Talk:à propos de bottes

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Latest comment: 12 years ago by -sche in topic RFV
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Anyone ever heard of this? Mglovesfun (talk) 14:00, 2 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

RFV[edit]

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification.

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English expression? DCDuring TALK 00:48, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

Fwiw, google books:"à propos de bottes you|are|am|is|there|the" has four hits, two of which are uses, both italicized. A better search along the same lines may yield more results, of course.​—msh210 (talk) 09:01, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
I've added a couple more citations, courtesy of gutenberg.org. — Pingkudimmi 11:44, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
All of the cites are italicized. I thought that italics for such an expression means that it is not English. Thus, this is presumably French, possibly dated, archaic, obsolete, or even ungrammatical in French. I had looked and found only italic/quotation-mark usage in English. DCDuring TALK 14:24, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
In reply to "I thought that italics for such an expression means that it is not English". I don't think it's quite that simple; italics are used for loanwords/loan phrases in English, but that's not enough to say that these terms aren't English. WT:CFI says "A term should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means." which could be the case whether the term is italicized or not. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:32, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
I agree (with Mglovesfun). —RuakhTALK 15:39, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
@msh210: Simply dropping the leading "à" produces many more hits: google books:"propos de bottes you|are|am|is|there|the". Google Books is diacritickally incompetent. By the way, google books:"and|or|but a propos de bottes" also gets a few dozen hits (though it only catches instances where Google Books treated "à" as "a", as opposed to as "à" or as "d" or as "u" or as something else entirely). —RuakhTALK 14:27, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
I also agree with Mglovesfun. Italics ou quotes are often used when the author cannot find the word in his dictionary, but a word is used when it is used, whatever the typography. Of course, it's English: it's valid French, and the sense used in English seems to also exist in French, but I've never heard it nor read it. Lmaltier 21:33, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
Re: "I've never heard it nor read it": For the record, I'd never heard it in English, either. It seems to be dated or archaic in both languages. —RuakhTALK 21:34, 6 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
Kept: cited, (and were this RFD) no consensus for deletion. - -sche (discuss) 02:04, 13 October 2011 (UTC)Reply