Talk:drastically

Deletion discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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drastically

rfd-sense: "Using drastic or severe measures." Isn't this the same as "in a drastic manner"? Mglovesfun (talk) 15:19, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

You would think so, being a native speaker, but what about the poor language learner who doesn't know that? DCDuring TALK 15:56, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, what's your point? Mglovesfun (talk) 20:19, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

It may look like duplication to you from your privileged position as native speaker, but not to the poor, struggling language learner. DCDuring TALK 22:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

• Combine them. Sense 1: In a drastic manner; using drastic or severe measures. bd2412 T 22:42, 17 October 2013 (UTC) Striking !vote, new vote below. bd2412 T 15:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

They are not the same, are they? "The numbers have fallen drastically" does not mean they have fallen "using drastic or severe measures" (no measures were used!), but to a drastic or severe extent. Equinox ◑ 22:46, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

I made the degree sense separate from the 'manner' sense today. The challenged sense is "using drastic or severe measures", which could be considered duplicative of the manner sense "in a drastic manner". DCDuring TALK 23:31, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Can someone provide an example of a sentence using "drastically" to refer to the use of drastic or severe measures, that would not be covered by the meaning, in a drastic manner? bd2412 T 23:17, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not even sure that I know how to distinguish "in a drastic manner" from "to drastic/extreme extent".

???They cut back on store hours minimally, but drastically.

That doesn't seem right at all. DCDuring TALK 23:36, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

• Delete. In retrospect, the problem here is not that drastically has multiple meanings, but that drastic has multiple meanings, which are contained in that entry. Drastically means one thing, in a drastic manner, no matter which sense of drastic is used. Compare passionately; we do not list separate senses for the romantic, excited, and bereaved senses of passionate. This reflects our practice with other parts of speech. For example, posters is merely defined as the plural of poster, not as "the plural of paper hung on the wall" and "the plural of one who posts things". bd2412 T 15:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

  It can seem to be a problem with -ly adverbs that the senses simply carry over from the adjective. However, I think the seeming may not be reality. In this case can you really call this a manner adverb at all? I can detect no semantic difference in the meaning of this adverb whether it modifies an adjective or an adverb. In both cases it seems to have no meaning other than that of a degree adverb. What seems interesting is that it is not or cannot be used with just any verb or adjective. Perhaps this restriction is the vestige of whatever semantically distinguished it at one time from other degree adverbs. It is a shame that older print dictionaries like MW 1913 and Century 1911 rarely offer separate definitions for -ly adverbs. Does the OED define them separately? DCDuring TALK 15:51, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

  Why is there a dichotomy between manner and degree at all? If drastic relates a degree, and I do something "in a drastic manner" then I am doing it to a degree that is drastic. Drastically, in that sense, still means "in a drastic manner". bd2412 T 20:31, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

  There are -ly adverbs that have lost all possibility of being interpreted as manner adverbs, such as greatly. DCDuring TALK 22:40, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

  There is a small class of words like greatly, mostly, and lastly, which can not be described as being in the manner of their corresponding adjective, but they are few and far between, and I don't think this is one of them. bd2412 T 00:52, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

  I'd like to see an instance, invented or real, of the use of the word in current English that clearly had a 'manner' and not a 'degree' interpretation. DCDuring TALK 00:59, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

  Do beautifully or silently convey degree? bd2412 T 01:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

  What about these citations (not the usex)? - -sche (discuss) 01:19, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

  They look good as cites of a 'manner' sense, which would seem to merit its own definition. They seem dated to me, but confirming that would take a bit more research. DCDuring TALK 04:31, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

I have combined all of the senses into one sense: "in a drastic manner; to a drastic degree". - -sche (discuss) 21:45, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

I completely agree with this solution (another way to put it would be, "in a manner, or a to a degree, that is drastic"). bd2412 T 16:19, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

How does that substitute into "drastically different/wrong/smaller"? Wouldn't the degree sense, especially where drasticlly modifies an adjective, be better served by a {{non-gloss definition}} ({{n-g}})?

There is something that we are not capturing. It's a good thing that these discussions are linked to from the entry talk page or, better, ON the entry talk page, so someone else could press on to capture what's still missing. Substitution is a good test for the quality of a definition, both as to length and, especially, grammar.DCDuring TALK 17:45, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Re "how does that substitute into ‘drastically different/wrong/smaller’?": doesn't it sub right in? "Chocolate is drastically different from vanilla": "Chocolate is different from vanilla to a degree that is drastic=extreme, and/or in a manner than is drastic=extreme", "chocolate is extremely different from vanilla"; compare google books:"the differences are drastic": "the differences are extreme". Likewise with "drastically smaller". I don't recall hearing "drastically wrong" before, but the Google Books hits it gets all seem to mean "wrong to a drastic=extreme degree". - -sche (discuss) 18:35, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I picked the most frequent adverb-adjective combinations from COCA. I think drastically is bleaching its way toward being a pure degree adverb. So far it retains its manner interpretation almost always when modifying a verb. But I just don't consent to the naturalness of the "drastic manner" reading when it modifies an adjective, at least not in most cases. I can readily accept the "manner" reading when it is "drastically differ/s/ing/ed", but not when it is "drastically different". So the "or" bothers me, here, much as combining transitive and intransitive verb definitions bothers me. DCDuring TALK 19:56, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I have undone the combination of the senses as out of process. If someone wants to close the nomination, please do so in boldfaceso that we know what is going on without wading through walls of text. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:13, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I undid my edit; I acted hastily. In any case, I am not about to be closing this mess right now. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:32, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

