Talk:come to somebody's aid

Archived from RFD: January 2013

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

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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come to somebody's aid

come to someone's rescue

SOP. Delete.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:02, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Delete both, SOP. Maybe usage notes could be added to aid and rescue about its usage with possessive pronouns. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 17:32, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Maybe. Then also to [[assistance]].​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:48, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Delete. Equinox ◑ 17:36, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I wouldn't object to a hard redirect, in case, to the noun.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:49, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

I meant "in each case" when I wrote "in case".​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:48, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Delete both. The redirect might discourage the recreation of these better than the RfD-failed notice. DCDuring TALK 18:24, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

So are you saying we should hard-redirect?​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:48, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Or to a new Collocations namespace or via {{only in}} to WikiPhrasebook, but those haven't been voted on yet. DCDuring TALK 22:57, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

• They seem idiomatic and unusual, but I'm not a massive fan of these entries in general....maybe redirect to the nouns? With suitable usage notes? Ƿidsiþ 18:40, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Not only can the noun be replaced by synonyms so can the verb (go, hurry, run, sprint, race, speed). Adverbs can be inserted. You could also change tense and add modal verbs. OTOH, it is rather unnatural to say "It was his aid that I came to" or "It was to his aid that I came". This looks like a construction with some idiomaticity, but a rather low degree thereof. DCDuring TALK 21:29, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Rename to come to rescue and come to aid. Lmaltier (talk) 14:02, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

The renaming idea would contradict our prevailing practice for this type of entry and would seem to be a matter for WT:BP.

It also doesn't fit the grammar of any form of these, which is either come to the aid/rescue/assistance of someone/something or come to someone's/something's aid. DCDuring TALK 15:07, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

It's often found in titles such as BP agents come to aid of stranded Samaritans, Bedspring Spears Woman; Firemen Come To Rescue, or Bankers come to rescue of unpaid teachers, and it's more basic. This was the reason for my suggestion. Lmaltier (talk) 20:40, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't count titles as running text. They certainly aren't speech. The expression you would have as a headword might belong in a pidgin or creole. DCDuring TALK 22:04, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

An entry title is not speech either. But it seems that it was a bad idea. Lmaltier (talk) 22:35, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

I can't see how this could possibly make sense knowing only the parts. The best I can come up with is "come (literally) to someone's assistance (whatever their assistance is)". I do suspect that there is something else going on though. You can also say "(person) [comes] to the rescue". It seems that the idiomaticity lies in "to" combined with some kind of word meaning assistance, but I can't really put my finger on what it is. In any case, until we resolve that specific idiomatic meaning, keep these entries as they are not SoP within the spectrum of definitions that currently exists at Wiktionary. —CodeCat 22:29, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Note, come to somebody's aid should be moved to come to someone's aid per WT:About English. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:17, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

• Keep both. They seem unusual to me in the way they are constructed. Since Widsith says above that they are idiomatic and unusual, they appear so to at least one native speaker (a double-check, since I am a non-native). In Czech, we say "přijít [někomu] na pomoc", which is also a peculiar construction; the lemma would probably be "přijít na pomoc"; google:"přijít na pomoc". On the downside, I admit that they are absent from OneLook dictionaries. I tried to translate "They came to his rescue" to German using Google Translate and obtained "Sie kamen zu seiner Rettung", which has no Google web hits per google:"Sie kamen zu seiner Rettung"; the same English phrase translated by the translator to Czech yielded *"Přišli k jeho záchraně", which is a non-idiomatic (funny foreign-sounding) Czech for "přišli mu na pomoc". You can try this for other langauges that you know. Thus, to me, something peculiar is going on and we can document that peculiarity in this dictionary, thereby providing value to the user.

  I am okay with moving "come to somebody's aid" to "come to someone's aid" as proposed by Mglovesfun above. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:35, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

• I'm happy to keep these. Although they have an unusual construction they translate to a similar Italian verb that is definitely in use. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:47, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 20:51, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

• One dictionary has "bring something to someone's aid". A lot of redirects to to someone's aid and to someone's rescue would probably better address the core idiomaticity, though no print dictionary does it that way AFAICT. DCDuring TALK 22:09, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the "come to someone's" part collocates with aid, assistance, defense, help, protection, reinforcement and succor (I'm sure there are others). One can also substitute run, speed, rally, and other synonyms for come. I'm not sure where the best place is for this information. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:44, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

And [various verbs|'bring something'] to the [various nouns] of someone/something. The idea that this is "unusual", one of the premises of the longest argument, seems wrong. This is a very open-ended construction, albeit with some restrictions on what can fill the slots. I think that that our non-native speakers are misleading themselves about the idiomaticity of this kind of expression. To me it looks more like one common collocation among tens/hundreds of thousands. The expression may say more about to and the possessive than may be familiar. DCDuring TALK 23:39, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

By the way, there's also the plain "come to the rescue" without implicitly saying whose rescue. --WikiTiki89 23:47, 7 March 2014 (UTC)