Wiktionary:Tea room

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A place to ask for help on finding quotations, etymologies, or other information about particular words. The Tea room is named to accompany the Beer parlour.

For questions about the general Wiktionary policies, use the Beer parlour; for technical questions, use the Grease pit. For questions about specific content, you're in the right place.

Please do not edit section titles as this breaks links on talk pages and in other discussion fora.

Oldest tagged RFTs

• mico
  Sukhumi
  regnbuefamilie
  Euthemia
  hagdon
  lipsati
  Romanophobia
  Wesson
  monolid
  watercressing
  notch
  address
  carhouse
  RGSS
  series
  multivarious
  amen
  -stan
  червь
  speedometer
  maᵗⁱᵉ
  چھہ
  half
  based
  α΄
  orignal
  dies Mercurii
  manso
  ၐြဳ
  ကာလယဲ
  pasar por las horcas caudinas
  monosemous
  monosemic
  hazelly
  Dağ Türkleri
  Aster
  smeť
  over skyerne er himlen altid blå
  rumped
  Indon
  belly dance
  on purpose
  nasal cavity
  how much
  cut one's teeth
  take its toll
  bok choy
  search up
  don't try to teach grandma how to suck eggs
  speech recognition
  turn the tide
  ne bis in idem
  cornus
  code point
  one over the eight
  green privilege
  Chinese landing
  one's house in order
  native bread
  rhina
  one's heart bleeds
  gender-neutral
  chicken-or-egg question
  otocrane
  Surinam
  no thank you
  mukt
  uninvited
  away
  catalogue
  imaginary
  tweener
  radiendocrinology
  classique
  be
  smuggling raisins
  shadowing
  mandate
  war hero
  war-hero
  eat like a horse
  tacet
  lightning bruiser
  phrogging
  tjälknöl
  efilism
  Jacboson
  Andersdr
  berm
  pirmas
  arena rock
  rayon
  on someone's ass
  caviar to the general
  churtle
  Lipović
  -to
  sum of its parts
  joke
  dunnarf
  

June 2024

mis-

I think the entry for mis- (English prefix) seems to have gotten a little mangled. Between a sub-sense and some questionable differences in senses that aren't really different, I wanted to try to clean it up, but doing so well is probably a bit beyond me, so I thought I'd just post here in case anyone else feels like taking a stab at it. Thanks! Deacon Vorbis (talk) 16:40, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

laquearius, laqueatus

Hoping Latin editors can look over these entries: I can cite laquearius as an English word for an ensnaring gladiator (Citations:laquearius), but our Latin entry only defines it as a ceiling-maker, so is our Latin entry missing a sense? Wikipedia asserts laquerarius and laqueator as other words for such a gladiator, but the first's a redlink and the second's only a verb form, so again, are we missing entries? Alternatively, the scantness and nature of the (overwhelmingly English rather than Latin) cites I found in searching makes me wonder if WP is mistaken to think these are words for net-using gladiators (certainly ‎laqueary and laquearian have few cites). - -sche (discuss) 23:48, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

The "gladiator" terms seem to occur in two alternative versions of Isidore's Etymologies. Laqueator also appears in Hugutius Pisanus's Derivationes, which quotes Isidore: I don't think there is an independent source attesting the name.--Urszag (talk) 02:45, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Etymology scriptorium

I am trying to create the new topic Cyclidium on the main Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium page of June 2024 and I systematically receive an error and I am redirected to the page Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2024/juin. Could you please help me? Gerardgiraud (talk) 07:43, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

IPA pronunciation for Swedish "idiot"

The IPA pronunciation for Swedish "idiot" is /ɪdɪˈuːt/, but the page is protected so I cannot edit it. Can anyone with the perms do this? Akhaeron (talk) 13:43, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Done. Tollef Salemann (talk) 14:04, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

after

Adverb sense:

• On the result of. Often used with verbs related to cleaning.

  I'm tired of picking up after you. Why can't you clean your own messes?

Anyone see why this is an adverb? The definition (which barely makes sense to me anyway, as far as it can be substituted into the example) seems prepositional, as does the example itself. Mihia (talk) 19:45, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Unhelpfully, when I look at other dictionaries, none of the ones I checked list a sense which I was able to recognize as obviously corresponding to this (unless they are treating it as an instance of something more general than we are), in any POS. We ourselves don't seem to have a sense for this at behind (unless, again, we too are subsuming it into something more general), where it nonetheless seems to exist to the same extent as this: google books:"cleaning up behind you", google books:"picking up behind you", google books:"fixing things behind you". On the face of it, I agree with you that it looks more prepositional, and the definition needs to be rewritten. - -sche (discuss) 20:10, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

It is definitely prepositional. I think other dictionaries are trying to be more general. I liked AHD: "5. Subsequent to and because of or regardless of: They are still friends after all their differences." MW 1913 and Online have something similar, 1913 splitting it into "because of" and "regardless of" definitions. I remember my mother saying the first sentence to me. Are there corresponding uses of nach [not in our defs.] and après?

