Talk:smash

I like the edited definitions better -- I wasn't really satisfied with the original -- but I have the nagging feeling there's about 3/4 of a sense missing. Smashing something under slow pressure, or, say, smashing the fender of a car when backing carefully around a turn isn't breaking something brittle, nor is it hitting something very hard, nor is it destroying it completely and suddenly. -dmh 14:27, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

OK, I commented out this sense because it didn't seem to make sense ("smashing cans with a steamroller" - surely a smash is sudden rather than slow?) but it does now. It's something like "to damage something by an impact" (also as in "to smash someone's face"). I'll add something to that effect. I'm not convinced by the slow smash though. — Paul G 16:14, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hm, the sense of "to strike violently" is already there. I don't see how you can smash something by slow pressure - I would use "crush" in that sense. — Paul G 16:18, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I couldn't find anything convincing in BNC, but here are some results from googling "slowly smash":

1. I watched the face rotate around the y-axis in my head and thought that all you have to do is slowly smash the curves horizontally and eventually invert them
2. Grass and weeds grow through the cracks in the pavement and slowly smash open the rotting road.
3. And through all these tectonic tribulations, mountain ranges form as plates slowly smash together while rifts appear as they drift apart
4. While many details emerge — exactly how shifting ice floes can slowly smash a sturdy ship ...
5. All models of ETX,DS and LX will happily keep following an object after it sets and (possibly) slowly smash into their bases.

Items 1, 3 and 4, in particular, seem to pick up a sense something like "deform under continuous pressure". -dmh 16:59, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

To "smash under slow pressure" sounds like "to crush" to me.

Backing a car into something I would call smashing it - I would say "to dent" or "to ding", maybe depending on what the damage was.

— Hippietrail 23:09, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

That's all well and good, but the usages above are genuine and they don't seem well covered by the existing definitions. They may or may not be synonymous with something else, but that hardly makes them unfit. The quote I gave with the definition is definitely not "crush", "dent" or "ding".

I'm not sure there are necessarily as many senses as we now have -- we're probably not quite getting the central sense. It will be interesting to see what translations come in. I generally take multiple translations (unless they're clearly closely related) as prima facie evidence of an uncpatured sense. -dmh 02:12, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't see the examples before. Some seem like "foreigner English". Let me comment on them:

1. I cannot guess what this one means!
2. "Slowly break through the rotting road"
3. "as plates slowly collide.
4. This one actually does sound okay as is. In this sense "crush" is a synonym though. I might use "smash" for a wooden ship but not for a metal ship.
5. This one sounds very very wrong.

1 and 5 could be foreign English, 2 and 3 are a bad choice of words. 4 works if the material is brittle and will shatter - which may be another synonym in this case.

— Hippietrail 06:23, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This seems like a pretty clear case of regional/dialectal variation. None of the examples I cited seems foreign or wrong to me (else I wouldn't have cited them), and I had no trouble coming up with the quote I gave in the definition. All six sound just fine. On the other hand, "There was a terrible smash on the M24." sounds very odd to me. I included it, however, because it's well-attested in BNC and other places, and in fact I'm 99% sure I've heard it myself on the radio in London.

In short, British English -- and I'm assuming Australian as well -- is comfortable with smash as "car wreck" and uncomfortable with smash as "deform under continuous pressure." American English likes "deform" but doesn't like "car wreck". I'll mark the new definition as "US", and if anyone outside the states recognizes it, they can always correct the entry. -dmh 14:10, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

adverb: with a smash

Adverb : with the sound of a smash --Backinstadiums (talk) 12:18, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

RFD discussion: September–October 2020

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

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smash sub-senses

These newly-added subsenses of sense 3 of the noun smash are covered by the primary definition ("something very successful"):

• (entertainment) Of a product aiming at aesthetics (as music), what is catchy and a runner.
• (cooking) Something which convinces the guests or anyone who is to taste the food.
• What has visually appealing features, reaching out to a high degree of attractiveness.

