Talk:lose the baby

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Looks like a classic case of SOP. Compare lose hair, lose the match, lose the race, lose the signal, lose the keys, lose the plot (idiomatic), lose one's life. --Three littlish birds (talk) 13:41, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Delete. Already covered at lose, sense 5 ("experience the death of"; e.g. you can lose your parents), and not a fixed phrase (e.g. "she lost her baby" is fine). Equinox ◑ 13:43, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Delete. No need for me to comment here. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:46, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Keep. Lose the pregnancy would be unidiomatic, but lose the baby as a colloquialism for "to suffer a miscarriage" is not. It is idiomatic because its precise meaning cannot be determined strictly from its constituent parts. It's not clear that lose the baby means to suffer a miscarriage, as "the baby" could mean an infant. Thus the phrase has a number of possible alternative meanings: to have an infant die, to misplace an infant, to have an infant taken away (e.g., "the biological mother ultimately lost the baby after a custody battle with the adoptive parents"). I would not oppose moving it to something like lose one's baby, though. Astral (talk) 14:22, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Keep. I imagine the baby talked about is the one the unfortunate mother-to-be would have had, not the foetus; so the term is referring to a loss of something one does not yet have. — Pingku^dimmi 15:04, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

@Astral: That reasoning applies to individual words as well. One cannot tell which meaning is intended without resorting to the context, often outside the particular sentence. I don't see why a human would want to have a dictionary that consisted of all possible collocations involving polysemic words. For a machine of certain architectures it might be more cost-effective to have a really big look-up table instead of contextually based selection, but I doubt the utility of this for humans. It's a shame that we don't have a way of monitoring usage that we are willing to use.

@Pingku: That would be a reason to make sure that there is an appropriate sense of baby. I am reminded of the use of the term beef in English to refer to cattle on the hoof. The frequency of use of beef rather than cattle or steers increases the closer the animals are to the abattoir and the more the mind of the speaker/writer is on the end product.

Delete. DCDuring TALK 15:58, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Keep. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 16:06, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

The claim that this phrase only applies to a foetus is just wrong. Real example from the Web: "Leanne said: “I lost my baby when he was three months old." This is a live baby that had been out of the womb for 3 months. Equinox ◑ 16:09, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

I never claimed that the phrase is used exclusively to mean "to suffer a miscarriage." As I noted, the phrase can mean many things. When it is used to refer to the death of an infant, it isn't idiomatic. When it is used to refer to suffering a miscarriage, it is, since it's not transparent precisely what is meant by "the baby." The unidiomatic meanings don't warrant definitions, but the idiomatic meaning does. Of course, if you knew your friend was pregnant and she said, "I lost the baby," then you could figure out what she meant by context, but reaching that understanding would require prior knowledge. A phrase that requires prior knowledge to understand cannot be considered SOP. Not to mention that the term "baby" only applies postpartum in most non-colloquial/technical definitions, and miscarriages typically involve the loss of not just an embryo or fetus, but of the placenta and amniotic sac. Perhaps that's splitting hairs, but those things are part of what makes a pregnancy a pregnancy, and thus make a miscarriage categorically different from other possible meanings of "losing the baby." Astral (talk) 16:46, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Delete. Pregnant women often feel the "baby" inside them kick, or joke that they're eating a lot because "the baby is hungry". A man often announces to his friends that he and his wife have learnt from an ultrasound that "it's a baby boy!": and he doesn't mean she's given birth several months premature, he's referring to the fetus which is still inside the womb. Right-wingers accuse "abortionists" of "killing babies". "Fetus, unborn child" is well-attested as a sense of "baby", and the idea that "lose the baby" is idiomatic because it uses that sense is mistaken. - -sche (discuss) 18:21, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

• Add the sense "fetus" (not "unborn child" which faces the same difficulties) to the definition of baby and then delete. —Angr 18:24, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Delete per Equinox. What is the point of having specific definitions, like def. 5 of lose, if we’re going to add every SOP that uses it? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 14:38, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

• Comment. I don't see that the current definition of "To suffer a miscarriage" is a semantic sum of parts in terms of "experience the death of"; the mother could have lost a baby due to a car accident after birth. However, it is unclear that the specificity of the current definition is warranted. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:49, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Delete per Equinox, -sche: straightforward SOP.​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:08, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Keep but move to lose one's baby. This term admittedly hovers near the borderline of idiomaticity, but I think it squeaks through as an idiom. It is possible to lose a baby in the most common sense of the term "lose" and also to lose a baby in the much less common sense of "lose" used here. In the interest of having a clear and complete dictionary, I'd keep this definition. -- · (talk) 14:48, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Keep in some manner. Perhaps move it. Without any other context, this phrase is taken to mean "lose an unborn baby", which is not SoP. However it can either be used with the definite article or a possessive adjective. This, that and the other (talk) 00:34, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

Delete. Ƿidsiþ 06:19, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Deleted; this was a fairly close discussion, but a solid majority favors deletion; it is undisputed in the discussion that "lose" can refer to the experience of having a loved one die, and that one can "lose the baby" before or after birth. bd2412 T 18:54, 3 December 2013 (UTC)