"on the result of" does not fit American English. DCDuring (talk) 02:22, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

• OK, thanks, I moved it. Mihia (talk) 16:23, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

escritório in Portuguese

Unfortunately I'm having a bit of a disagreement with another user about this word, @Sarilho1, and after being unable to achieve consensus with them at their talk page, I am turning to the community. Sarilho1 added in September a new definition to this word, which they entered in as the very first definition. Prior to their edit, the entry's first and sole definition was office; afterwards, the new first definition was writing desk. After checking numerous Portuguese monolingual dictionaries, as well as Portuguese-English dictionaries, I haven't found a single one that lists "writing desk" as the first and primary definition, and this accords with my own experience talking and interacting with Portuguese speakers both from Portugal and Brazil, where I have only ever seen it mean office (in the sense of a work place, or in the related sense of "bureau", "ministry", or "(bureaucratic) department"). Every dictionary I have checked has "office" as the very first definition. A few dictionaries do list "(writing) desk" as a third or fourth definition; of these, the Priberam definition, in its third sense of the word, defines it as a "A piece of furniture that was a type of writing desk", while Michaelis, in their second definition of the term, define it as "an antique piece of furniture with a school desk cover or table to write on; desk". The use of "was" and "antique" in these definitions seem to indicate that this is an older, largely antiquated sense of the word, while the Michaelis definition in particular suggests that it applies to a specific type of antoque desk and not writing desks in general. I would also like to point out that the Portuguese Wiktionary entry for the word, pt: escritório, nowhere lists such a definition as "writing desk". Obviously another Wiktionary is not a reliable source per se, but it just adds evidence in favor of my point. I have also consulted with a number of Portuguese native speakers who agreed with me and stated they have never seen "escritório" used to mean writing desk, which, if not necessarily evidence against the word having (had) that meaning in specific contexts or in earlier times, is at least evidence that this is not its primary usage. Also, of particular note, not one bilingual dictionary translates the word as the English word(s) "(writing) desk"; to the extent it appears at all, it is in monolingual dictionaries, and, again, always as a secondary/tertiary (or lower) sense.

I have attempted to engage with Sarilho1 about this out of good faith, because they appear to be an experienced user who knows what they are doing, but unfortunately they have stonewalled me and resorted to reverting my edits, without giving me any explanations or evidence that this is a currently a primary sense of the word.

Thus, I am reaching out to other people in the community who know Portuguese to see what they have to say about this.

A summary of dictionaries I have checked:

• Collins English-Portuguese dictionary — "Office" as first sense; no definition corresponding to "writing desk"

• Routledge English-Portuguese dictionary (paper copy) — "Office" as first sense; no definition corresponding to "writing desk"

• Priberam monolingual dictionary — Office as first sense, "writing desk" in a specific and narrow sense as the third definition as discussed above.

• Michaelis monolingual dictionary — Office as first sense, "writing desk" in a specific and narrow sense as the second definition as discussed above.

• Aulete monolingual dictionary — Office as first sense, "writing desk" as the third definition.

• Infopedia monolingual dictionary — "Office" first sense; "writing desk with an inclined cover" as the fourth sense. Brusquedandelion (talk) 01:00, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

@Brusquedandelion This looks like a case of an eternal disagreement on Wiktionary: should entries order things with the oldest first, to show the history of the term, or the currently best known, to put the information that most users are likely to want where it's easiest to find. It's been debated many times, and there's never been a consensus one way or the other.

I suspect that the writing desk sense is the original. There are English terms like bureau and cabinet that started out as furniture and progressed to names of organizational units. Even desk has administrative senses. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:16, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree that the "writing desk" sense is probably the original sense, for etymological and comparative linguistic reasons (c.f. Spanish, Galician escritorio, Latin scriptorium), although I am unsure if this is the reason that Sarilho1 holds their position, since they have decline to clarify their reasons for prefering such an ordering. However, while perhaps not "consensus", in the preponderance of cases, I'm fairly certain, from what I have seen here on Wiktionary, obscure senses get delegated to later positions in the list of definitions, even if they are more primordial. English examples I can think of that are comparable in their obscurity include meat (sense 3 "food in general" is the original meaning), buxom (senses 3/4 and then 2 were its meanings, in that order, prior to the modern, most commonly used sense that is 1), and worm (senses 3 and 9, "dragon" or "any crawling thing, including snakes", the original meaning). In the rare cases where they are included as the first item in the list (the only such word I could think of is decimate), they are marked as archaic/obsolete using {{label}}, something Sarilho1 is also apparently against. I can only conclude from this that our disagreement is actually more fundamental than "how should we order a list of definitions"; they seem to believe the sense of "writing desk" is both current and common, which is at odds with the facts, hence why I am asking other Portuguese speakers to weigh in.

