacy distinctions treat plants as inanimate, so יָשָׁן would be my a priori guess. —Angr 21:14, 26 May 2013 (UTC) Interesting question. I believe a tree is זקן actually, at least in older Hebrew. The commentary of w:Rashi to the Babylonian Talmud, Avoda Zara 49, reads (in part) "אם הבריך או הרכיב יחור של ערלה באילן זקן מותרים פירותיהן מיד", for example, and that's my impression from, I guess, having seen it in various other places. But I await a native speaker (or someone who'll bother Googling) re modern Hebrew.​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:49, 27 May 2013 (UTC) Crumpet[edit] I don't blame Wiktionary for it, as other dictionaries missed it too. There must be another meaning for the word "crumpet" than a specific kind of cake or a desirable woman, for in P.G. Wodehouse's "Young Man in Spats", first published in 1936 the word clearly refers to a type of young man, wearing spats, like the title of the book states, but here the word is used to distinguish them from two other types of young man in spats that visit the Drones Club in London: "eggs" and "beans". As I'm not British, and even worse I'm Dutch, I have great difficulty, sensing the nuances in closely related non-temporary English slang words. Is there anyone who can help me out and tell me what are the differences between "an egg", "a bean" and "a crumpet" in Wodehouse's short stories? This is a Wodehouse invention, probably not suitable for a dictionary: it is only used in his books. See Eggs,_Beans_and_Crumpets and Drones_Club. Equinox ◑ 12:58, 26 May 2013 (UTC) Irregular Russian Pluralization? (голоса/копокола)[edit] While in the nominative case most Russian plurals (nouns at least) end with -ы or -и but I've recently come across a few that end with -а such as "голоса" and "колокола". Being a novice at the Russian language, I was curious if anyone could enlighten me as to the reason for this? Much obliged. Different nouns follow different patterns, often depending on the gender of the noun. -ы or -и are most common for masculine or feminine nouns, but -а or -я for neuter nouns. There is a lot more information on w:Russian grammar. —CodeCat 01:39, 28 May 2013 (UTC) A contributor noticed that the citations for this entry were for an adjective sense that we didn't have, so they tried (and failed) to add a definition based on them. I corrected it so it's not blatantly wrong, but it's still not quite right. In the cites, it's used in the phrase "conflate reading" (using an obscure and specialized sense of reading), but a Google Books search on "a conflate" turns up combinations such as "conflate text" and "conflate manuscript". It also turns up the phrase "a conflate", which means that the adjective sense may just be attributive use of a noun sense that we don't have. It also seems to be broader than biblical criticism, since there's also the quote " Menes appears to be a ' conflate ' personage of legend." I can see why no one has tried until now to add a definition based on the cites. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:59, 28 May 2013 (UTC) Century Dictionary had it as an adjective: "In diplomatics, marked by conflation; inadvertently formed by combining two different readings into one: as, a conflate text or passage." I didn't find any cites for use in this context. This seems to actually behave like an adjective inasmuch as a few instances can be found of gradable use and predicate in the context of hermeneutics, but almost exclusively in Biblical interpretation. 1975, Frank Moore Cross, Shmarjahu Talmon, Qumran and the history of the biblical text, page 283: While it is not expansionistic, it is normally inferior to the Old Palestinian tradition preserved in 4QSam [sic], and often to the Egyptian despite the more conflate traits of the latter. I even found an instance of comparability on the web. The noun usage seems derived from this, but I don't know how to tell based on the evidence. DCDuring TALK 14:41, 28 May 2013 (UTC) study one's own interests[edit] To study one's own interests - does that mean (almost) "pursuing one's own interests"? I'm translating a sentence where a director of a company rebukes a counterpart by saying that while "we're faithful to the interests of our Republic, you're studying your own". Will that do? --CopperKettle (talk) 14:34, 28 May 2013 (UTC) It seems to be 'polite', inasmuch as the director is not actually accusing the other of overt actions contrary to his responsibilities as citizen, but mere investigation, though possibly implying covert action. Perhaps "seemingly pursing". DCDuring TALK 14:54, 28 May 2013 (UTC) Thank you! That's what I need. (0: --CopperKettle (talk) 15:00, 28 May 2013 (UTC) While fixing up the entry on hisself that had gotten mangled by a bot, I noticed that the entry gives that the plural of it is themselves. It would seem to me that in dialectal/nonstandard English, the corresponding theirselves would be more likely to be used. Anyone have any ideas as to whether there has been any serious study of the colocation of those two forms? — Carolina wren discussió 01:24, 29 May 2013 (UTC) It's probably possible to find the frequency of one collocation relative to another using the Ngram Viewer, although I can't offhand think of how. - -sche (discuss) 02:53, 29 May 2013 (UTC) Thanks. That was helpful, tho not to the specific formulation of my question. Quite a few of the uses of both nonstandard forms are in grammar books telling people not to use them. I was able to find at least one author who used them both in a context other than being a grammarian, but once dialectal language started getting printed regularly, the ratio of hisself to theirselves is noticeably higher than that of himself to themselves. It's also more volatile because of the sparsity of printed usage. Still, what I saw convinced me of the desirability of including both themselves and theirselves as plurals for hisself. — Carolina wren discussió 16:28, 29 May 2013 (UTC) Sounds good. - -sche (discuss) 17:26, 29 May 2013 (UTC) Berry Blue[edit] Wacky Watermelon[edit] "An artificial flavoring used in candies and punches that is colored blue and meant to simulate the flavoring of blueberries, blackberries or raspberries." This suggests that the flavouring itself is coloured; is that accurate? I would have thought that the colouring was just accompanied by a flavouring. Equinox ◑ 02:03, 31 May 2013 (UTC) A friend once told me that when her brother was a little boy, his favorite flavor was red. Nevertheless, I think you're right that the color and the flavor are two different things. A priori one would expect something called "berry blue" to be the color rather than the flavor, but who knows for sure? I'd say this is an issue for WP:RFV so we can find out exactly what "berry blue" really is. —Angr 05:38, 31 May 2013 (UTC) This is is the name for a KoolAid flavor, so it's based on the usual silly word-play: "how blue is it? Berry. Berry, berry blue, like a blueberry- get it? Har har har!" Other flavors have included Goofy Grape and Loudmouth Lime. It's one of those quasi-brand-name things like Crayola colors that probably aren't entry-worthy. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:26, 31 May 2013 (UTC) Yeah, the berry/very pun is quite a common marketing device, e.g. "Berry Delicious" bakery, "Berry Berry Good" frozen yogurt. Equinox ◑ 17:24, 1 June 2013 (UTC) There are enough instances of Berry Blue/berry blue as a product from different companies, and enough citations of those brands independent of those companies, to satisfy WT:BRAND Purplebackpack89 (Notes Taken) (Locker) 17:30, 1 June 2013 (UTC) Comment: Universally, all products that are flavored berry blue are colored some shade of blue. The color blue is an inherent part of the berry blue product. Not seeing the issue here, 'cept that once again, my contributions are being unfairly criticized. And to Chuck Entz, it's worth noting that Kool-Aid is hardly the only brand that markets/marketed a berry blue product Purplebackpack89 (Notes Taken) (Locker) 15:20, 1 June 2013 (UTC) There are no citations. Is this used in product names, in ingredients lists, or in industry jargon? There is no evidence supporting or denying any sense other than simple SOP. Even quoting the product packaging would be better than nothing at all. I have added this entry to WT:RFV#berry blue. —Michael Z. 2013-06-01 15:29 z For starters, as I've said time and again, SOP is bullshit and needs to be abolished. But even if it isn't, it isn't SOP because it isn't made from actual berries, it just tastes like them. And it doesn't taste like blue berries; sometimes it tastes like strawberries or raspberries, which aren't blue Purplebackpack89 (Notes Taken) (Locker) 15:34, 1 June 2013 (UTC) We're not going to abolish SOP, so deal with it. — Ungoliant (Falai) 16:17, 1 June 2013 (UTC) These aren't independent uses of the term Berry Blue as a noun – they are mentions of trademarked product titles, two Jello-O and one Yoplait. That is why they are capitalized. The second one is a product title Yoplait Berry Blue Blast Gogurt, and is not an independent use of Berry Blue as a noun. The definition is wrong, or at least it does not follow from the citations. None of these references is to any specific artificial flavouring. They are product marketing copy only, whether they are trademarked names or not. They are simple titles made up of the normal English words berry and blue, strung together to fool shoppers into believing the product has something to do with blueberries. —Michael Z. 2013-06-02 21:07 z "They are product marketing copy only". Uh, last time I checked, none of the citations are in materials printed by Jell-O, Yoplait or anybody associated with them. Therefore, not product marketing copy, and therefore acceptable citations. It is not forbidden to have product names as entries, and berry blue/Berry Blue isn't a product name, it's a flavor offered by many different companies. Much like rocky road. For some reason, you apparently have some vendetta against this entry. Please stop being disruptive Purplebackpack89 (Notes Taken) (Locker) 18:02, 5 June 2013 (UTC) The origin of the name is product marketing copy - it's used on artificially blueberry-flavoured products that can't have "blueberry" on the package because they contain no blueberries. The citations are essentially quoting the package copy. But in the interest of figuring out whether or how this is really a term, I have created Wacky Watermelon. Is this an English term? I think it might be a proper name, formed as a simple SOP of wacky + watermelon. If so, does it belong in Wiktionary or not? What do you all think? —Michael Z. 2013-06-06 19:04 z The two are not analogous Purplebackpack89 (Notes Taken) (Locker) 18:02, 10 June 2013 (UTC) I think it is not a good idea to create junk in order to refute junk. At Wikipedia this would fall foul of WP:GAME. Also the definition just suggests it's watermelon, without indicating that it's specifically a marketing brand, nor why the "wacky" is there (presumably to make it seem exciting and different from "boring" everyday flavours). Equinox ◑ 18:12, 10 June 2013 (UTC) I don't know what a better definition is. Please try to improve it based on the citations. Perhaps there is more than one sense represented. —Michael Z. 2013-06-17 20:21 z Yeah, the Watermelon entry is definitely junk. No citations or indication that it passes WT:BRAND (both of which Berry Blue has). I have nominated it for deletion Purplebackpack89 (Notes Taken) (Locker) 16:38, 12 June 2013 (UTC) There are seven citations. Maybe your reading glasses are junk. —Michael Z. 2013-06-17 20:21 z Perhaps this will help: 2010, Adriann Bautista, Sanctuary of Snow, page 157: Or the wonderment in not 1 but 2 rainbows as they cap off a berry blue sky now void of thick heavy rain clouds. 2010, A LaFaye, Nissa's Place, page 132: The washstand had white linen towels and a berry blue pitcher and basin. 