WordyAndNerdy (talk) 09:00, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

• Agree that these are merely examples of the main sense, not sufficiently distinct to be subsenses, so Delete all, but retain the examples/citations under the main sense. Mihia (talk) 19:43, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
• I added it because the usages remain unclear otherwise. What does it mean “every woman under the age of 35 was a smash”, in the example you deleted by political motivation? It is tough to subsume physical attractiveness under the notion of success, especially if the whole category is claimed to succeed. Success in what? Beauty is not an obvious meaning of “success” – though it be principally subsumable under it, it is only peripherally with many redoubts and reservations and conditioned. A sentence like “this look is a smash in our books” you added is similarly dark and could be read as “is an asset to earn much money” (as in “accounting books”) if one didn’t know the term is simply used to denote physical attractiveness without respect to any success proper. Consider whether a mere general gloss is helpful to non-native dictionary users, in comparison!
• Besides, what does it mean to be “a distinct subsense”? Contextual notes are helpful. There is nothing essential about the senses. One can shed and bundle uses according to one’s skills in the art of glossing, and the disadvantage of obscurity that much abstraction poses such as has been employed to make a term overseeable – to make a term parsed fast for getting informed about all meanings, which is needed the more polysemic a term becomes (not “is”, because the terms only attain “meanings” in the minds who summarize them) – can be eased up by recurring to a more contextual style of sense notes. Fay Freak (talk) 12:49, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

The example "Can you even begin to imagine walking around and seeing that every woman under the age of 35 was a smash?" apparently belongs to a separate main sense, "An attractive person", probably a variant of smasher, and can probably be added back in on that basis. It is apparently not a subsense of "Something very successful". Mihia (talk) 13:57, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

1. Why did you add the gloss "physiognomics" to the third sub-sense? That's not a legitimate science, and even if it is a pseudoscience that's built up its own jargon (the way I imagine phrenology did), how is the slang term smash a "physionomics"-specific term? Are hottie and hunk also "physiognomics" terms?

2. Why would you cite an article from a white supremacist website (not an isolated incident[1]) when there it is very easy to find citations that are 1. durably archived and 2. not hate propaganda? There is zero reason to cite hate propaganda unless one is citing hate movement slang.

3. All of the issues you raise could be solved by modifying the base definition ("something very successful or impressive") and certainly do not justify the addition of unnecessarily wordy and hyperspecific sub-senses. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 15:30, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

Also, @Mihia, please note that quote is from a Nazi site. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 15:37, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

You see, there was reason enough not to be confident that the supergloss suffices to depict the usage, as it is even suggested now there is a separate mainsense; basically I found this use, looked what covers it in Wiktionary and thought perhaps this is also meant by the sense “something successful”, but also added it considering it opaque without mention. I thought it is influenced by that sense at least, not knowing the gloss of smasher “an attractive person”; though in the examples we have amassed it is said of 1) a dress 2) in a compound “she is a smash hit” 3) a look 4) in Mr. Anglin’s quote said of women themselves, which is a noteable difference, which all shows it is not restricted to a person but also their stuff (probably with the form smasher too, where perhaps “anything […] extraordinary” is the same sense in application to things, meaning extraordinarily beautiful). I do not share the impression of “very easy to find citations”, I do not know how frequent it is as I have never spoken English with people, it is hard to find such colloquial senses amongst many other senses. I have added my finding so it is documented why the editor has even been motivated to add the gloss with the words that have been employed. Scientific honesty. Open-source spirit.

I added “physiognomics” for the tricolon. The labels do not need to contain “real sciences” but contain a lot of other things. They also often have “botany” for any plant name even though the plant name is also used in ordinary language, not only by botanists. And why sciences if “cooking” is not a science either? What would be a better label for terms used in description of looks?

“Why would you cite” X? Because I have no intention for acting as a political filter or censor, and in addition it is useful to know in which social strata a term is used, in other words one might want to know whether a term is only said by progs or also right-wingers, whether official party language uses a word during the Soviet Union, and the like. (And for being the most-persecuted website on the internet and yet being on, the Daily Stormer is pretty durable. However lacking durability was not the original reason for removal, as you do not go around and remove all non-durable quotes (which there would not be consensus for either) it is clearly a political sensitivity, which is an irrational concern. There is no reason not to quote nazis, like there is no reason not to quote pedophiles, or not to quote a rap song because it is too violent. What if a sense is only used by Nazis, racists or sexists? And why would the inclusion of them be different if it is not only? There is no point to slant in favour of liberal sources, unless that is exactly what you want.) Fay Freak (talk) 17:13, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