I'm really not talking here about a case where a word still has multiple more or less common definitions, where one is older, but slightly less common; in this case, if you asked 500 Portuguese speakers if escritório can mean "desk", I think you'd be lucky to find one who would agree; in this sense, it is perhaps analogous to "meat" in the sense of "food in general", or "worm" in the sense of "snake" for English speakers.

All this said, if you happen to have links to previous cases of this same sort of disagreement, I would appreciate that; it might shed some light on this issue. Thank you for weighing in. Brusquedandelion (talk) 05:04, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

cukinia

[t͡sukiɲa] and [t͡sukiɲja] are both pronunciations used in Polish, as evidenced even by the audio file used here. Flavʲja (talk) 11:22, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Added. Vininn126 (talk) 11:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

ectostosis

This seems to be an old term. Looking on Wikipedia, it might be the same as endochondral ossification (specifically "Appositional growth"). But I'm focussing a lot on the prefixes ecto- and endo-. ChatGPT suggests exostosis is largely synonymous with ectostosis , but I haven't fully trained it to write definitions for me yet. Denazz (talk) 21:12, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Cites would help. Can you get ChatGPT to assemble good cites? DCDuring (talk) 21:51, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Probably not; I know that if you ask if for e.g. references for a certain claim, it just hallucinates ones that don't actually exist. - -sche (discuss) 22:16, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

lesbian /ˈlɛz.bi.jɪn/

We give the RP pronunciation as /ˈlɛz.bɪ.ən/, but GenAm as /ˈlɛz.bi.jɪn/, /ˈlɛz.bi.jən/. Given this (small) April discussion about 'linking' /j/ and this (small) May discussion about /ən/ vs /ɛn/~/ɪn/, it seems prudent to raise the question of whether /ˈlɛz.bi.jɪn/ is the best analysis, or should be changed, moved into [square brackets], etc.
(It is easy to find pronunciations of this word on Youglish with a vowel that is more like [ɪ] than [ə], OTOH it's also easy to find Americans pronouncing it without any /j/...) - -sche (discuss) 06:13, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

The phonemic transcription should certainly not include /i.j/, and I don't think it's a good idea to include [i.j] in a phonetic transcription either, for reasons I already explained at the linked discussion. I am also against including /ən/ and /ɪn/ as separate transcriptions, since I imagine the latter occurs only for speakers with a weak vowel merger (and if there is no contrast, it might as well be transcribed as /ən/, and the quality might well vary continuously between these two positions).--Urszag (talk) 07:23, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I wondered (both here and with -ment words) whether it might be something different from the weak vowel merger, because it's most noticeable to me in situations where the /ɪ/ matches other /ɪ/s and contrasts with /ə/s (where both /ɪ/ and /ə/ are present, contrasting with each other throughout the utterance, and not being one merged sound), but I think I'm thinking about it wrong; if only some weak /ə/s shift to /ɪ/s (in specific environments) and other weak /ə/s and /ɪ/s stay unmerged, that accounts for this.
In I met a pretty intimidating lesbian in Acadia, for speakers I've heard say lesbian with /ɪn/, it was like the /ɪn/ of in and in(timidating) and unlike the /ə/ of a and Acadia, and in/intimidating and a/Acadia didn't have the same vowel... but I've yet to think of a situation where lesbian's /ɪn/ not only matches another, original /ɪn/ but also contrasts with an original /ən/-that-has-to-stay-/ən/; every /ən/ I've thought of offhand is either able to be shifted to /ɪn/, e.g. allowing London to rhyme with runned-in, or varies between /ən/ and another sound, as like an (/æn/), or isn't exactly /ən/ because it's /əˈn/, like in our entry's current analysis of another. But FWIW, in a sentence like I met an intimidating lesbian in another place, the in- of intimidating and an- of another contrast with each other (for at least some speakers, AFAICT), so the -an of lesbian being /ɪn/ does seem to approach being contrastive for speakers with that merger/phenomenon.
I suppose this is one of the things our {{a|weak vowel merger}} label is for (along with showing the converse, merger of /ɪ/ to /ə/ at the start of edition), and we could move the /ɪn/ pronunciation to a new line with that label.(?) - -sche (discuss) 19:26, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

