Talk:China Hand

RFV

The following information has failed Wiktionary's verification process.

Failure to be verified means that insufficient eligible citations of this usage have been found, and the entry therefore does not meet Wiktionary inclusion criteria at the present time. We have archived here the disputed information, the verification discussion, and any documentation gathered so far, pending further evidence.
Do not re-add this information to the article without also submitting proof that it meets Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion.

---

I have several doubts about this:

1. Is "hand" really capitalized?
2. Is this the most common sense? A quick Google search would imply that "China hand" is a cardgame. The Wikipedia article is about more specifically defined groups of people.
3. If the indicated sense is real, isn't it just "China" + "hand" ? --Hekaheka 01:14, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I think it derives from the term "old hand." I believe it should be "China hand" but sometimes it appears with both words capitalized. See [1]. 71.66.97.228 20:21, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

One can be a "hand" about many things, especially places (Washington, Asia, Africa, Japan, California, Chicago, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Germany) or people (Nixon, Reagan, Warner). A "hand" can be "old", "experienced", "veteran", "three-decade". (All examples from COCA.)

IOW, the novelty seems to be entirely in the specific sense of "hand" not in any multi-word term that uses it. DCDuring TALK 03:37, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

It is included in sense 7 of our entry, which could be split to cover the senses in "hired hand" and "old hand" more clearly. DCDuring TALK 03:41, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, both capitalised and non-capitalised forms are used. I would say keep this because even if you could argue it's SoP, are you telling me a non-native speaker (or native speaker for that matter) could figure out which "hand" is being referred to in the #18 noun senses currently listed at hand? ---> Tooironic 20:28, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I think it is obvious that listeners do this many orders of magnitude more frequently than they successfully resort to dictionaries.

I think the actual questions are:

1. How many of those a users coming across "China hand" and resorting to a dictionary would look up "China hand" (vs "hand")?
2. How many of users finding "China hand" would realize that "hand" could be used with other attributive nouns and that it was the same sense of "hand" as in "an old hand at ..." ? DCDuring TALK 19:04, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

RFV-failed because it is uncited. The discussion above suggests it would have failed (RFD) even if cited (though I do not express an opinion on that at this time). - -sche (discuss) 02:32, 9 August 2011 (UTC)