Talk:cost an arm and a leg

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cost an arm and a leg

[[cost]] + an [[arm and a leg]]. The idiom is all and only the object. Other verbs: charge, pay. DCDuring TALK 17:03, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Keep, I think. The construction is widely used and I'm disposed to think of it as an idiom in its own right, or at least an entry-worthy set phrase. Users might well come in searching for this expression. -- WikiPedant 17:07, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking that redirects from charge an arm and a leg, pay an arm and a leg, as well as this entry might adequately address user needs. We could include more forms as well (past, gerund, 3rd person sing). I don't see how we are going to maintain full entries for all the verb-extended "idioms", nor do I see why we would exclude forms or act as if there is a closed set of forms using arm and a leg. No other dictionary at onelook, including the idiom dictionaries they portal to, have any variety of this other than "(an) arm and a leg" as an entry or even a redirect. DCDuring TALK 19:28, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Redirects would suffice, I suppose, although I am getting a couple of idiom dictionary links for "cost an arm and a leg" at OneLook (and WT is an idiom dictionary too). Anyhow, I agree that the important thing is that users get sent directly to an illuminating entry if they search for any of these variations. -- WikiPedant 22:48, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I think FreeDictionary.com and/or Dictionary.com have links, but not entries. I hope that Google takes our redirects seriously. I'm happy to wait for more opinion on this. There are a large number of idioms that each have a very limited number of words that fit in surrounding slots. Though I don't really like redirects, they seem to be our best tool for these situations. I would love to have some sort of accepted guidelines for these situations to give a little bit of regularity to our treatment of some regularizable classes of multiword entries. DCDuring TALK 23:44, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Redirect to arm and a leg.​—msh210℠ 21:23, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Redirect per DCD. Mglovesfun (talk) 04:20, 28 July 2009 (UTC)