Talk:himand

RFV

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification.

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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I don't believe that the quotations provided in the entry are anything else but typographical errors. However, I do not know how typographical errors are dealt with in RFV; maybe RFD would be needed to decide whether these are typos. I don't really know. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:46, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

After googling around there do seem to be books where himand is written together, but that doesn't seem to be anything but errors because everything else (like searchfor) is written together in these as well. -- Liliana • 19:48, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

This one was a bit of a stretch, I admit, although it's the only one I created which was such a stretch, and I found several more quotations of it than I added, both in books and on Usenet, leading me to think what I thought at Talk:haĉek: "we never have, to my knowledge, had a good way of telling misspellings (which we generally exclude, even if they are one-fifth as common as the usual spelling), especially hapax legomenon misspellings, from alternative spellings (which we include, even if they are only one-five-thousandth as common as the usual spelling)". Thus, I argue that except by assuming bad faith / bad typing skills on the parts of the writers, we ultimately cannot know whether this is a misspelling/typo or an intentional spelling, especially in the Usenet posts in which it is the only nonstandard word (refer to my comment on hapax legomena). - -sche (discuss) 19:51, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

At the risk of adding no value... I agree with all of this. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:53, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I agree that it's an assumption of typo/scanno, but I think we are qualified to assume that in cases like himand and searchfor. Equinox ◑ 19:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Our knowledge that this is a typo stemms from two things: (a) there are several quotations of "himand" in Google books where "himand" is obviously a typo, as the surrounding text contains many other similar typos; (b) one does not join a pronoun and a conjunction without a space in English; that is a vanishingly rare thing to do. As far as we declare at least some typographical forms as typos, "himand" is a foremost candidate for a typo. We already do declare some attested forms as misspellings, so the argument about ultimate unknowability seem as implausible as anything to me. We do have to make some educated guesses about what is a misspelling, or else "percieve" (google books:"percieve") gets included as a standard if rare spelling. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:05, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Um...move to RFD? And request that editors stop creating entries facetiously? Ƿidsiþ 20:08, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Moving to RFD is okay with me; I was unsure how to proceed. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:13, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

If we move discussion to RFD, we should move #hisown, too (I assume you all agree). - -sche (discuss) 20:28, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

A somewhat off-topic note: It annoys me, to some extent, that the quotations of himand are not linked to the sources, so I can't easily check them. I acknowledge that typing some searches is an alternative, nonetheless. --Daniel 20:26, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I have moved this to RFD per the consensus here. - -sche (discuss) 20:32, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

RFD discussion

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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hisown

Moved from RFV. The question is: do the citations in the entry attest this word, or are they better analysed as typos etc? - -sche (discuss) 20:31, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

himand

Moved from RFV, per the consensus there. The question is: do the citations in the entry attest this word, or are they better analysed as typos etc? I repeat what I said in RFV: "This one was a bit of a stretch, I admit, although it's the only one I created which was such a stretch, and I found several more quotations of it than I added, both in books and on Usenet, leading me to think what I thought at Talk:haĉek: "we never have, to my knowledge, had a good way of telling misspellings (which we generally exclude, even if they are one-fifth as common as the usual spelling), especially hapax legomenon misspellings, from alternative spellings (which we include, even if they are only one-five-thousandth as common as the usual spelling)". Thus, I argue that except by assuming bad faith / bad typing skills on the parts of the writers, we ultimately cannot know whether this is a misspelling/typo or an intentional spelling, especially in the Usenet posts in which it is the only nonstandard word (refer to my comment on hapax legomena)." I created this, in other words, out of a perhaps unwarranted good faith in the writers of the citations, some available in the entry and others available on Usenet, in which it is the only nonstandard word. I presume the consensus here will be to delete. - -sche (discuss) 20:31, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Delete both as rare misspellings.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:54, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Delete, same reason. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:01, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Delete. "Phrase"? Nice try. Equinox ◑ 20:26, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Delete himand. I just looked through the four cites given for it, just out of curiosity. None are valid.

• The 1980 Mary Higgins Clark cite is from an edition with a lot of missing spaces; I'm sure it didn't appear that way in print. (It looks like the publisher gave b.g.c. an electronic version based on faulty OCR, so the image that b.g.c. displays is not a faithful image of the print book, but rather a re–laying out of the scanno-ridden e-book. I note that the 1991 edition, which b.g.c. has in Snippet View (so is presumably an actual scan of the print edition), has a line break between "him" and "and".)
• The 2007 Usenet cite is quoting from (a version of) this document, which has "him and". I note that the Usenet cite also has "peoplewith" instead of "people with". Since the Usenet cite is in the subject of a posting, not the body of a posting, I suspect that it's the result of copy-and-paste from a source that had line-breaks; either the software dropped the line-breaks or the human did (if any human was involved at all; the posting looks a bit spammery to me), but in either case, (s)he/it failed to insert spaces in compensation.
• The 2008 Shreve Stockton cite is from an edition where all apostrophes and quotation marks seem to have been excised; it's from the same publisher as the Higgins Clark cite, so I take it to be the same kind of garbage. The edition that Amazon.com lets me search inside has normal punctuation. Amazon.com won't show me the specific page in question, but if I'm parsing the sentence right, it's missing em dashes, so our "himand" is actually supposed to be "him—and".
• The 2010 Anne Brontë cite is from a digital publisher's b.g.c. edition. Note that two centuries of editors have used a comma or em dash between "him" and "and" in this sentence, and I cannot believe that this digital publisher made any sort of intentional decision to drop it.

But my delete vote is independent of those specific cites. Even if someone presented three cites that are not so extrinsically dubious, I would reject this as a clear misspelling.

—Ruakh_TALK 21:05, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't think you could say the same about hisown, though. In two of the citations it's used multiple times, which would at least indicate the spelling to be deliberate. Can we keep hisown but delete his own? — This unsigned comment was added by DAVilla (talk • contribs).

No, we cannot. Per COALMINE, if we have hisown, we must have his own. - -sche (discuss) 02:27, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

• Delete "hisown" and "himand" as rare typesettings errors. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:32, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

  A typesetting error that occurred three times in the same book? DAVilla 02:00, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

• Delete both as obvious typos. Ƿidsiþ 07:12, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I have deleted [[himand]] and [[him and]], [[hisown]] and [[his own]]. - -sche (discuss) 07:36, 5 April 2012 (UTC)