Talk:drone attack

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drone attack

An attack by a drone. Humorous definition too, though that's not a reason to delete it. Was gonna list this under #drone strike above, but I was afraid it would go unnoticed. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:10, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Why, if you agree with definition, I don't understand your reason to delete the entry: drone attack is not simply an attack by a drone. Please elaborate. --Biblbroks 09:57, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

An entry for "my car" would have the accurate definition "the car that belongs to the speaker". We would nevertheless not have an entry for it unless we had decided to be something very different from a dictionary. In principle, a dictionary does not include terms that are deemed to be decodable from the definitions of their component parts. It is difficult to make hard-and-fast rules about what is to be considered decodable, but hard and fast, for example, is considered an idiom, not decodable based on the current meanings of its parts. In contrast drone attack would seem to mean an attack by a drone. Someone completely unfamiliar with current affairs might have to look up "drone" in a modern dictionary, but, having done so would hardly need to look up "attack". I suppose an older "modern" dictionary might have an overly specialized definition that excluded the possibility of a drone being armed.

That someone could point to an arbitrary combination of definitions that are not what drone attack means in the most common context trivializes the process of human understanding of utterances. That computer algorithms have had difficulty in duplicating the way in which humans decode language expressions doesn't mean we need to compile a database for them. DCDuring TALK 12:11, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Biblbroks, you've made my point for me, it is an attack by a drone. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:49, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, delete.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:53, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

• 1912, British Bee Journal, volume 40:

  It is possible that the good behaviour of the Metropolitan bees is a protest against suffragette tactics, whilst the drone attack recorded by Mr. Smallwood is an assumption of the rights of the male armour […]

Ha! DAVilla 07:06, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Excellent! Mglovesfun (talk) 07:46, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Touché. :-) --Biblbroks 00:47, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

How about if we consider the drone attack syntagma not just as a simple attack by a drone, but an attack with a drone? Would that matter? Is sword attack an attack with a sword, as well as it could be an attack by a sword? I am not that proficient in English, so this is more of a hypothesis. --Biblbroks дискашн 21:30, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

Keep, idiomatic meaning, widely used in journalism.Gtroy 11:39, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Influenced by the precedent of drone strike, I've deleted this. - -sche (discuss) 03:23, 28 October 2011 (UTC)