2010, Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan, The Strain, page 325: People get nervous about poison, especially parents, but the truth is that rat poison is all over every building and street in Manhattan. Anything you see that resembles berry blue Pop Rocks or green kibble, you know rats have been spotted nearby. 2009, Amanda Little, Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells---Our Ride to the Renewable Future, page 350: Two blocks away from the 5-mile-long Industrial Canal that links Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River, a cluster of new, candy-colored homes—lemon yellow, tangerine, berry blue—on 8-foot stilts rises up from narrow grassy lots, adorning the scarred landscape like jewels in ash. 2007, M. M. Etheridge, Hannah: Woman in Red, page 69: Hannah, clad in her berry-blue cloak, quietly slipped into the space next to Jess. 2007, Jason Murk, Tokharian Tales, page 248: "It's good coffee, isn't it?" says Martin, and he's got good taste, he drinks huckleberry coffee from Montana, he drinks bits of morning berry blue in his coffee as if they're flecks from the Big Sky itself. I see nothing comparable for "wacky watermelon", capitalized or not. bd2412 T 17:12, 12 June 2013 (UTC) That's said "to descend again". But in French redescendre means mainly "to descend after to ascend", the use "to descend a second time" comes really far after this first use. So, this first use (descend after ascend) didn't exist in English or it's an omission ? V!v£ l@ Rosière /Whisper…/ 10:58, 1 June 2013 (UTC) In English, redescend is a little-used word (not in some dictionaries), and can mean descend again in either sense. Its usage can mean descent following ascent (we would normally say "come back down", "go back down" etc.) Perhaps we should adjust our entry. I'll do that. Dbfirs 06:36, 4 June 2013 (UTC) Ok thank you for the answer. V!v£ l@ Rosière /Whisper…/ 08:58, 6 June 2013 (UTC) I suspect many uses are a simple calque of French text; none of the uses I could find on Google Books were clear as to what it means besides "descend".--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:34, 7 June 2013 (UTC) casting him up[edit] From "Sons and Lovers" : "He hated her as she bent forward and pored over his things. He hated her way of patiently casting him up, as if he were an endless psychological account." - does that come from the mathematical meaning of cast as "to add up" (4) and cast up as "compute"? Just want to be sure. Never met such expression concerning a person. --CopperKettle (talk) 18:06, 1 June 2013 (UTC) I'm not familiar with it in my idiolect and would view all use as cast + up, up being perhaps an aspect marker or an intensifier. Collins has a sense "(transitive) to bring up as a reproach against a person". But that seems like a derivation from usage of the compute sense as a simile and, in any event, has a different object, ie, "casting up his things against him". DCDuring TALK 18:55, 1 June 2013 (UTC) Tnanks, DCDuring! --CopperKettle (talk) 01:25, 2 June 2013 (UTC) Yeah, it just means "adding him up" as though he were a balance-sheet (normally you "cast up" accounts). Ƿidsiþ 08:02, 4 June 2013 (UTC) We don't have a proper definition of clothing. Someone on Commons quoted Wikipedia (which turns out to have multiple contradictory definitions) and I looked here, but it just loops; clothing says "clothes; apparel for wearing"; clothes says "items of clothing; apparel."; apparel says simply clothing and wear likewise says "To carry or have equipped on or about one's body, as an item of clothing, equipment, decoration, etc." The last helps a little, but still doesn't resolve if hats or shoes or belts are clothing, or if leather and fur items aren't clothing (as the first definition on Wikipedia states). Interestingly enough, most adult non-learner dictionaries online fall into the same trap, though they usually get garment in their loops.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:05, 3 June 2013 (UTC) First attempt at a noncircular definition of clothing: "any of a wide variety of articles, usually made of fabrics, animal hair, animal skin, or some combination thereof, used to cover the human body for warmth, to preserve modesty, or for fashion". All modifications welcome. —Angr 06:40, 3 June 2013 (UTC) For most folks, hats, belts, shoes, and all garments - whatever the material - are clothing, etymology notwithstanding. There may be definitions from, for example, the garment industry, that exclude leather and fur garments and most headwear, probably because the supply chain and skillsets are quite distinct as often is the retailing. Accessory and clothing share a fuzzy boundary. On which side do ties and scarves fall? Belts and gloves? Permanently attached jewelry? Diadems? Eyeglasses? What about sports protective gear, like a baseball batting helmet? It's a good thing that normal people don't need precise definitions to use words. Organizations that need to classify (businesses, tax-collectors, labor unions, etc) need more precision, which precision can influence normal usage. DCDuring TALK 11:26, 3 June 2013 (UTC) I'm adding my proposed definition above to clothing now. Fine-tuning still welcome, of course. —Angr 19:48, 18 June 2013 (UTC) I cannot find a word that I have only heard, do not know correct spelling ( sisspasate, cyspessate,?)[edit] The word was given to me as a gift (I love words)by someone that I will never see again. Supposedly it means something like "solidified to the point of just starting to obscure light." This sort of reminds me of the word "precipitate", I think that it also might be a chemistry term? Or maybe occult type term to describe a stage in a manifestation? It was pronounced like( siss-pah-sate),with the middle syllable being the long one. I would love to hear from someone about this word. Can't find such a word. The closest I can think of is inspissate (thicken, condense, become viscous). Equinox ◑ 07:24, 4 June 2013 (UTC) I think it should be somehow underlined that it is union while repeated before two or more words in affirmating negation (I don't know how to render it). And as particle, 1 and 4 translations seem to me unclear (for first, usage notes needed, I cant replace один in ни один on any other nominative word, but it can be with genitive: вокруг ни души (nobody around), я не потратил ни копейки (I haven't spent a penny). For 4th, nothing is ни[…]что, not ни). antonym of monopsony[edit] Monopoly is not the antonym of monopsony since it is logically possible for an agent to be both a monopoly (single provider of a good) and a monopsony (single purchaser of a good). I don't know if the word exists, but the proper antonym of monopsony would be polyopsony. —This comment was unsigned. Antonymy is not a simple relationship. Two words are antonyms more by convention than by logic or physics. To try to play out the logic, we could say that there are two dimensions of the meaning of monopsony: directionality and number. Focusing on the directionality dimension of the meaning, monopsony and monopoly can be said to antonyms as much as buying and selling can be. As to the number dimension of monopsony, mono- corresponds to "one", which does not have a conventional antonym in the sense of single. In your choice of polyopsony, poly- corresponds to "many". "Many" and "few" are conventionally considered antonyms, but in economics monopoly and oligopsony are considered to have important shared characteristics, principally their unpopularity with buyers, and would not be considered antonyms. Getting back to convention, reviewing Google books, one can find only 176 reported publications in which polyopsony is used, more or less as you say and another 25 for polypsony, which I find more euphonious. To compare, monopsony and oligopsony each have more than 20,000 hits at Google books. I find it hard to consider polyopsony to be common enough in economic discourse to be considered a "conventional" antonym of monopsony. DCDuring TALK 10:24, 5 June 2013 (UTC) gotcha journalism[edit] Are you guys aware of the term "gotcha journalism"? Should we include it as a separate term, or add a new definition of gotcha? ---> Tooironic (talk) 08:14, 6 June 2013 (UTC) What does it mean? — Ungoliant (Falai) 19:17, 6 June 2013 (UTC) See w:Gotcha journalism. —Angr 20:20, 6 June 2013 (UTC) Looks idiomatic. — Ungoliant (Falai) 20:41, 6 June 2013 (UTC) let one's hinterland show[edit] A quote from The Economist: "Sometimes the younger Paul's populism involves silence. In New Hampshire he did not mention a position disliked by many Republicans: his conditional support for immigration reforms that would give millions a path to citizenship. Sometimes it involves letting his hinterland show. Recent speeches have seen him recite lines from a love poem by Pablo Neruda, verses from T.S. Eliot and lyrics by the 1980s Scottish pop duo, the Proclaimers." Does this mean "providing a glimpse into his soul, his inner world"? --CopperKettle (talk) 11:28, 7 June 2013 (UTC) Sort of. It means the parts of oneself that aren't normally seen. I added a sense to hinterland, which anyone is welcome to tweak. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:14, 8 June 2013 (UTC) Thank you, Chuck! --CopperKettle (talk) 06:13, 8 June 2013 (UTC) Huh, that's not what I would have expected this to mean at all. I imagined someone in a hospital johnny that doesn't close properly in the back. —Angr 09:00, 8 June 2013 (UTC) An image akin to that glimpsed in my head also, but hah.. politicians usually show that kind of hinterland after being elected, not before. (0: --CopperKettle (talk) 09:33, 8 June 2013 (UTC) all along[edit] all along - it seems that it may mean not only "for the whole length of time" but "for the whole length" in the physical sense. "All along the Watchtower" ; " He and she stood leaning against one another, silent, afraid, their bodies touching all along." (Sons and Lovers chapter 12). --CopperKettle (talk) 03:45, 8 June 2013 (UTC) Yes, but it's simply all + along, so we don't have it on SOP grounds. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:01, 8 June 2013 (UTC) Added.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:47, 25 June 2013 (UTC) logorrhea[edit] Definition 1 of logorrhea has a context:medicine template which I am doubtful of. Anyone think it should be kept? RJFJR (talk) 23:05, 9 June 2013 (UTC) Do you dispute the existence of the medical diagnosis? If you do not, there are those who think that such labels should be reserved for register and those who think it should be also allowed for terms not restricted to a medical usage context but about a medical topic. The medical diagnosis, if it exists or has ever existed, would seem to warrant a usage-context restriction. DCDuring TALK 23:34, 9 June 2013 (UTC) Very, very many terms have the wrong or inappropriate context label. I think that medical conditions, ailments, diseases etc should have the "pathology" context. Particularly misused in the context "chemistry":- about half of the terms should be use a better context - either more specific "organic chemistry", "biochemistry" etc) or should use "organic compound" or "inorganic compound". One day I'll get around to fixing them. SemperBlotto (talk) 07:40, 10 June 2013 (UTC) There's no RFV in this is there? See the prolog of this page. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:49, 10 June 2013 (UTC) See w:Logorrhea (psychology) and the sources therein, and change it to {{context|psychology}}. —Angr 08:17, 11 June 2013 (UTC) Definition of catharsis[edit] The definition of Catharsis as a phenomena triggered by Vicarious experiences is inadequate. As a student of Gestalt Therapy and an individual whose most transformational Catharses came about when I had constructed enough supports to process them with no modeling involved. I can testify that Catharsis is (less frequently but more powerfully) experienced in or as realization of a part of self locked off for self protection. This likely involves the same type of phenomena as repressed memory. I "realized one day,while out in a field, that my father had tried to kill me, before I was born . I checked this information with my mother who abashedly confirmed that he gave her quinine to abort me and later pushed her down the stairs seeking the same result. While emotionally presented material sparks emotional reactions more strongly in individuals with similar unresolved feelings, true Catharsis is Internal. Thus I interpret the root Katharos as pure, not from dirt, but from the chaotically configured energy that carries with it a shaming sense of dysfunction or brokenness (conscious or unconscious). Catharsis then brings completion that releases the misconfiguration of energy that is chaotically bound and so impure (dysfunctional), and guilt producing improving function and removing negative feelings. Post definition note - FYI- I also did my MA thesis on the "Inter-Generational Transmission of Trauma" and noted similar occurrences in others who were processing material from grand parents they had not even known indicating that trauma or configurations of UN-resolved fear, terror, and other trauma can be passed by one generation to another by emotional posture and other non-verbal communication which has never been fully explored. I suspect that the status of ductless gland excretions is resultant rather than creative of particular types of damage thus limiting the efficacy of psychoactive medications. Alex R. Anlyan MA--Pndrgn99 (talk) 23:08, 10 June 2013 (UTC) We have to get our information from reliable sources. Equinox ◑ 23:10, 10 June 2013 (UTC) drill cuttings[edit] w:Drill cuttings - does it merit inclusion, or is it simply a sum-of-parts? --CopperKettle (talk) 05:23, 11 June 2013 (UTC) By the arguments used to defend many multiword entries, this might be included. Because of the general disinterest in technical matters, no one will apply those arguments to this term. The term does appear in one dictionary at OneLook: McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, 2003. DCDuring TALK 10:22, 11 June 2013 (UTC) Thank you, DCDuring! --CopperKettle (talk) 16:34, 11 June 2013 (UTC) refactor[edit] Something's off with the example paragraph: "Two significant activities which to contribute to community projects, such as wikipedia, are to refactor complicated articles into simpler ones, or refactor duplicated content into reusable templates." "...which to contribute to..."? Was it supposed to be "...which contribute to..."? I'm just not seeing a difference between the two adjectival senses. Are there two different adjective meanings, and if so, can we provide (a) clearer distinction in the definitions, and (b) clear quotations to differentiate them? --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:41, 13 June 2013 (UTC) This seem like a misleading entry without some kind of usage tag. I would consider it a misspelling if I ran across it in something contemporary. According to GloWBE (new Brigham Young corpus of 1.8B words of global web-based English), this occurs less than 2% as often as every + way. Above-average use occurs in New Guinea and Tanzania! COHA shows it to have been more frequent in the US in the 19th century than lately. At OneLook, Wordnik carries our entry and Collins and RHU have it (without comment). What is the right kind of label for this to be helpful for someone trying to actually write useful English? Should we just refer folks to other sources or not offer any help at all? DCDuring TALK 12:41, 13 June 2013 (UTC) I take some comfort from the fact that at least we don't use everyway in the definiens. If we are going to keep such entries and have translations, how can we suggest that "everyway" is inferior to "every way" in writing? DCDuring TALK 12:44, 13 June 2013 (UTC) Lots of ways: {{proscribed}}, {{nonstandard}}, {{misspelling of}}, take your pick. —Angr 15:45, 13 June 2013 (UTC) It seems to me to have had more currency/validity in the past, but not to be obsolete, archaic, or dated. Is it an alternative spelling in PNG and Tanzania, but nonstandard elsewhere? Our effort to have all words terms in all languages dialects seems to be leading us to try to be all things to all people and, hence, jack of all trades and master of none. Perhaps the best things for us to give up are the lingering vestiges of prescriptivism, like {{non-standard}} and {{proscribed}}. We are not well suited to the task. We do not have access to the information required to make valid assessments (lack of data or copyright being in the way), nor standards for using the information that is available in a way comprehensible to us, let alone normal humans, and let alone that meets scholarly standards. In any event, it takes a better man than I to reconcile all this. DCDuring TALK 16:11, 13 June 2013 (UTC) I think I'd just regard it as {{dated}}. The OED has cites from 1828 and 1878 (Carlyle and Browning) (with everyways being marked as obsolete, and everywayness having only one cite). Carlyle also used everywhen, but it doesn't seem to have much other usage. Dbfirs 20:57, 13 June 2013 (UTC) We have at least as much information on whether a word is non-standard or proscribed as we do on say pronunciation. In some cases proscribed is easy; find some page on the web ranting about it, or check Strunk and White or Eats, Shoots, Leaves. Just as importantly people who use our dictionary frequently want to know if a word is the best choice for their writing (I know that's frequently my goal when looking something up); whether it's standard or not is an important part of that.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:36, 16 June 2013 (UTC) "We have at least as much information on whether a word is non-standard or proscribed as we do on say pronunciation" I believe that to be false in the case of English. There are numerous online dictionaries that provide pronunciations for almost all words commonly used in speech, all of which are in near agreement, allowing for regional differences. In contrast, there are relatively few usage guides that cover more than a relatively modest number of terms. For example, Garner's Modern American Usage (2009) is among the most comprehensive. In its 876 pages it rarely covers more than 10 words on a page and often covers topics in grammar and rhetoric at much greater length than its coverage of individual terms. I estimate it to cover between 5,000 and 10,000 terms, offering five grades of acceptability, the only source that does so AFAIK. We could not simply copy their ratings without it being obvious that we had done so. If we did so systematically, it would risk being a copyright violation. Garner's far exceeds works like Eats, Shoots and Leaves in its coverage, which I estimate to cover far fewer than 1,000 terms. Strunk and White (4th) covers perhaps 250 terms. Comprehensive usage dictionaries are not frequently published. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) was the most comprehensive previous American usage, covering perhaps 5,000 terms, rarely judgmentally. I have not examined overlap, but I suspect that there many, many terms with at most one resource providing coverage, rarely as simple as saying that a given Wiktionary definition of a term is to be "proscribed". Thus, I find it hard to see how we can find multiple sources to make it possible for us to produce a reasonably objective, comprehensive guide to usage. Of course, others may disagree and, more constructively, someone could prove my judgment wrong by simply doing it in a way that contributing users find acceptable. DCDuring TALK 22:09, 16 June 2013 (UTC) freezing cold[edit] Soo...I just edited freezing cold to categorise it as an adjective. It seems to be uncomparable but I searched b.g.c. to confirm. Consequently, I found something else of possible interest; it seems to also have a noun sense...see this search google books:"more freezing cold". I included more because as I said I was initially confirming the adjective is uncomparable. User: PalkiaX50 talk to meh 16:31, 13 June 2013 (UTC) I'm seeing a few cites for comparative and superlative among the noun hits though. — Ungoliant (Falai) 16:38, 13 June 2013 (UTC) I added the noun sense before I noticed this discussion. I suppose that speaks for its existence in some non-official way? —CodeCat 17:18, 13 June 2013 (UTC) freezing cold can be a nominal or an adjectival, but either way it's just an SoP collocation, cluttering up Wiktionary as if it were an idiom. In contrast piping hot is an idiom, IMO, because piping/pipe#Verb is archaic/poetic in the relevant sense. DCDuring TALK 17:27, 13 June 2013 (UTC) Anavatos[edit] destroyed town on Chios. When? Why? What happened? —This unsigned comment was added by N. Scott Catledge (talk • contribs). This is a dictionary, not a repository of all knowledge. We don't even have an entry for it, so what prompted you to come here? Chuck Entz (talk) 01:38, 14 June 2013 (UTC) Original poster should probably ask at w:Talk:Chios or w:Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities (or just Google around). (Note that the only mention of Anavatos in the English Wikipedia seems to be at w:Chios#West coast, although this doesn't answer the question.) - dcljr (talk) 01:45, 14 June 2013 (UTC) Curiosity trumps my better judgment again: See this link. DCDuring TALK 02:20, 14 June 2013 (UTC) Re-form[edit] I just created re-form after noting a redlink at re-#Derived terms. I included the usage note: In modern usage, the hyphenated form of this word is usually reserved for the sense of "to form again" rather than the other senses of reform. (I place a copy here in case someone wants to remove it from the entry entirely.) Apart from the awkward phrasing, does anyone object to the purported fact itself? It seems right to me, although I have no actual evidence. Would anyone like to actually research this? - dcljr (talk) 02:06, 14 June 2013 (UTC) Take a look at how other dictionaries cover the term via the OneLook link at re-form. MWOnline doesn't seem to find it worth covering, but many others do. DCDuring TALK 02:23, 14 June 2013 (UTC) No need for further research; the OED does exactly what you have done, with the last cite for reform in anything like the modern re-form sense being 1672. I would be inclined to mark the "alternative spelling" as dated or obsolete, but someone might prove me wrong because there will be some modern writer somewhere who hasn't made the distinction. We need also to note the difference in pronunciation. Personally, I side with the OED in regarding these as different words, not alternative spellings. Dbfirs 16:51, 14 June 2013 (UTC) "(much) given to"[edit] We don't seem to have a meaning at given or give corresponding to the now rather old-fashioned meaning found in our usage example at crabling and in our definition of poodlefaker: The juvenile members of most of our seaside communities are much given to crab-fishing... A young man too much given to tea parties and ladies' society generally It seems to mean 'addicted to' (in the nontechnical sense) or 'fond of' or something like that. I'm not sure whether we're missing a definition of give or of given or if given to needs to be its own entry. —Angr 15:35, 14 June 2013 (UTC) If it comes to that, we're also missing the more old-fashioned sense of addicted which merely implies a great fondness for something considered improper, rather than physical or psychological dependence. Usage examples from Wikisource can be found here, here, here, here, and here. —Angr 15:48, 14 June 2013 (UTC) As to given to, perhaps it could be a redirect to the right sense of given#Adjective, which might be something like: (with to) Prone, disposed. DCDuring TALK 16:22, 14 June 2013 (UTC) I added the sense and another one, split one of the previous senses, and provided three usexes, all of which could stand improvement. Also, can anyone give usage example for the senses showing as 1 and 2. I'm not getting them. Perhaps rewording would help, too. DCDuring TALK 16:38, 14 June 2013 (UTC) The fourth listed meaning of the conjunction "when" is described as "at a time in the past". Is this really confined to the past? Wouldn't it be the exact same "when" in "It will be raining when I come tomorrow" as in the example given, "It was raining when I came yesterday"? Also, something might be needed on the usage of "when" in chess literature. A chess author writing about the Queen's Gambit Declined might well write something like If Black makes no attempt to defend the pawn, White normally plays 3.cxd5, when 3...Qxd5 simply loses time to the natural development move 4.Nc3. or, if writing about the Poisoned Pawn Variation, perhaps something like This sharp variation begins 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 Qb6, when White must decide whether to sacrifice the b2 pawn for piece activity, or protect it with 8.Nb3. (Both examples made up, but similar things abound.) I can't see how this usage falls under any of the described meanings. It clearly means "at which time" or "at which point", although often perhaps "and now" would be a more natural replacement. 