Talk:do a number one

Deletion debate

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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do a number one

Sum of parts - do + a + number one. ---> Tooironic 02:51, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Speedily deleted. You can "do" any word for this. ((deprecated template usage) do a jobbie should probably go too.) Equinox ◑ 11:18, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Done that one too. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:40, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't think "do" can be followed by just any noun. OTOH, I think it can syntactically work with any proper noun, though it would only be with a proper noun closely associated with some particular phenomenon. I'd expect we could find instances of "do a Biden" and "do a Quayle" to pick US examples. We should try to properly characterize the semantic and syntactic nature of the noun complements that "do" permits. For example, to "do PN" (we have those senses, I think), to "do a PN", and to "do the PN" mean dramatically different things. (Consider, say, PN = "Lindy".)

We should record these at least, perhaps only under one synonym of number one. Some examples, mostly idiomatic, I think, of the class of items including this, are in Category:English light verb constructions. We also have Appendix:Collocations of do, have, make, and take with others. DCDuring TALK 14:44, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

I would be grateful if we could copy this discussion to Talk:do a number one so that I could search for deleted instances. Such copying of deleted MWEs could make it easier to check that we have properly complete senses of the important component terms, especially the partially grammaticized elements like "do". DCDuring TALK 15:02, 27 August 2010 (UTC)