Talk:flat as a pancake

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I'm not missing something here am I? This isn't something cryptic like fit as a fiddle, this is just a straightforward simile. Pancakes are flat, things can be flat like them. There is no knowledge needed to decode this beyond what you'd learn at pancake ("A thin batter cake fried in a pan or on a griddle in oil or butter."). Smurrayinchester (talk) 20:03, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

I honestly would keep this for reasons I can't articulate at the moment. I suspect someone will do it for me. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:30, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

A lemming check at “flat as a pancake”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. shows that we are not the only ones who find this possibly inclusion worthy. float glass is flatter than a pancake, but 'as flat as float glass' is not a common collocation though it is one syllable shorter.

I prefer SMW's standard of decodability, but others will use the fact that "pancakes" are, for some reason, the everyday standard of flatness, and someone (ie, the multilingual) might want to know how to encode and translate. We are likely to have many such cliches.

I prefer 'as flat as yesterday's beer', slightly more novel, playing with alternatives senses, etc. DCDuring TALK 22:17, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

• Keep as a simile, outside of CFI. Similes are often uninteresting for the decoding direction ("What does 'flat as a pancake' mean?"), but are key for encoding direction ("How do I say 'very flat' using a simile?") and for translation ("How do I render 'flat as a pancake' using a Spanish simile?"). --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:12, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
• Keep: Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 17:56, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
• Weak keep, I think, just because (deprecated template usage) flat as a pancake and (deprecated template usage) flat as a board mean two different things.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:24, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Kept. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 04:03, 3 July 2013 (UTC)