85.226.204.42 12:20, 15 June 2013 (UTC) What might be behind the definition is some intuition about the asymmetry between past and future in terms of definiteness. In the past something happened at a definite time. Future events may not happen and may not happen at the particular time the speaker has in mind. I am not sure whether that intuition can be accommodated in definitions without causing users (like you!) to question the definition. Comparing our 3 good definitions with MWOnline's 7 for the conjunction, I'd say the section is ready for a cleanup and expansion. DCDuring TALK 14:47, 15 June 2013 (UTC) BTW, the definition "at some time in the past" is not "substitutable" as written, usually a bad sign, unless the definition is explicitly worded as a "non-gloss definition". In the usage example, substitution into "It was raining when I came yesterday" leads to "It was raining at some time in the past I came yesterday.", which is non-grammatical. The definition given is one appropriate for an adverb not a conjunction. DCDuring TALK 14:53, 15 June 2013 (UTC) The "chess" sense is not restricted to chess. As you say, it can be worded substitutably as "at which time/point". I don't see a definition covering that at MWOnline. DCDuring TALK 14:58, 15 June 2013 (UTC) You don't? I just checked MWOnline and definition 2a is "at or during which time". —Angr 20:06, 15 June 2013 (UTC) from time to time (legal use)[edit] Hi! Reading a translators' forum, struck upon a discussion of a quaint legalistic use of "from time to time", like in: "..and references to "USD" or "US Dollar" are to the lawful currency of the United States of America, from time to time." etc.. also google "from time to time outstanding". Here the legal aspects of the phrase are addressed in English; I quote: "A second use of from time to time serves to clarify that the subject referred to may change after the agreement enters into force: " If Supplier desires to amend the Statement of Work, it shall notify Customer of all proposed amendments in accordance with Customer's engineering change (EC) procedure from time to time. Chairman means the chairman of the Non-Executive Board from time to time." The examples bring aspects that may influence the object that is modified by the phrase from time to time outside the immediate scope of the provision. How and when the Chairman is appointed should be addressed elsewhere; it is clear who is referred to. Similarly, although a change in the engineering change procedure might well affect the possibility of amending the Statement of Work (or even render such amendment illusory), such change is outside the scope of this amendment provision." --CopperKettle (talk) 06:10, 16 June 2013 (UTC) I read this in the opposite way, bringing future changes in the identity of the chairman, and future changes in the EC procedure, within the provision of the amendment procedure. Thus "from time to time" implies "incorporating any change in the last-mentioned person or procedure". Dbfirs 08:54, 16 June 2013 (UTC) I believe these are separate examples they provide (the authors of the book that I've given URL to); the "procedure" clause does not relate to the "Chairman". So I've reformatted the sentences, separating them. Anyway, I wonder how one would go adding this meaning to the "from time to time" article; I barely can grasp the use of the term.. phrasing a definition for this would be a hard needle to thread. --CopperKettle (talk) 15:34, 16 June 2013 (UTC) Yes, it's not easy to explain. Perhaps something along the lines of "as may exist at some time in the future"? Dbfirs 15:49, 16 June 2013 (UTC) I don't really think the legal use is very distinct from the normal idiomatic use of the expression. I think it could be glossed as "occasionally", "on occasion", or "at intervals" for irregular or unspecified intervals, "periodically" for regular intervals). The idea is there are events that change the state of affairs, rather than that the state of affairs changes gradually. One could take a look at from time to time at OneLook Dictionary Search to see how others handle it. DCDuring TALK 18:00, 16 June 2013 (UTC) Looking a google books for uses in a legal context, it seems that the phrase is used to achieve a specific kind of result and may be applied in ways that do not fit the expected syntax/semantics of the general expression. Perhaps a non-gloss definition would more accurately reflect the reality of the usage. "Used to make clear that a clause or provision applies even under certain changes in specified conditions, such as the individual holding an office or position, or a law or contract as amended." That's a little long, so separating out the usage examples would improve it. DCDuring TALK 18:18, 16 June 2013 (UTC) I've made a stab at it, adding # {{rfquote-sense}} {{context|legal|lang=en}} In whatever status exists at various times.{{attention|en|topic=law|definition may need improved wording}}.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:41, 25 June 2013 (UTC) Pastry/ies[edit] Consistency? It seems odd to me that the text describes these as "baked" and the photo is of doughnuts/dognuts which are deep-fried, aren´t they? Yes. I have replaced the image with another one randomly selected from the many on Commons. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:01, 17 June 2013 (UTC) Does anyone have a quotation using the word "disambiguate" (or one of its inflected forms) predating its use among Wikipedians? I heard it used on radio this morning in the context of a debate about the elimination of the apostrophe. I have heard it suggested in the past that this was a Wikipedia invented word, and it certainly has been a useful and effective word in the Wikimedia projects. How much has this word's usage in other places been influenced by Wikimedia practice? Eclecticology (talk) 19:13, 17 June 2013 (UTC) The OED has the following:- "1963 Language 39 175 A speaker can disambiguate parts of a sentence in terms of other parts. 1967 Language 43 619 When necessary, the Greek spelling is disambiguated by an appended phonetic transcription." - Language would appear to be a journal. SemperBlotto (talk) 19:19, 17 June 2013 (UTC) I've added a citations page from a quick Google book search. SemperBlotto (talk) 19:28, 17 June 2013 (UTC) Um, yes. Language is probably the best known linguistics journal in the United States. Certainly disambiguate has existed in linguistic jargon since long before Wikipedia. —Angr 19:33, 17 June 2013 (UTC) This Google Books search for uses before 1960 yielded only two no-preview hits. But one is from Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning, which might remind someone of where those authors used it (if indeed they did). The other work seems a bit less likely to have been read by someone here. How far back do on-line databases of language scholarship go? I don't have access to one. DCDuring TALK 20:26, 17 June 2013 (UTC) I have a sneaking suspicion that disambiguate is more recent than the noun disambiguation; if so, the etymology should probably be changed to {{back-form|disambiguation}}. —Angr 21:18, 17 June 2013 (UTC) Indeed, I have a citation from Bentham's Logic. 1827 for disambiguation, which I will add there. I didn't find a French precursor for disambiguation in Robert. DCDuring TALK 21:47, 17 June 2013 (UTC) The Bentham is apparently George Bentham, nephew of Jeremy, with the work, apparently published when George was 27, partially based on papers left by uncle Jeremy. DCDuring TALK 22:10, 17 June 2013 (UTC) A cranse iron is a fitting on the end of a bowsprit of a traditional sailing yacht or larger sailing vessel —This unsigned comment was added by 86.19.99.72 (talk • contribs).. Thanks. Cranse iron added. Feel free to further edit it. — Ungoliant (Falai) 23:52, 17 June 2013 (UTC) Our entry boondocks classifies this noun as plural only but makes no mention of the singular boondock, which also exists and has the same origin (Tagalog, interestingly). I suppose it could be said that boondock and boondocks are two separate lexemes with slightly different meanings and do not form a paradigm, in the way that the meaning of boondocks could be simply derived by imagining the plural of boondock (it's rather the reverse: boondock seems to refer to a larger region, boondocks to a smaller place, though in practice they are probably largely synonymous), although boondock does give boondocks as the respective plural. Another point is that perhaps most speakers who use boondocks (the much more widely known lexeme according to my impression) do not have boondock in their active lexicon and may not even be aware that it also exists in English. Perhaps boondocks is plural only simply by virtue of the obscurity of the singular (in fact, most people may never have encountered the word outside the idiomatic expression out in the boondocks, and can derive its meaning as a stand-alone lexeme only from the phrase)? So you could say that the noun is a plurale tantum only on the level of an individual speaker's idiolect (or may exist merely in fossilised form as part of an idiom), but not contemporary Standard (American?) English in general. In any case, the situation is awkward. How to solve it best? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:39, 18 June 2013 (UTC) I would label it chiefly plural or chiefly in plural. In English, everything has exceptions. There are probably many nouns that could be labelled with the seemingly contradictory "uncountable; plural ---s". —Michael Z. 2013-06-18 17:52 z Good idea, and good point too; it's not only that way in English, but, for example, in German, for most singularia tantum and pluralia tantum you can easily find attestations defying this classification, although they tend to strike the average speaker as unusual sounding. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:56, 18 June 2013 (UTC) Do we have a "chiefly plural" template? Or how would you go about adding such a remark? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:59, 18 June 2013 (UTC) Use this: {{context|chiefly|_|in the plural}}. For general instructions, see {{context}}. —Michael Z. 2013-06-21 19:15 z Cool, thanks! But how and where do I properly mention the singular in such a case? