Talk:make a living

RFD

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make a living

earn a living

Both are SoP, in contrast to such expressions as bring home the bacon and even pay the bills/pay the rent/put food on the table, which at least are idiomatic inasmuch as they are metonymies. DCDuring TALK 21:22, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Delete, or redirect if we absolutely must (which is dismissing the readership as idiots who can't separate words by spaces). Equinox ◑ 21:41, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

• Keep. From a non-native-English perspective, make a living at least isn't entirely obvious. The common JA gloss for EN make, for instance, is 作る (tsukuru), but this verb cannot be used sensibly with any of the common glosses for living (though I suppose some kind of allusion to Frankenstein might be possible). That would seem to make this an idiomatic phrase. The idiomatic JA equivalent would be 生計を立てる (seikei o tateru), literally “to stand or set up a living”, similarly non-obvious for anyone not fluent in the language. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:11, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

  Re: "common gloss". That's why we take the trouble to offer several definitions of make#Verb. and livelihood is a perfectly serviceable gloss at living#Noun. I think it does a serious disservice to a language learner to suggest the there are idioms that have to be memorized just to know a single expression, when instead there are polysemic words to learn of very broad application, like make and living. DCDuring TALK 22:57, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Delete or redirect to [[living]] or [[living#Noun]].​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:46, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Keep both as idiomatic set expressions. Another synonym: bring home the bacon. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 14:33, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

• Keep, possibly outside of CFI. While both phrases can probably be understood when seen or heard, the existence of this way of putting it in English is unobvious, I think. Furthermore, both "make a living" and "earn a living" seem more common than the other synonyms, as per Google Ngram Viewer: make a living,earn a living,make ends meet,pay the bills,bring home the bacon,put food on the table,pay the rent.--Dan Polansky (talk) 19:27, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
• Keep both. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 16:57, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Having read make#Verb, I can't see a sense to cover this, so keep. Definitely keep earn a living too Mglovesfun (talk) 17:50, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

• RFD kept: no consensus for deletion after months since nomination. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:40, 1 February 2014 (UTC)