In light of what Equinox said, we should rewrite the entry, making clear what the difference between the two senses is. Renard Migrant (talk) 19:28, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I still don't see that there's a difference not resolved by the different definitions of drastic, but I withdraw my vote to delete in light of the obvious desire to reflect this difference in this derivation. bd2412 T 04:13, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I see no likelihood of a consensus to delete arising here. There is currently only one definition in the entry, which reads "In a drastic manner; to a drastic degree"; but under the current consensus this would be split again and presented as distinct and distinguished senses, each with its own set of supporting citations. Does anyone disagree with this assessment of the discussion? bd2412 T 02:23, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree. There is evidence supporting a single true 'manner' sense, as well as what I view as the more and increasingly common 'degree' sense. The original delete/merge of the two manner senses seems to have been implicitly accepted without much discussion. DCDuring TALK 02:51, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

No consensus to delete. I am closing this as resolved, because there is a clear absence of consensus to delete the second sense. However, the two senses are currently combined into one definition line. To the extent that anyone wants to address the state of the entry, fell free to do so. bd2412 T 16:49, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

WTF. It's already been deleted. DCDuring TALK 17:04, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, I would say that the senses have been merged into a single line. Should the second line be restored as a separate line, with separate citations supporting its distinctive usage? I don't know, but I can see no consensus against such an arrangement, so if you want to restore the entry to that state (or otherwise improve it), there's no reason not to. I'm just calling the discussion, not saying that the entry conforms to it as is. bd2412 T 17:17, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Not only have the original senses been merged, but a sense not the subject of the original RfD-sense was merged into it as well. Most of the discussion seemed to simply assume that the challenged sense ("Using drastic or severe measures.") should be deleted or merged into the pure 'manner' sense. If we can delete senses with so little explicit discussion, then the originally worded pure 'manner' sense should remain and the other 'manner' sense be deleted. If the absence of explicit votes is a problem then the discussion needs to be refocused, perhaps with {{look}}. I apologize for my contribution to the loss of focus, right at the start of the discussion. DCDuring TALK 17:43, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

The discussion was initiated nearly a year ago. I gather that the community as a whole doesn't much care if there is one sense or two, or if "Using drastic or severe measures" exists as a separate sense. I personally don't see much difference. bd2412 T 18:33, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

The entire reason to have two senses is to eliminate an "or" in the definition, so that one does not try to substitute the 'manner' definition into an adjective-modifying slot where a 'degree' definition plain and simple is a good fit. I don't see very many cases where a professional lexicographer has done that since Webster 1913, which its synonym-cloud approach to definition.

I have yet to find a dictionary that follows our practice (which I agree with BTW) of actually offering self-contained definitions of '-ly' adverbs where we have the willingness to do so. Most don't offer definitions at all, treating the '-ly' adverb as a run-in, thereby forcing the poor language learner to construct the meaning without assistance. If we are going to put a language learner on a separate page for the adverb, we should make the page self-contained for most purposes. Forcing the user to the adjective page is not much help. At the very least, we should have the most common meanings laid out, unless we think we are institutionally incapable of doing so, which may be, since we cannot simply copy from or imitate other dictionaries in this regard.

This is the kind of thing that professionally constructed dictionaries handle with a style manual, I think, but such a manual is probably beyond our capability to produce and gain agreement on as well as beyond the willingness of most of our volunteers to follow. The lack of interest in the discussion is evidence of the lack of required attention to detail. DCDuring TALK 19:50, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I tried making more informative "manner" -ly pages when I first got here, and they were quickly stripped down, so I gave up on that and have since largely stuck to convention in creating them. bd2412 T 21:01, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Not much reason for having them if we don't have meaningful definitions, usage examples, translation tables, synonyms, usage notes. I'd also bet that OED makes distinctions between manner and degree adverbs, but we apparently have given up that aspiration. DCDuring TALK 21:27, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I think we do have synonyms and translation tables for some. It's just the definition lines that are routinely sparse. It's not much different, frankly, from having entries for plural forms that use a template to say, in bare terms, "plural of foo". bd2412 T 22:23, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I have re-split the manner and degree senses in diff. I am not convinced that this is necessary, and I expect it will mae some uses hard to classify (even the 1920 citation has shades of "degree"), but it's not wrong, I guess. - -sche (discuss) 20:22, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

The pure degree interpretation which includes the usage modifying adjectives is clearly derived from the pure manner interpretation. Thus there must have been usage that was intermediate. And there is plenty of current usage that fits both interpretations.

There's a difference in what one expects from a definition. I hope to find definitions that accommodate all the significant grammatical variation as well as the semantic variation. I prefer lots of senses, not too dissimilar from OED, MWOnline, and most other 'unabridged' dictionaries. MW 1913 liked the synonym-cloud approach to many definitions. I think we do well to split in order to span the usage types and allow users to select or blend on their own, thereby covering a larger number of cases, including some we don't anticipate. I can see that trying to achieve agreement on a dictionary style manual is probably futile. DCDuring TALK 21:44, 8 September 2014 (UTC)