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:12, 23 June 2013 (UTC) Okay, also a good question. Normally everything goes in the singular-form entry, and the plural is only a brief "form-of" entry referring to that. There might be a good case to make boondocks a fuller entry, but I will give a try to reorganizing this the usual way. —Michael Z. 2013-06-23 23:18 z I have consolidated the entry at its lemma boondock. How does that look? —Michael Z. 2013-06-23 23:29 z Looks fine to me. No relevant information has been lost, as far as I can tell. (In fact, "rural location or town" seemed redundant if not simply wrong anyway, as this expression does not seem to refer to towns specifically, just locations in general.) Thank you! --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:00, 24 June 2013 (UTC) beach#Noun[edit] I'm not feeling the difference between sense 1 ("the shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly") and sense 2 ("a horizontal strip of land, usually sandy, adjoining water"). —Angr 23:14, 20 June 2013 (UTC) Maybe there's a pill for that. ;-|} DCDuring TALK 23:54, 20 June 2013 (UTC) Other dictionaries make various kinds of distinctions, differing from ours. Are ponds without significant wave action (hence, mud not sand or pebbles) said to have beaches? If someone says they are "going to the beach", but stay on the boardwalk, are they mistaken? Collins has a definition that refers to the strip between high- and low-water marks. AHD has: "The shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly. The sand or pebbles on a shore. The zone above the water line at a shore of a body of water, marked by an accumulation of sand, stone, or gravel that has been deposited by the tide or waves." People clearly use the word differently. I don't know how many senses we would need to capture all the various kinds of metonymy, let alone the missing figurative sense: "a place or state of idleness or unemployment" The associate was on the beach between assignments more than most. DCDuring TALK 00:14, 21 June 2013 (UTC) Typography measurement en[edit] Wiktionary has an entry for the typography measurement em, but none for en; that's odd. Yes, we do. It's Etymology 2, sense 2 of en. —Angr 15:35, 22 June 2013 (UTC) faces that would stop a clock is the most attested plural, but there are two valid google hits for faces that would stop clocks. Can anyone find one more to fulfil the attestation requirement? Hyarmendacil (talk) 04:58, 23 June 2013 (UTC) Wouldn't that be the plural of face that would stop clocks? — Ungoliant (Falai) Not necessarily, although that is also attested. Compare the nuanced plurals of e.g. deus ex machina (the rarest of which I've just moved out of the headword line and into the usage note). - -sche (discuss) 13:04, 23 June 2013 (UTC) Variation on Workcation[edit] A suggested, and somewhat opposite meaning for workcation would be. A pseudo vacation during which one travels to restful places, but remains connected to and continues to engage in work related activities. We go by usage. Do people already use the term with that meaning, or are you just suggesting it because it seems like a good idea? If the second is true we can't include the sense until the first is also true. See WT:CFI. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:27, 23 June 2013 (UTC) It seems we have no entry for the English noun kugelblitz as in w:Kugelblitz (astrophysics). What's its plural? Perhaps kugelblitzes, according to the regular English pattern? Or kugelblitze, as in German? In contrast, kugelblitzen as in w:Orders of magnitude (temperature) doesn't seem right. Except as a jocular form like boxen or fen, analogical to the few remaining irregular (old consonant-stem) plurals in English, or perhaps as a dative plural (of) kugelblitzen (like von Kugelblitzen), which makes even less sense in an English context. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:21, 23 June 2013 (UTC) None of the above is common, but kugelblitzes is the only plural that shows up in English in Google Books or Google Groups, as far as I can tell. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:46, 23 June 2013 (UTC) Khmer translation[edit] I need "proud to be Khmer" in Khmer transcript please! Please post this at WT:TRREQ. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:48, 24 June 2013 (UTC) We don't seem to have anything for (someone) (is/are/etc.) a riot, in other words, extremely funny or amusing. Should this be a sense under riot, an entry as "a riot", or an entry as "be a riot"? I'm leaning toward the second, since it's always singular, regardless of the referent, and because I can imagine saying that someone who has improved their sense of humor has "become a riot". Also, what's the part of speech? It looks adjectivish, but good arguments can be made for noun or stative verb, depending on the construction. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:27, 24 June 2013 (UTC) It's a sense of riot#Noun. Perhaps it should be marked {{context|figurative}}. If the usage is always in the singular, mark it {{context|in the singular}}. —Michael Z. 2013-06-24 18:35 z Our entry for riot#Noun has but three senses. MWOnline has seven senses and subsenses. We lack the figurative sense used in "riot of color". Our definition of the public disturbance sense looks excessively legalistic. Could we use a YouTube link to Jackie Gleason, The Honeymooners for the sense Chuck has identified as missing? I don't think the meaning is well conveyed by a simple quote, though, perhaps one or two lines of preceding dialog is enough. BTW, "You're a riot, Alice" gets 26 hits at Google Books, many of them explicitly referencing the show. DCDuring TALK 19:53, 24 June 2013 (UTC) Coming from the community of the software project Drupal, I have a quite urgent question on the (mis)spelling of referencable, which in Wiktionary is stated to be an alternative spelling of referenceable. While Google shows a number of hits, particularly in other software projects, there seems to be evidence from English grammar, the spelling of similar adjectives and just common sense that this is instead a plain misspelling that shouldn't be further proliferated. The question is quite urgent because Drupal will be on code freeze by Juli 1st, and it won't be possible to change the spelling of classes afterwards, so in order to not further proliferate a plain misspelling, we'd need definitive input until June 30. I filed an Rfv for that but would like to invite you to help out with some input. Thank you very much! --PanchoS (talk) 12:40, 25 June 2013 (UTC) Drupal won't include class names that are not in English Wiktionary? This is very curious. I know nothing about Drupal (don't even now what a CMF is), but programming languages include things like esac, elif, and goto. In any event, I think this duplicates the RFV discussion and can be stricken.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:32, 25 June 2013 (UTC) Don't get what's weird about it. Just as school books, software projects of course shouldn't proliferate plain misspellings, especially not in names of subsystems or classes that tend to further propagating the misspelling. And Wiktionary is of course a valid indication of whether this is an acceptable alternative spelling or an unacceptable misspelling. Sorry, if duplicating. --PanchoS (talk) 19:32, 25 June 2013 (UTC) referenceable is the standard spelling, regardless of whether or not referencable is attested. Just use referenceable. - -sche (discuss) 16:45, 25 June 2013 (UTC) Yes, the OED allows only the standard spelling, but the OED is conservative in spellings. It's always difficult to decide whether cites are genuine alternative spellings (that the author intended to use) or just an error (or typo) that slipped through the editing process. The other problem is that spelling changes over time. Most of us (older generation) would never think of missing the "e after c" to soften the "c", but if enough people who are not aware of the rule miss out that letter, it will eventually become an alternative spelling, and when the rule is eventually forgotten, "referencable" might become the standard spelling. I estimate that it will take another 100 years for this to happen (if ever). Meanwhile, most dictionaries allow only referenceable. Strangely, my spellcheckers didn't recognise either version (until I added the correct one)! Dbfirs 21:24, 25 June 2013 (UTC) Clearly, referencable is a mistake, even if it has occurred in three books. (In the second quotation it occurs only once in the book, in the third, the misspelling occurs along with two correct spellings, so the attestation is incomplete, and also lame.) It would be pronounced like referenkable, because the Latin-derived c is hard unless followed by i or e. —Michael Z. 2013-06-25 21:59 z I agree. Unfortunately, Wiktionary has a number of spelling errors purporting to be alternative spellings just because someone has found three examples. In this case, I think the request for verification will clearly fail, but there are others that are borderline. How do we decide? Dbfirs 06:10, 26 June 2013 (UTC) On the basis of the above discussion and sheer common sense, I'm changing {{alternative spelling of}} to {{misspelling of}}. How do you like them apples?. —Angr 13:47, 26 June 2013 (UTC) I certainly agree, and so for me that's fine. Beyond common sense and all it might be worth defining not just criteria for inclusion, but also some concise criteria for discrimination between alternative spellings and misspellings. Finally this seems to be a rather clear case, with others being less so. I'm new to Wiktionary, but willing to help. --PanchoS (talk) 19:26, 26 June 2013 (UTC) I see value in linking to an entry from a common misspelling. But I don't think we need a list of misspellings to be headed "Alternative forms." —Michael Z. 2013-06-26 20:18 z Sorry, I guess, you got me totally wrong. I pleaded for a set of criteria used to differentiate what makes a form be considered an "alternative spelling" vs. a mere "misspelling". --PanchoS (talk) 21:08, 26 June 2013 (UTC) No, I'm sorry – I changed topic. Just saying I would remove the link to referencable from the entry referenceable. (I've gone ahead and removed that link. I hope that's OK with everyone. Dbfirs 08:02, 27 June 2013 (UTC)) Not sure if it's helpful, but I guess there are 1,476 examples to look over in. What evidence can indicate that a non-standard spelling is actually a misspelling?: Source uses standard spellings alongside misspellings. Source corrects a misspelling in a later edition. Errata, discussion in interviews, published letters of correction, etc. What else? —Michael Z. 2013-06-26 22:51 z If one starts with an on-line search, the first thing is to exclude scannos or possible citations that don't allow inspection of the scanned image. Evaluating each citation individually is tedious, but appropriate for hard-to-attest spellings. The harder cases are those for which there are numerous attestable instances some of which won't fail on the grounds you mention. If there are 200 raw cites with preview available, but the other spelling has 5,000 raw cites with preview, and there is no evidence that the less common spelling is relatively common among some user group, and there is no dictionary support, I'd be inclined to call the less common spelling a misspelling. The quantitative criteria matter. DCDuring TALK 23:47, 26 June 2013 (UTC) I have placed some evidence at WT:RFV#referencable; some discussion takes place there. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:24, 5 July 2013 (UTC) anyone can make mistake[edit] Hi, Does anyone can make mistake is an idiomaitic expression? Thanks by advance for your answer. Automatik (talk) 22:33, 27 June 2013 (UTC) If this were Wikiphrasebook, I would vote to include it, but not here in a dictionary. It's meaning is perfectly transparent from its component terms, unless one is too lazy to go through a long dictionary entry such as the one for make#Verb. DCDuring TALK 23:45, 27 June 2013 (UTC) It is grammatically incorrect as written: you'd need to say make a mistake or make mistakes. Equinox ◑ 00:52, 28 June 2013 (UTC) Also, it's not what you asked about, but, in English, "do" can't be used with be: you would say "Is 'anyone can make a mistake' an idiomatic expression?". I might add that when you use an auxiliary verb like "do", only the auxiliary is inflected- the main verb is in its infinitive form (but without "to" in front of it). Chuck Entz (talk) 02:34, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Thank you for the correction. Automatik (talk) 13:08, 2 July 2013 (UTC) Thank you all for the answers! Automatik (talk) 13:08, 2 July 2013 (UTC) A problem with "自" and"英明" pages[edit] There is no definition in the "自" page and I was looking for the Chinese definition of "英明" but there isn't any.