If English is, by your own admission, not your first language, then you shouldn't be adding novel senses to English entries, because you're obviously out of area of knowledge. Apparently, you don't have a firm enough grasp on English to search Google Books for cites of an English slang term, but you can search/read an English-language white supremacist site just fine? 🤔 And in any case you don't need to write three paragraphs to justify your edits. Wikimedia projects aren't censored, but they also aren't tools for proving a point or pushing an agenda. We're talking about a synonym for hottie, not white supremacist/neo-Nazi jargon like Holohoax. There is no reason to use a quote from a non-durable white supremacist site over any of the book, magazine, and song lyric cites you could've found for smash if you'd bothered to look, unless you've got an ideological interest in trying to disseminate material from such sites, or are an edgelord who wants to insert objectionable quotes into unobjectionable entries because freeze peach. Neither of which serve to improve the quality of Wiktionary. (And someone who thinks a Nazi site is "persecuted" has no business judging what are rational vs. irrational concerns.) WordyAndNerdy (talk) 18:34, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

That a term is used among Nazis or astrologists does not detract from its lexical relevance. On the other hand the lexicographic value of the opinion of one who consistently politicizes lexicographic evaluation is a matter of concern to those of us who value a more open, non-prescriptive approach to lexicography at Wiktionary. DCDuring (talk) 06:18, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

My objections to Breitbart (a conspiracy site) and the Daily Stormer (a white supremacist site) being cited were secondary to greater CFI concerns. Woketopia doesn't have a year's worth of CFI-compliant cites and doesn't appear widely-used enough to warrant hot word status. The sub-senses added to smash are just unnecessary re-phrasings of an existing sense. But I shouldn't need to explain why citing Breitbart and the DS (which would not pass muster as sources on Wikipedia) is detrimental to Wiktionary's reliability. Nor should I have to apologize for stating plainly that they are, respectively, a conspiracy site and a white supremacist site. Sometimes editors soapbox for three paragraphs on RfV, and it has no lexicographical relevance at all. I'm too old to pretend to be a perfect vessel of NPOV, and too tired to treat odious nonsense as anything else. Can you imagine if Oxford or Collins casually quoted white supremacist propaganda in random entries? Would that make them more open, reliable dictionaries, or would that make them crap dictionaries no one would ever trust or reference again? Weird hill to die on, but ok. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 11:45, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

It would give them more street cred – neo-Nazis are also customers to put it bluntly, and here possible contributors – and that cheaply, since there is no connection in Wiktionary quoting personae non gratae to Wiktionary’s reliability, on the contrary it shows that Wiktionary knows its onions. It’s not logical. The quotes are shown for what they have in language, not as reliable reporters. Citing Andrew Anglin for facts – not his words themselves being the facts – is a different kettle of fish. And I think if he made a blog about etymologies one should be careful about his findings, as I found him very bad at it, like claiming شَرِيعَة (šarīʕa) as a kind of Indo-Aryan word. You see the difference?

Nor can you pursue your vague idea of evil quotes consequentially, since we would not be able to quote the Bible or the Quran because they are full of violent content and at the very least all their verses are objectional content trying to disseminate ideology. Or obviously I am not an alt-right edgelord but an islamist since as an Arabic editor my most-quoted sources here are the Qurʾān and the Sunna 🤷. So better stop phantasizing together evil connections in linguistic material, free your mind of hate and stay objective.

And learn to separate issues. I could quote The Turner Diaries, Mein Kampf and the Myth of the Twentieth Century with ease and then you couldn’t lament about durability, and then I would be a great man for all the effort and ardour in quoting the languages – English and German alike, since “if English is, by your own admission, not your first language, then you shouldn't be adding novel senses to English entries, because you're obviously out of area of knowledge” is an obviously unworkable racist view. Fay Freak (talk) 20:12, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

"Something which convinces the guests or anyone who is to taste the food." with the citation "Southern squash casserole is a smash for any occasion" is clearly, in my view, just the main sense; one can just as well say it's a "hit", where we also cover the various fields something can be a smash/hit in with one sense. (That reminds me: something can also be a "smash hit".) I am inclined to view the other two senses as redundant to the main sense as well, especially when the citations are things like "[the] album Babel [is] a smash on all fronts", where the main definition about being successful makes more sense than the subdefinition talking about aiming at aesthetics. Delete all. (To one of the other points above: efforts to attract neo-Nazi contributors(!) or make them feel welcome by adding their non-durable websites as citations should be rejected. Neo-Nazis should not feel welcome; they make far too many other people unwelcome. I also think "should we try to attract neo-Nazis" and "are these senses distinct" are clearly very distinct questions...!) - -sche (discuss) 18:25, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Setting aside the pro-Nazi tangent this thread went off on, I merged the subsenses. - -sche (discuss) 20:55, 8 October 2020 (UTC)