Talk:commit suicide

RFD discussion: December 2013–April 2014

The following information passed a request 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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commit suicide

Sum of parts: commit + suicide. As the same with commit homicide, regicide, genocide, patricide, infanticide... etc. Also on commit#verb sense 3 we have: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 09:35, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• Well, looking from another angle, you don't do suicide, nor make suicide, you commit suicide. It should be kept. And there's a load of translations. Donnanz (talk) 10:24, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• • (edit conflict)You sure you can't "do suicide"? You can make all the same arguments for all the other constructions, and they'd still be sum of parts; our entry at commit already covers this. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 11:32, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

  The fact that you "commit" rather than "do" suicide has more to do with the peculiarities of -cide: if there were a Latin-based morpheme blurg, you would "commit blurgicide" rather than "do blurgicide". Chuck Entz (talk) 14:39, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Addendum: I didn't have time to develop my thought because I was going to be late for work. Here's what I meant to say: basically commit is the preferred verb in a specific semantic environment: you commit "a crime, sin, or fault", as it says in definition #3 of the verb. When someone jokes about "committing insecticide", the humor comes from the way that it sets up a conflict between the idea of insects being lower life forms that you buy chemicals to kill and the "commit Xcide" construction that you would use for various classes of murder (patricide, matricide, fratricide, sororicide, etc.). Suicide, being a very terrible deed, is quite regular in taking commit. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:48, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

I disagree. No one says ‘commit homicide’ except police spokesmen (let alone ‘matricide’ etc.), but ‘commit suicide’ is the normal idiomatic way to express the idea in English. Ƿidsiþ 08:32, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• Delete SOP. The translations can be hosted at suicide#Verb. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 11:28, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Keep if only for the translations ("translation target"); while German "Selbstmord begehen" is a word-for-word translation, Romanian "sinucide", Italian "suicidarsi" and Spanish "suicidarse" not so. suicide#Verb is a poor location for translations, since the verb is unidiomatic in the sense of "not most characteristic or usual means of expression"; for this check committed suicide, suicided at Google Ngram Viewer. As for other dictionaries, Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary has this; see also “commit suicide”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. See also commit suicide, kill oneself, kill himself, kill herself at Google Ngram Viewer, which shows "commit suicide" to be the most common expression of the notion. See also commit suicide, commit homicide, commit genocide, commit infanticide, commit regicide, commit patricide at Google Ngram Viewer to see how common this is relative to the other phrases. So the other non-CFI card I would play is "set phrase". My personal tentative criterion for translation target: The term has to be useful for translation into at least three languages and the three translated terms (i) must be single-word ones and (ii) they must not be closed compounds. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:23, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Irritatingly I think this is a delete as not idiomatic. I suppose per Dan Polansky, what's the point of having Category:English non-idiomatic translation targets if you then delete all the non-idiomatic stuff from Wiktionary. Still, I think WT:CFI and the de facto CFI both say delete on this one. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:16, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

 Delete as SOP. If you think it's that important we let readers know that "commit suicide" is the customary locution, you could supply an appropriate usex or two under suicide. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 15:31, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Usage examples in "suicide" entry do not allow translation. They do not make it possible to link all the synonyms in other languages to commit suicide and traverse the translation graph through it, such as Spanish suicidarse --> English commit suicide --> German Selbstmord begehen. By the way, here is Duden: Selbstmord begehen, where "Selbstmord begehen" can be understood from Selbstmord and begehen. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:09, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• Delete. --WikiTiki89 18:39, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Delete as SOP, even though suicide does show a great deal of commitment. Note that there are also a fair number of hits for "perform suicide". bd2412 T 19:30, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

  The frequency ratio is overwhelmingly in support of "commit suicide": commit suicide, perform suicide at Google Ngram Viewer; committed suicide, performed suicide at Google Ngram Viewer. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:21, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

  The frequency ratio of "eat breakfast" is overwhelmingly in support of that usage over any other synonym of "eat", but that only shows that when it comes to consuming food, the most common verb to use is "eat". When it comes to engaging in an act that is generally deemed criminal or wrongful (suicide, murder, adultery, burglary, a faux pas), the corresponding verb is "commit". bd2412 T 05:16, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

  With breakfast, the verb breakfast seems to be nearly as common as "eat breakfast". Thus, if the sense is only hosted at the verb breakfast, it is on a term that is actually very often used for the sense, unlike when "to commit suicide" would only be hosted on the verb suicide. Searches: had breakfast,breakfasted,ate breakfast at Google Ngram Viewer. "ate breakfast" is not even the most common term of the three. By the way, I searched for past tense, since otherwise the present-tense "breakfast" would also find noun occurrences. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:49, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• One more note: You can think of this as a semantic analogue of WT:COALMINE: if a concept AKA sense has two synonyms of which one is unequivocally a single word while the other one is more common, the more common one should be kept. In this case, the verb suicide will clearly be kept even though it is quite rare; the concept or sense will be there in Wiktionary, albeit on the wrong headword: suicide (verb). --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:32, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

  By that logic, the existence of I'm is a reason to have I am. You can't just make up policies on the spot, they should be voted on. --WikiTiki89 01:58, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

  The term "muckamuck" gets 2810 hits at Google Books. The phrase "someone important" gets 49,100, "a person of great importance" gets 43,400, "an important guy" gets 6,970- do you see where this is heading? Chuck Entz (talk) 03:48, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

  big cheese,big gun,big kahuna,top dog,big noise,big shot,bigwig,big wheel,head honcho,someone important,person of great importance,important guy at Google Ngram Viewer shows that the terms you listed are not the most common terms for the sense. I admit that my formulation of the semantic coalmine has to be fixed, to only allow the most common synonym even if it is semantically transparent. The idea is that when we include a sense, we should also include it on the headword that is most characteristic for the sense; if the most characteristic headword turns out to be sum of parts, that should not prevent us from including it. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:09, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• Keep. Ƿidsiþ 07:53, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
• Keep. As Dan Polansky said, the value of translations is enough to keep this entry. ¦ hyark digyik 12:25, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
• Keep. Per Dan Polansky. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 20:12, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
• Keep --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 10:50, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
• Comment Within the suicide community, it's sometimes considered offensive to talk of "committing" suicide; see e.g. http://ash2.wikkii.com/wiki/About_ASH#General_posting_rules However, I think even they break their own rule. Leucosticte (talk) 10:34, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
• Delete as SOP.​—msh210℠ (talk) 03:53, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Kept. bd2412 T 18:19, 16 April 2014 (UTC)