--Leopardfoot (talk) 15:16, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Hello and welcome to Wiktionary. When mentioning pages, you should link to them using double brackets: [[自]] (although there seems to be a custom of using quadruple brackets when meaning a page, and not the word it defines), so people do not have to copy and paste the title. We are a bit short on contributors in Mandarin, unfortunately. Category:Mandarin definitions needed contains almost 25 thousand pages. In the meantime, the definitions in the Translingual sections for the invididual characters will have to suffice. Keφr 15:39, 29 June 2013 (UTC) 英明 means "intelligent" in Mandarin. That's a rough definition: I don't know Mandarin, but I do know Japanese, and their page has an entry for the Mandarin word 英明, and it claims that means the same thing as the adjective 英明 in Japanese (not the give name) which means "intelligent" or "wise." Their page for 自 claims that it means "from" or an affix meaning "on one's own." I hope that helps. --Haplology (talk) 16:37, 29 June 2013 (UTC) It means "wise". I've added it now. Cheers. ---> Tooironic (talk) 01:15, 2 July 2013 (UTC) other meaning to "come in"?[edit] I've just read this in Harry Potter: "Mrs Dursley had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbours." Can it mean "prove", a meaning that is not mentioned on come in? --Fsojic (talk) 14:49, 30 June 2013 (UTC) Some new definitions have come in at come in (arrived). Sense 7 would seem to fit the usage. Prove is a certainly a near synonym. Come in seems to work better with less formal complementary adjectives (like handy) than prove, which I would use instead of come on with useful in the sentence from Harry Potter. It may be that prove is better with complementary adjectives that have a clear valence (positive or negative) or where there is a relatively explicit "test". Thanks for noticing the missing sense and letting us know. Comparison with MW Online, which has seven non-SoP senses (We had three, one of which seems SoP.) should be humbling and concerning to us. DCDuring TALK 15:59, 30 June 2013 (UTC) We already have come in handy. It seems to me to be a bit more restricted in meaning/usage than the new definition. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:15, 30 June 2013 (UTC) Thanks for these explanations! --Fsojic (talk) 16:56, 30 June 2013 (UTC) @Chuck: Maybe. The synonyms useful, serviceable, and profitable (in that order) are much less common than handy at Google books and news. come in handy is covered in Wordnet and one idioms dictionary at OneLook. come in useful and not come in handy is in Cambridge Advanced Learners. Only the one idioms dictionary covers them both. I may have confounded this with another sense of come in - not that senses are always as distinct as we make them out to be - "arrive", "emerge from a production process". "The pineapples came in a bit fibrous this year." DCDuring TALK 17:05, 30 June 2013 (UTC) "historicals"[edit] I have encountered the word "historicals" through the sentence "Historicals throughout the text provide brief biological sketches of such engineering pioneers as...", found in a published textbook, "Fundamentals of Electric Circuits", 4th. ed. There is no noun def. in historical, so is this word a neologism or is a def. missing? Rnabioullin (talk) 20:09, 30 June 2013 (UTC) Yes, it's evidently been used as a noun. I can find a few texts using "historicals" as shorthand for "historical romances"; there might be other senses too. Equinox ◑ 11:46, 2 July 2013 (UTC) "you tell me", French "à toi de me le dire"[edit] Would this expression you tell me and his translation à toi de me le dire be acceptable here? --Fsojic (talk) 08:28, 1 July 2013 (UTC) The three words in English are often a sum of parts, but the idiomatic usage implies more than the simple meaning of the words, so I would support adding it. Dbfirs 12:41, 1 July 2013 (UTC) Is there a plural to Latin sodes?[edit] Good evening, Does anyone know if there is a plural sodete to the Latin word sodes (from si audes, a second person singular), which means please (more or less), and that could be used when addressing several people? Or is sodes completely lexicalized? --Fsojic (talk) 21:10, 1 July 2013 (UTC) No plural is mentioned in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. —Angr 20:26, 3 July 2013 (UTC) Mistake in declension of derjenige[edit] I think there might be a mistake in the following page: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/derjenige Shouldn't the genitive plural of derjenige be derjenigen instead of denjenigen? I would say it should be derjenigen, yes. BigDom (t • c) 13:18, 2 July 2013 (UTC) So what does it mean? The definition doesn't tell me anything... —CodeCat 16:16, 3 July 2013 (UTC) Similarly hocayım - the verb form of a noun! SemperBlotto (talk) 16:23, 3 July 2013 (UTC) Actually, it does make sense to me more now thanks to your example. I think the copula in Turkish is a suffix, so -yım means "I am" and I suppose -dır means "is". The definition isn't really very clear on that, though. Neither olmak nor hoca make any mention of suffixed copulas, so the user is left guessing. —CodeCat 16:32, 3 July 2013 (UTC) So, hocadir means "he is a master", and hocayım means "I am a master" - maybe? SemperBlotto (talk) 16:35, 3 July 2013 (UTC) Yes, I think it's like that. How would we write a definition to indicate that, in such a way that it's easy to extend it to any noun? We could write "I am a master" but if we are going to do that for every sense of every Turkish noun it could quickly become a maintenance nightmare (which is why we avoid repeating definitions in form-of entries to begin with). So we probably need a template that says something like "the word (word) + the copula (copula suffix) (meaning of suffix)" so that it is clear what it means. w:Turkish copula explains a bit more but I don't understand all of it. —CodeCat 16:43, 3 July 2013 (UTC) In Italian, we have many terms that are combined forms of verb forms and pronouns (See abbandonandola as an example). But the work needed to add the translation is just far too much and we normally omit it (and we only generate the forms that are actually used in the real world - not mass bot generated). I can't think of anything combining random verbs with nouns (or is the verb always "to be"?). Is it always the present tense? SemperBlotto (talk) 16:51, 3 July 2013 (UTC) I think it's only the present of "to be". That's what the wiki page seems to say anyway. From what I can gather, every Turkish noun or adjective has 4 or 5 of these copula forms. Turkish is agglutinative but it's not polysynthetic like some American languages are, so you can't just combine arbitrary words. This kind of thing is not all that unusual though, the same happens in Zulu and its relatives as well (but they use prefixes instead). —CodeCat 16:58, 3 July 2013 (UTC) Turkish is as User:CodeCat states an agglutinative language. Words like hocadır bring me into a scism. On the one hand, they are clearly a predicative form of a noun. On the other hand, they resemble somewhat a verb: It is also the third-person "simple present" form of hoca olmak (to become a teacher/master. So, I sometimes make a verb entry in such cases. --Sae1962 (talk) 17:57, 3 July 2013 (UTC) But hoca olmak isn't a real verb, and we would never create an entry for that. So that means we need some other way to show the definition. How is my proposal above? Also, olmak is missing information about the copulative suffixes, and noun declension tables should probably include these copulative forms. I think that's important. Personally, I would rather call them "nouns" than "verbs" because a copula isn't strictly a real verb when seen from a universal point of view, and in many languages there isn't even a copula verb, or (like in Turkish) it is replaced by some other formation in certain cases. —CodeCat 18:02, 3 July 2013 (UTC) I've created {{tr-copulative form of}} and updated the entry hocadır to use it. My knowledge of Turkish is very limited, so I used an online resource. I hope I did it right. —CodeCat 19:13, 3 July 2013 (UTC) I've asked one of our other Turkish speakers to comment. :) - -sche (discuss) 21:11, 3 July 2013 (UTC) In the declension tables, all possible forms can be seen, with the verb "to be" in present, past, and unwitnessed past forms for all subjects, the possessive forms and cases. I really don't think that we should create seperate articles for all possible derivations. That'd really get out of control. I don't agree with Sae about the verb-resembling-part. You can say whatever you want as "I am ..." and that doesn't turn them into verbs or verb forms. If we're talking about verbs, third person singular, simple present form of "hoca olmak" would be "hoca olur", and that's something completely different. Of course not a real verb, again you can say whatever you want like "he/she becomes a(n) ...". Sinek (talk) 00:56, 4 July 2013 (UTC) I don't disagree that anlamamak ("not to understand") is the antonym of anlamak ("to understand"), but I'm 100% sure that it's wrong. "İyi" ("good") is the antonym of "kötü" ("bad") but the negative forms of the verbs cannot be antonyms. And the category "Turkish verbs" is full of verb forms such as "I understand", "you understand", "they understand" etc. while they belong to the Category:Turkish verb forms. So there are tons of entries with miscategorizations and incorrect titles. What's worse, "gelir" (he/she comes) has been listed as the Third-person negative singular simple present indicative form of gelmemek. ("not to come"). And it's not the only one. I've been away from Wiktionary for a while but how could this get so crazy? Sinek (talk) 01:31, 4 July 2013 (UTC) Re "how could this get so crazy?": Sae1962 is known to make lots of grammatical, formatting, and other errors. A fair number of us clean up the English and German errors, but not many of us speak Turkish... - -sche (discuss) 02:29, 4 July 2013 (UTC) User:Sae1962 may have made a few mistakes in his entries. Feel free to make corrections. —Stephen (Talk) 04:19, 4 July 2013 (UTC) It should probably be listed as the negative infinitive form of anlamak. — [Ric Laurent] — 19:52, 4 July 2013 (UTC) I think we are missing a sense, as in, "I'm sorry, I haven't got around to doing that yet." How would we define it in this case? Struggling with this. ---> Tooironic (talk) 11:35, 5 July 2013 (UTC) See get around to. The definition includes "procrastination" as an essential element, which it is not, at least not in the most common meaning of "procrastination". DCDuring TALK 11:53, 5 July 2013 (UTC) I've just added some adverbial senses to ruhig. Could other German speakers, especially native speakers, take a look and see if I've gotten the implications right? It's one of those notorious German adverbs or particles that corresponds more to tone of voice than to any English word. —Angr 17:08, 5 July 2013 (UTC) I (native speaker) think your definitions are fine :) I'm not sure if we (should) include "SoP" senses like 1 and 2, though. Every adjective can be used as an adverb in this way. Longtrend (talk) 15:46, 8 July 2013 (UTC) Well, I wouldn't add senses 1 and 2 if they were the only thing ruhig meant, but if we only include senses 3 and 4, readers might get the impression it can't mean "quietly, calmly", which of course it can. Sort of the way we often include {{&lit}} senses for our idiomatic entries (cf. vier Buchstaben). —Angr 20:13, 9 July 2013 (UTC) This term originally referred only to the Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris, but in the US refers only to trees in the genus Abies. Until today, the Pinus sylvestris sense wasn't even mentioned in our entry (except in reference to an Old English word), and Wikipedia still only refers to Abies in the w:Fir article. I'm trying to put together a usage note to clarify all of this, but I don't know enough about usage outside the US. Is the Abies sense used in the UK/Ireland, and, if so, how much has the Pinus sylvestris sense displaced it? What about Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.? Chuck Entz (talk) 23:36, 5 July 2013 (UTC) All we can do is try. Range data, maps etc can help make it clear which species rural folks might need or have needed a name for. Commons has a