Talk:sickeningly sweet

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sickeningly sweet

This looks like pure SoP to me. It doesn't even claim to be an idiom. DCDuring 15:12, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Delete, sum of parts — [ ric ] opiaterein — 15:39, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Keep. This is a mildly idiomatic set phrase. I've heard it many times. Over 65,000 Google hits. -- WikiPedant 18:10, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

WPedant: I am curious as to whether there is any common collocation that you would exclude from Wikitionary and on what basis. Examples: "cause and effect", "house of cards", "dawn of a new day", "all about", "global economy", "at work", "rise and fall", "paranoid delusions". About all of these I can say that they are set phrases that I have heard many times. I'm quite sure that I could get numerous g.b.c. hits, let alone Google hits. "Any time, any place." E.g., BP, my talk page or here. DCDuring 20:11, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Set phrase: replacement by synonyms destroys meaning. "cloyingly sweet". "sickeningly syrupy". DCDuring 20:15, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

One at a time, please, DC. Here we're just talking about sickeningly sweet. Replacement of terms in a set phrase does not necessarily destroy the meaning; rather (to use the nicely nuanced term in the WT defn) it compromises the meaning. And the substitutions you made above {i.e. "cloyingly" and "syrupy") do seem to me to compromise the meaning. I see sickeningly sweet as a very widely used variant form of sickly sweet and I see both of these terms as mildly idiomatic and as warranting WT inclusion. For one thing, these phrases contain a vaguely paradoxical juxtaposition of concepts which tend to be contraries (sickness is unpleasant but sweetness is pleasant). Also, both phrases are often used non-literally to refer to something or someone overly nice, sentimental, or gushy. Also, "sickeningly" here includes a connotation of "overly" or "too", but "sickeningly" does not necessarily intend a meaning of "too" or "overly" in every usage (e.g., "sickeningly odorous"). In my mind these sorts of considerations add up to a rationale for including the meanings of sickeningly sweet and sickly sweet in a dictionary. -- 20:45, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

So sweet (any sense) as too be sickening (pragmatically disgusting rather than literally making one sick). Meaning seems pretty straighforward to me. Delete. DAVilla 06:55, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

I tend to think that (deprecated template usage) sickeningly is a generic intensifier, sickeningly simple, sickeningly devious etc. In which case the term in question is an SoP. - [The]DaveRoss 22:21, 30 April 2008 (UTC)