It’s pretty normal for /ə/ to have a phonetically opener quality when it is word-final compared to word-medial (the “word-final” quality may be maintained before suffixes, as in the famous example pair Rosa’s/roses). I’m reluctant to transcribe the closer medial quality as /ɪ/ or [ɪ] partly because of the lack of contrasts in this position between ɪ and ə (other than those that can be explained as “juncture” effects) and partly because I don’t know of any professional phonetician or pronunciation resource that uses ɪ to transcribe the vowel in the last syllable of words like lesbian.--Urszag (talk) 20:21, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the Cambridge Dictionary give the UK pronunciation with /i/, the infamous 'schwee' created towards the end of the last century to represent simultaneously /iː/ and /ɪ/ (in variation). I think it would be fair to represent the most common pronunciation of -ian these days as /iːən/, and indeed we do so on that entry. And in the same vein /iən/ for American English. Nicodene (talk) 07:57, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, updating all the places where we still give the British pronunciation of -ia(n) (and -y) with /ɪ/ seems like a needed but mammoth undertaking. (I notice the OED still uses /ɪ/ for comedian, but has updated happy and city to /i/.) - -sche (discuss) 19:26, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Note that the /ˈlɛz.bɪ.ən/ pronunciation is marked not just as "British" or "UK" but specifically as "Received Pronunciation". I find it questionable whether this label is useful, but if it means anything at all, it's reasonable to interpret it as referring to the historical accent that was given that name (like the mythical "General American"), not to present-day Southern British English (which is of course a moving target).--Urszag (talk) 20:09, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

@Nicodene Reading that blog post reminded me of something I've been meaning to raise for a while: why do we consistently mark RP with /əʊ/ and GA with /oʊ/? This is a purely phonetic difference, but it means we have to give multiple pronunciations for any word with that vowel, which is annoying. Theknightwho (talk) 23:36, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Such is the convention found in modern pronouncing-dictionaries. I don't like it either, any more than I would like having /ˈkat/ (UK) vs. /ˈkæt/ (US).

It's only the tip of the iceberg for me. I don't like the convention of omitting stress in monosyllables either, since that removes the difference between ones that have lexical stress, like the aforementioned cat, and ones that do not, like and. Yes, the latter are generally function words, but why add extra variables to our model? We already, and inevitably have phonemic stress, so just use that.

I also don't like having syllable divisions or secondary stress in phonemic transcriptions since the phonemic status of both is dubious. Any argument to that end is immediately torpedoed by a consideration of morphology: reconstruction = ⫽ɹiː-+kənˈstrʌkt+-ʃən⫽, etc. Yet here we are.

Which if any of these hills are worth dying on I don't know. Nicodene (talk) 23:57, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

@Nicodene I completely agree with you except on secondary stress (the Reagan, raygun minimal pair in AmEng clinches it for me). I find it annoying that there is no way to indicate stress which doesn't rely on making a choice as to where the syllable boundary lies (since you need to put the stress marker somewhere).

I would be very happy to do away with /əʊ/ altogether in British English pronunciations, because I'm unconvinced that there is any phonemic distinction between BrEng and AmEng: using broad phonetic transcription, both realise the stressed form as [oʊ] and the unstressed form as [əʊ]. I suspect we only do this as an artefact of the OED making the same distinction, but we don't follow them on some of their other non-phonemic differences (e.g. in the OED, BrEng /ʌɪ/ == AmEng /aɪ/). Theknightwho (talk) 11:24, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

There has been a fair amount of talk of revising our transcriptions for English. Often BP threads by -sche, but not only. Perhaps an overhaul is possible.

The raygun–Reagan difference is also, incidentally, captured by morphological considerations: ⫽ˈɹeɪ+ˈɡʌn⫽ (compound) versus ⫽ˈɹeɪɡən⫽ (monomorphemic). Nicodene (talk) 12:06, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

putative

Our definition of "putative", which more or less matches that of other dictionaries that I have looked at, reads "Commonly believed or deemed to be the case; accepted by supposition rather than as a result of proof." On the other hand, I think it is not that uncommon to see uses such as this:

• "The process of selecting which businesses should be allowed to kiss the ring of putative Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and presumptive Chancellor Reeves, has not been left to chance."

• "Oland no longer has therapy sessions 'for the moment', he laughs, and the duo have completed 26 songs for a putative new album."