surprising number of such maps, which also help in translation requests. DCDuring TALK 01:19, 6 July 2013 (UTC) I've created Pinus sylvestris, with a distribution map, showing the last bit in the Highlands. I suppose Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa know it as a landscape specimen, unless the forest products industry there finds it superior (which I would doubt). DCDuring TALK 01:32, 6 July 2013 (UTC) The Century Dictionary has Scotch fir as meaning Scots pine. In the US BTW, don't most people call the Christmas trees Scotch pines? And, they grow Pinus sylvestris in New Zealand. It is considered invasive in some parts of North America. DCDuring TALK 01:56, 6 July 2013 (UTC) See Scotch pine, Scotch fir, and Scots pine also. DCDuring TALK 02:06, 6 July 2013 (UTC) I see little use of Scotch fir in the 20th century in newspapers. Before that, it was used in Scotland and New Zealand, with small amounts of usage in the US, UK, Canada. DCDuring TALK 02:18, 6 July 2013 (UTC) The distribution of newspaper usage of Scots fir is about the same. I would infer that the usage of fir to means Scots pine is about the same: pre-20th century, chiefly in Scotland and NZ. DCDuring TALK 02:23, 6 July 2013 (UTC) To start with, "Scotch" is proscribed in reference to anything but the drink, and as people have caught on to this fact, it has progressively disappeared from modern usage, so it's not a good indicator. I'm quite familiar with the distribution of the different species: Pinus sylvestris it the only needled conifer native to the British Isles. Abies alba is native throughout the mountains of southern and central Europe. It was well known to the Romans, and their name for it, abies, has been inherited in most, if not all, of the the Romance languages- but never made it to England. It used to be that "fir" was the pine, while the introduced Abies was "silver fir". The pine was driven to extinction in the wild in Britain a few hundred years ago (except for Scotland), but was widely reintroduced as a planted tree. It then became known as the "Scots fir". In the US, names tend to get switched around: the most common deer in the US has no counterpart in the UK, so it took the name from the closest counterpart to the English deer, the wapiti. This, in turn took the name away from the counterpart of the European elk, which then became known as the moose. Just as the average person in the US would be astonished that the European elk is the same as the US moose, they would also be astonished that Europeans would refer to a pine as "fir". This leads to confusion: the University of Michigan's Middle English Dictionary starts out out its definition of firre with "An evergreen coniferous tree of the genus abies; a fir tree;". The only problem is that Abies wasn't introduced to England until the time of Modern English, so that has to be wrong. I think that this ambiguity has lead to a tendency in the UK (at least in books) to refer to Pinus sylvestris as "pine" to avoid confusion, which leaves "fir" to the silver fir. I have no idea, though, whether pines are still referred to as "firs" in modern usage, and which predominates. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:28, 6 July 2013 (UTC) In the US, per COCA, Scotch pine get 23 uses, Scots pine 7, Scots fir 1, the other three possible combinations (also including Scottish) 0. I don't have any good ideas about how to determine the referent of the word fir occurring alone, except by looking at a lot of cites. One might hope in a newspaper to get a locally tuned explanation of the the words in the course of an article. I don't see how one can get frequency data though, except through something like DARE. DCDuring TALK 08:15, 6 July 2013 (UTC) Or we could rely on Century, whose entry for fir has a long list of referents conveniently reported at Wordnik. DCDuring TALK 08:29, 6 July 2013 (UTC) Our entry certainly needs adjusting. In the UK, "fir" can mean any conifer. This usage goes back many centuries (as in "Spruce fir, Scotch fir, Silver fir, Weymouth fir" from Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London). Scotch Fir is now more usually known as Scots Pine (at least in formal documents). I look out of my window every day at a lone specimen on top of a hill. I haven't found out whether it was deliberately planted a hundred years ago or is the last remnant of a Caledonian forest. Dbfirs 08:22, 7 July 2013 (UTC) I've made the UK entry more general, but please adjust as more evidence comes to light. Dbfirs 08:59, 7 July 2013 (UTC) A script error[edit] I do not do much here, but I noticed a script error on commencer. Please fix it. Воображение It was almost certainly caused by a template on that page rather than the page itself. At any rate, I don't see any script error at commencer now so I guess it's been fixed. —Angr 09:01, 6 July 2013 (UTC) Adverb as part of speech is misleading here. It's not talk + up a storm (like bark up a tree); it's talk up + a storm (like chop up an onion). Since other verbs than talk can be used, I don't know what to call this if not adverb, though. Perhaps it should be relegated to usage notes at storm (noun). Equinox ◑ 10:39, 7 July 2013 (UTC) Talk up a storm is decidedly not like chop up an onion, unless it is a TV weather person dramatizing his subject. There are numerous instances of up a storm with verbs that do not normally occur with up. For example, dance up a storm, baked up a storm. This is almost a case of two adverbials being used together, though if a storm is or was used adverbially apart from up, I would find it archaic. MWOnline includes this. Is it mostly US? DCDuring TALK 12:59, 7 July 2013 (UTC) Both of the OneLook idiom dictionaries that have this are books of American idioms. DCDuring TALK 13:12, 7 July 2013 (UTC) I meant "talk up + a storm" grammatically, not in the sense of "talk up = exaggerate". I meant that up a storm is not an appropriate lemma/decomposition, in the way that up an onion would not be the appropriate reading for chop up an onion. A better analogy to the chatted "storm" might be whip up a meal (produce from nowhere). Equinox ◑ 21:07, 9 July 2013 (UTC) I think grammatically storm is better characterized either as a direct object of the verb or an adverb (like a lot) with up being adverbial. Even if a storm is construed as direct object of the verbs, we have numerous non-constituents as entries in Category:English non-constituents. I'd just as soon keep it more or less as is. DCDuring TALK 22:06, 9 July 2013 (UTC) Is this really a word or a misspelling? It's not in the OED and google finds it necessary to insert [sic] in this book title. On the other hand gbooks and scholar have enough examples of it to justify an entry as a common misspelling even if it is incorrect. We also have an example ourselves at klusi. SpinningSpark 13:56, 7 July 2013 (UTC) It looks like a common mis-spelling to me. What does it mean, other than unobtrusive? Dbfirs 15:47, 7 July 2013 (UTC) I've corrected the typo at [[klusi]]. —Angr 16:02, 7 July 2013 (UTC) obstrusive seems to come up just as often. SpinningSpark 16:08, 7 July 2013 (UTC) At Google news, which has relatively credible counts, there are 4 instances of unobstrusive and more than 1000 of unobstrusive. The ratio at COCA is similar. The raw count at Google Books is extremely unreliable. As I paged through the results, the last page showed the total to be 77. At Google Scholar we learn that peer review doesn't lead to good spelling: 2.7K of the misspelling and 98K of the right spelling. If the portion misspelled is 3% or less does that make it common, at least in combination with a large absolute count? I think a criterion like: natural log of raw count × ratio of misspelling to correct spelling > .3, when the data are drawn from a large corpus with reliable counts (like Scholar or News or COCA or BNC, but sadly not the Web or Books), apporoximates our intuition. Perhaps it should be the square root of the raw count or perhaps 0.3 should be 0.2 or 0.5, but the general idea seems right to me and it would simplify the determination. We could calibrate the formula against our past decisions. If this seems like a bad idea, I blame the lack of air-conditioning. DCDuring TALK 16:21, 7 July 2013 (UTC) I trust you mean more than 1000 of unobtrusive. How many hits does "apporoximates" get? Anyway, trying to quantify this mathematically seems like a good idea at first, but how do we accommodate things that are misspellings of one word but correct spellings of another word (e.g. there/their/they're, your/you're)? —Angr 17:03, 7 July 2013 (UTC) Gnews has way more than 4 results if the time is set to "archives". I like the idea of setting a numerical inclusion rule, it at least has the benefit of being an objective test, but there are some exceptions that need to be carefully thought out. Angr raised one, another is that accidental typos need to be distinguished from misspellings due to the author believing them correct. SpinningSpark 19:06, 7 July 2013 (UTC) Angr: Thanks for catching my typo above. As to there/their/they're: we don't now treat them as misspellings of each other. I can't think of anything helpful we could offer beyond pointing to the homophones line in the Pronunciation section. I'd be perfectly happy to admit defeat by homophones. My interest is in finding some systematic way of treating at least some of the cases. Upper and lower bounds on zones of inclusion and exclusion could leave a gray area in between to be resolved by voting as at present. This is intended only to apply to spellings not better considered alternative spellings, for which usage at a rate greater than 20%-30% in some identifiable usage group seems to be sufficient to convince us not to treat it as a misspelling. ::::If we never resolve this little issue, we'll just spend a bit more time on misspellings than we would have to. If there is any positive response here to the general idea (The formula might need changing and some discussion of corpora wouldn't hurt.), I'll take it to BP. DCDuring TALK 19:24, 7 July 2013 (UTC) Since no one appears to be positively saying we shouldn't have these, I have gone ahead and put them in. SpinningSpark 13:45, 11 July 2013 (UTC) Given unobtrusive, unobstrusive at Google Ngram Viewer, its frequency ratio in year 2000 of 155 and the absence in both obstrusive at OneLook Dictionary Search and unobstrusive at OneLook Dictionary Search, this looks like a common misspelling to me. While the frequency ratio for Google Ngram in year 1980 is about 50, that is still misspelling-ratio to me rather than an alternative-spelling one. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:01, 12 July 2013 (UTC) Yes, I put them in as misspellings, not normal entries. SpinningSpark 09:42, 13 July 2013 (UTC) Latin pronuntiation is [ˈfas.ci.num] (IPA: ɸʌsʦɪnʊm) not [ˈfas.ki.num]! --Kusurija (talk) 18:47, 7 July 2013 (UTC) ɸ and ʌ in Latin?? — Ungoliant (Falai) 18:53, 7 July 2013 (UTC) [ˈfas.ki.num] (well, [ˈfas.ki.nũ]) is correct for Classical Latin. Ecclesiastical Latin would be [ˈfaʃ.ʃi.num], but I don't know if this word is used in Ecclesiastical Latin. —Angr 19:39, 7 July 2013 (UTC) As Angr says, it probably started out with a k sound, but, beginning in the Middle Ages, the pronunciation of "s+ci" diverged regionally. In Latin used by English or French speakers nowadays, it would normally be IPA: si, by Italians and/or those who follow the Ecclesiastical pronunciation, IPA: ʃi (with ʃ single or doubled), while Germans and most Eastern Europeans would use your pronunciation of IPA: sʦi. Our practice of following the Classical pronunciation is probably best for an international resource like ours, though an argument could be made for using English (it is English Wiktionary, after all) or the Ecclesiastical pronunciation. Your version is completely alien to most English speakers, but would be fine for the German, Polish, Czech or other similar Wiktionaries. