Talk:all it's cracked up to be

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Merger convo[edit]

--Barytonesis (talk) 13:25, 30 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

RFM discussion: June 2017–November 2022[edit]

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

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.

Redirect one towards the other. --Barytonesis (talk) 23:02, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There are plenty of instances that don't include adjacent not (eg, not anything (also nothing) like what it was cracked up to be) and others that have no not (or any other negative) at all (eg, to send Ray and Isaac up there to see if it was what it was 'cracked up to be'.). Note that the second example does not have is/'s and also omits all. It also could be in the plural.
Thus it is not obvious what the lemma should be. cracked up to be is the core, but makes a poor lemma. DCDuring (talk) 00:04, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
This Books search shows that the active form can be found. DCDuring (talk) 00:20, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
We do have sense 4 at crack up that covers this in principle, but not in actuality for most users. DCDuring (talk) 00:22, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@DCDuring: thanks for your input. You're one of the few contributors here interested in improving the English entries ahah.
Should we keep all it's cracked up to be as the lemma (and redirect the negative form to it), with notes explaining that it's often used in the negative (there's already one), and that it admits a fair amount of variation: "all" is not compulsory, there are instances of the active voice, the verb can be at a past tense, etc.?
Maybe you'll be interested in the case of "give a monkey's" as well, which I posted some time ago on that very same page? --Barytonesis (talk) 11:40, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I can't think of a better simple solution than what you propose. It has the disadvantage that there is no place other than usage notes to give usage example of the major possible variations. It would probably not be helpful to give usage examples for all the forms anywhere on the entry
Another approach would be to have redirects to a senseid for sense 4 of crack up from all of the versions of this with or without all, with the various pronouns (∅, what), all the person pronouns, and various tenses and aspects of crack up for hundreds of redirects. Probably some are very rare/unattestable and could be omitted with no harm at all, but many would remain. And there would still be no place at crack up for the numerous usage examples either.
An idiom dictionary at OneLook has 1 lemma (at “not what something is cracked up to be”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.) and 14 or more redirects thereto. DCDuring (talk) 20:42, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, what you (Barytonesis) propose sounds good. In general, I find it confusing when we take expressions that are usually negative and lemmatize and define them as positive expressions; if readers search for the negative form and don't notice they've been redirected, the risk that they'll think the phrase means the opposite of what it actually means seems high; but ah well. There should be redirects from not what it's cracked up to be, what it's cracked up to be, and probably even the forms with "be" (be all it's..., be what it's...) and "not be". - -sche (discuss) 20:55, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder where I can find the stop words (if the search engine even needs to have them) for search here. There might be some way to radically reduce the number of redirects. DCDuring (talk) 20:58, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]


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