Talk:FD&C Yellow No. 5

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Is this kind of thing appropriate as an entry? Should we add the Pantone colors while we're at it? -- Liliana 14:35, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I ran across these things frequently in my long translating career. American foods, drugs and cosmetics are full of them. They’re important. If a company is going to export its products to Europe or Asia, these terms have to be translated to "E" numbers. —Stephen (Talk) 15:36, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What's the name of the color? Is it "FD&C Yellow No. 5" (with some capitalization and some spelling of number), or is it "Yellow No. 5" (with some capitalization and some spelling of number) with the "FD&C" part just a reference to which definition of "Yellow No. 5" is being used? Compare "[chemical name] USP": the chemical name is just "[chemical name]"; the "USP" is added just to show whose definition of "[chemical name]" is being used.​—msh210 (talk) 17:09, 18 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep it would be useful to know exactly what yellow #5 is without reading a dissertation on it at wikipedia.Lucifer 13:48, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Kept. — Ungoliant (Falai) 22:27, 12 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]


RFD discussion: July 2019–August 2020[edit]

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Previously survived an unsatisfactory RFD after one person (Luciferwildcat) voted to keep. --Gibraltar Rocks (talk) 08:19, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Mmmmmphhh there was a time I voted to keep all the "E numbers". Now I wouldn't. Still, what is this? Not a trademark, I suppose? Is it the normal name for the thing? Are there other names for it? I would prefer us to make the decision based on policy. Equinox 06:42, 20 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The term is in use: [1], [2], [3]. Although our definition calls it a “color additive composed principally of tartrazine”, all sources that I saw suggest it is just tartrazine.  --Lambiam 12:56, 20 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Actually if you read the FD&C Act, you will find that it is defined as a mixture containing certain limited amounts of impurities.[4] My understanding is that tartrazine is just the name of the trisodium salt which is the primary constituent of Yellow 5. But I am no expert on this. -Mike (talk) 22:03, 22 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
What is the reason for deleting? I see it is in use, we may need to change the definition slightly but that isn't grounds for removal. Stephen G. Brown said in the original discussion: "I ran across these things frequently in my long translating career. American foods, drugs and cosmetics are full of them. They’re important. If a company is going to export its products to Europe or Asia, these terms have to be translated to "E" numbers." There were two explicit keep votes and no explicit delete votes in that discussion. --Habst (talk) 16:25, 20 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Add the missing reds, blues. Dream up a category for them. SemperBlotto (talk) 05:11, 21 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
FD&C Blue No. 1; FD&C Blue No. 2; FD&C Green No. 3; FD&C Red No. 3; FD&C Red No. 40 (sic); FD&C Yellow No. 5; FD&C Yellow No. 6. Category:FD&C certified color additives?  --Lambiam 07:47, 21 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete the forms with FD&C at the start, I can imagine terms such as yellow no. 5 or yellow 5 surviving, but the full term is purely encyclopedic. This is no more lexical than, say, 21 USC § 841. - TheDaveRoss 12:09, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to me that this revolves around the distinction between "47 N Main Street" and "10 Downing Street". Is this a legally defined, but meaningless label for a known specific thing, or does it have meaning in a linguistic sense? I'm sure there are plenty of durably-archived uses in court records of lawyers and police officers referring to crimes by their numbers in the criminal code- and the people they're talking to know exactly what they talking about- but do those numbers mean anything as English? Another example is the number worn by a famous sports figure. Any fan of their team will immediately know who you mean when you say the number, and it may be used as shorthand for the the player's name in durably archived sports writing- but does it belong in a dictionary? If you want to anchor this in CFI, the relevant part is conveying meaning. The problem is, of course, that semantics is a tricky field, there's no doubt disagreement among lexicographers and semanticists about what "meaning" means. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:44, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There is no question in my mind that "FD&C Yellow No. 5" conveys meaning; and there is no question that this is an English term, just like "the chemical element with atomic number 90", which I would argue is a sum of parts. We may need to update CFI, or come up with a rationale for interim CFI override. To do so, we need to provide a least a tentative exclusion criterion, and examine that criterion on a larger set of items. And maybe we should do that on an occasion different from Wonderfool being bored. We may start by looking at E102: it is a term that refers to something, but it may be annoing that it does so via a counting number attached to something, and that may be the same annoyance with FD&C Yellow No. 5, except that some people above seem to be rather annoyed at the "FD&C" part and are happy with yellow no. 5, which is damned by GNV as per my link above. Then what is the annoyance? I don't know. Let us note the customary capitalization; it seems the users of the term treat it as a proper noun rather than a substance common noun; then, the policy would be WT:NSE, and it would be up to editor discretion to keep or delete. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:39, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]