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:24, 7 July 2013 (UTC) illocutionary[edit] The example about "pronouncing a couple man and wife" is misleading. "Pronounce" is a performative verb. Illocutionary force is the intention of the speaker, and that could be pronouncing a marriage, giving out information, lying or indeed anything at all. It's not quite that simple. The concept of illocution has changed over the years, and with it the usage. As a descriptive dictionary, we have to cover terms as they're actually used, not as they ought to be used. If someone reads about "I now pronounce you man and wife" as an illocutionary act, we'll want to have a definition that covers the word as it was meant. I think we may have to have two definitions at illocution and all of its derivatives to cover usage adequately. My linguistics education dates back to When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, so I'll leave it to others to decide exactly how to deal with this. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:43, 8 July 2013 (UTC) I'm not really sure, but isn't this just check followed by a prepositional phrase whose head is into? Similarly for the other currently "wanted entry" on the recent changes page, check up on (= check up + on). Longtrend (talk) 15:29, 8 July 2013 (UTC) I think your assessment is correct. But I am apparently not representative of prevailing opinion here. I think that check up = check#Verb + up (intensifier). DCDuring TALK 17:11, 8 July 2013 (UTC) Yes, this entry should be deleted. "Are you checking up on me?" can imply inappropriate or unwelcome micromanagement. I think it may have an idiomatic sense that is perhaps not captured in the definition. —Michael Z. 2013-07-08 17:23 z I moved it to RFD. Longtrend (talk) 19:33, 12 July 2013 (UTC) I'm not sure if the third sense of this word ("to join metal sheets, parts, etc.") can be rendered into English as "to sew"; it seems possible, but it also sounds strange to my (admittedly foreign) ears. The translation of the example given also seems weird... Could I perhaps ask some of the native speakers here who happen to know something about metallurgy (not my field...) for suggestions and comments? Thanks in advance! --Pereru (talk) 15:55, 9 July 2013 (UTC) welding, brazing, and soldering are some metal-joining methods. Spot-welding is used where a sealed joint is not required, but that seems wrong for most pipe applications. There is a process called seam-welding, which also uses a word with etymological roots in sewing. DCDuring TALK 21:04, 9 July 2013 (UTC) Could someone with good French please check out my translations of the quotes at bernard l'ermite and make sure they're right? Especially the second one, I'm not at all sure what "car je l'estime de nature à prêter grandement à réfléchir" means. Thanks! —Angr 20:06, 9 July 2013 (UTC) You seemed to do fine, and got the general point of "car je l'estime de nature à prêter grandement à réfléchir" means. It is very oddly worded; it literally translates to "I deem it of the nature to lend much thought.". I changed your wording a bit.Воображение Actually, I didn't; I got help from some people at Wikipedia and had changed the translation based on their suggestions before you saw it. What I originally put was "because I esteem it for the thoughts it leads me to". —Angr 16:02, 10 July 2013 (UTC) One thought though. It seems to me that bernard-l'ermite seems more commonly used than bernard l'ermite. Even the French wiktionary says so. I think you should transfer all the code from bernard l'ermite to bernard-l'ermite. Воображение I agree. French Wikipedia also uses the hyphen, as do both quotes I added (though one of them capitalizes it as well), so I've moved it to bernard-l'ermite. —Angr 19:44, 10 July 2013 (UTC) Actually, the most common spelling is bernard-l'hermite (hermite is an old spelling of ermite, but it's still used in this word). Lmaltier (talk) 20:15, 10 July 2013 (UTC) Merci pour votre suggestion, but would not it matter based on your location? I think the dialect of French most used here is Parisian French, as is the same in le wikitionairre, so if you are absolutely sure that you have seen somebody Parisian spell it the -hermite way, I think that we should go with the -ermite. Воображение I live near Paris and work at Paris, but this is irrelevant. I was surprised when I read your spelling. After checking on Google, I find: "bernard-l'hermite": 1,900,000, "bernard-l'ermite": 815,000. Actually, my conclusion is that I was used to the spelling with an h, but that both spellings are commonly used (and both were already used during the 19th century). According to Google Ngram Viewer, the trend is clearly favourable to bernard-l'ermite, but both spellings are still common: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bernard-l%27ermite%2Cbernard-l%27hermite&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=19&smoothing=3&share= although this is not the case for the plural: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bernards-l%27ermite%2Cbernards-l%27hermite&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=19&smoothing=3&share= Note that, unlike bernard-l'hermite, hermite is, very clearly, an obsolete spelling (you can still find it sometimes, but rarely, and it's considered as an error). Lmaltier (talk) 21:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC) Is there any chance of chronosynclastic meeting our CFI. As far as I know, it was only ever used in one book. If not, I shall have to delete the Italian translation (cronosinclastico). SemperBlotto (talk) 11:02, 10 July 2013 (UTC) Sirens of Titan is not a well-known work. Looking at Google Scholar, there are 26 raw hits, a large number of which are probably just mentions and some of which are not in durably archived media. But I'd be surprised if we couldn't find three good cites. I had recently RfVed an invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but that seems to have survived. Why not this? DCDuring TALK 12:02, 10 July 2013 (UTC) Esperanto noun forms not green[edit] Anyone know why the noun forms for Esperanto nouns are not showing up green any longer? Thanks, Razorflame 02:08, 12 July 2013 (UTC) See WT:Grease Pit#Two little things. — Ungoliant (Falai) 02:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC) Thanks :) Razorflame 02:29, 12 July 2013 (UTC) For the article on quis (Latin), quae is listed as the feminine form in the declension table, but quis is in the upper part. Is there a reason for this?72.74.136.49 15:29, 12 July 2013 (UTC) Human error. Fixed. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:49, 12 July 2013 (UTC) Compare first two senses: "something that someone possesses, but to which he does not necessarily have private property rights"; and "something that is owned". Can someone explain the difference, and confirm that these are separate senses of the word and not merely separate contexts? (Compare "something that one owns but has lent to somebody else", which is a conceivable kind of possession but would not merit a sense line.) Equinox ◑ 20:42, 12 July 2013 (UTC) ownership and custody or occupancy are often confused. MWOnline finesses the matter nicely with: "something owned, occupied, or controlled", which seems to cover both of those definitions. DCDuring TALK 21:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC) In the final sentence (quote) example for this word, I translated valganums as "dampness", but it seems somehow strange to me to speak of the "dampness of enthusiasm and passion" in someone's eyes. Doesn't "damp" or "dampness" usually suggest (in metaphorical contexts) sadder, more depressive feelings? In this case, how should someone talk about the "moistness" in a person's eyes who is happy and enthusiastic about life, as children often are (which I think is the intended meaning in the quote I tried to translate)? --Pereru (talk) 11:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC) Yes, dampness has more of a negative connotation. There's the expression dewy-eyed, so dewiness might work, though that has a bit of a flowery Victorian poetic feel to it. For a looser translation, brightness would be a closer fit, but it doesn't have the same literal meaning. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:03, 15 July 2013 (UTC) Not sure how things work around here, but here is a note on the etymology of the above - [27]. If the link doesn't work, just put - "sleep with the fishes" Sketches of Germany and the Germans - into Google. It's a usage of the phrase from 1836. This looks like a case of live metaphor vs. set phrase. In your quote, it's in the context of actual fishes, though the sleeping part is idiomatic. The modern usage has a perceived association with organized crime as portrayed in the popular media, and probably comes from the quote in The Godfather, as stated in the etymology. The etymology should be modified to account for previous use as a live metaphor. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:54, 15 July 2013 (UTC) modality[edit] The fourth definition of modality is "(medicine) any method of therapy that involves therapeutic treatment". But what does that mean? I tried following the linked words, and I am none the wiser. JonH (talk) 18:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC) "(medicine) A form or method of treatment." I'll try to get some usage examples and citations for this. DCDuring TALK 18:45, 15 July 2013 (UTC) Modality also refers to methods of diagnosis, especially now of diagnostic imaging. In all the medical and caring fields it seems to refer to readily distinguished means of therapy. So ultrasound is a modality of diagnostic imaging, but there could be different means, methods, or techniques of using it. It would not be impossible apparently for someone to use the more specialized word to refer to a means, method, or technique that seemed to them to be significantly different from others. DCDuring TALK 19:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC) Thanks for the quick reply and the update to the definition. I get the idea now. JonH (talk) 22:26, 15 July 2013 (UTC) Thanks for seeking clarification. If you can't improve it yourself, drawing attention to a problem definition is very helpful. And this space is better than the talk page. DCDuring TALK 23:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC) Problem with assignment of the possessive form of the Turkish word koordinat[edit] Hello! Although I consider myself a good Turkish speaker, I run into problems with a possessive form. I wanted to add all the forms for the new entry koordinat, but do not know which templates to use for koordinatınız and koordinatlarınız. The first is for "your" (second-person singular, subject pronoun). Siz on the right column is you for the second-person plural (a group of people you meet). I think the templates are somehow confusing to me.--Sae1962 (talk) 11:03, 16 July 2013 (UTC) Discussion moved to Wiktionary:Grease_pit/2013/July#Hebrew_display_problem. I find the order of senses very confusing. The most common sense of "truth" is "true facts", not loyalty. The current order obviously caused quite a few mistranslations. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:23, 18 July 2013 (UTC) The only plausible objective basis for ordering senses of basic words in general use is historical. It is incredibly time-consuming to establish relative frequency of meanings. The OED provides a reference for historical ordering. I don't know that there is any substitute for reading the glosses, at least all of those not with some restricted usage context (somehow ignoring the confusion between topic and usage context), before doing translations. I know that is asking a lot, especially if you, one of our most diligent and prolific translators, find this confusing. DCDuring TALK 01:06, 18 July 2013 (UTC) We have it as a postpositive adjective, but I always thought it was a noun; see google books:"a redux" for example. Does anyone have strong evidence either way (or a lemming test)? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:59, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

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