This does not mean that Starmer is commonly believed to be Prime Minister, or that the new album is commonly believed to exist, but that Starmer is expected to become Prime Minister, and that the album is expected to be produced (with whatever degrees of confidence). In other words, a meaning more like "prospective" or "potential". Is this an error, a mistaken use, or is it a valid use? Mihia (talk) 19:40, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I would not call it valid use, personally. I am not sure of your distinction (if any) between "mistaken use" and "error". —DIV (1.145.104.187 06:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC))

In that sentence, "mistaken use" was actually meant to be another way of expressing more-or-less the same thing as "error". (The sentence structure does very strictly speaking indicate this, but I see now that it is easy to read as disjunctive.) Mihia (talk) 08:31, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

If it's common, I would say it's worth having a sense line for (with appropriate labels/templates, maybe a usage note, especially if any authorities have discussed or proscribed it). It seems unlikely to be a misspelling (where someone meant potential and just spelled it badly), it seems like the writers intended to use this word putative, they just misunderstood what it usually means. (That's also how we end up with "the hoi polloi" meaning "the elite".) - -sche (discuss) 17:25, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

I think it's fairly common. It's pretty easy to find examples, at any rate. I've already added a definition line, but I was not very sure how to label it, so if anyone can do better with the label, please go ahead. Mihia (talk) 17:53, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Pronunciations of copypasta and creepypasta

Until just now, we listed /ˈkɒpiˌpeɪstə/ and /ˈkɹiːpiˌpeɪstə/ as the primary pronunciations for these (i.e. the same as non-rhotic "copy-paster" and "creepy-paster"), which seems extremely dubious. I can't find a single example of either when searching Filmot, despite there being tons of examples for both words ([1] [2]). Theknightwho (talk) 23:09, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Due to connection to the coordinated pair copy and paste I also doubt its being (only) stressed at the beginning.

Of course the end of the word is /ɐ/, though I don’t say in which frequency, in Urban British English, due to laxer vowel reduction rule imported from the Caribbean and Africa.

So, as a person with immigrant background who tries to sneak in into English society I would make any of /ˌkɒpiˈpejstɐ/, /ˌkɒpiˈpeːstɐ/, /ˌkɒpiˈpastɐ/, /ˌkɒpiˈpejstə/, /ˌkɒpiˈpeːstə/, /ˌkɒpiˈpastə/, by which stress it also becomes the typical drill beat in a less mismarked manner than if preproparoxytone, increasing the likelihood of its production because word and sentence stress like music reflect your emotional equalizer. MLE pronunciation is the only certain and reliable thing here, with the other linguistic strata being more likely to be too snobby for this term anyway: unlikely editors heard it in “Received Pronunciation”, which even the King’s children don’t speak, most likely Estuary English. Fay Freak (talk) 14:14, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Well, I speak in what we generally call RP on entries (not traditional RP, which no-one uses), and say /ˈkɒpiˌpæstə/, and have heard people say the same. I'm a little confused with your focus on MLE, though: this is just internet slang, and sees occasional use in informal speech by younger people in all linguistic strata, as evidenced by the Filmot results I've linked. Theknightwho (talk) 14:25, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I might frame its dominance broader than you do, as you frame RP broader than I thought. The former because young people on the internet are of cultural background different from outside the internet, though Black internet happens and we are unlikely to search for it: I have been shown a few times how search terms (especially for music), reflecting utmost spontaneity of man, differ between the races, and a site patroller can make a conclusion from people accidentally editing Wikis from their devices, reflecting different habits of arriving at the content of a site. So back to RP, at the present day there is only traditional RP; if some 20th-century dialectologist makes out a subvariety of RP traditional and mainstream as reported by Wikipedia, this reflects the beginning disintegration and disappearance of RP itself, for which Wiktionarians in the 2000s copied pronunciations from older references and after the recent discussions, though realizing with Geoff Lindsey that the vowels customarily given don’t match general RP, for their convenience ascribe a new meaning to, as an anachronym. I am not sure how legitimate it is for historical dialectology to do such a thing, given the confusion it abets, e.g. to newcomers, who might read it like I have read, provided they have conceptualized the actually spoken SSBE correctly of course. You have to rethink whether you would arrive to the same remarkable understanding of the dialect label, were it not for status quo bias. It might as well help to reflect that our entry Received Pronunciation has only one definition, epithetizing the matter in question traditional.

Changes happen faster than we even invent names for them. “Wikipedia has long struggled to be up to date … it still promotes (relatively) ancient theories like ‘South Semitic’ and things like that.” Because even if there is new taxonomy already, it is less likely made comprehensible to the general audience. Fay Freak (talk) 16:18, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

fansie

Could fansie be an obsolete/archaic spelling of fancy (like fancie)? I found the term in several books: 1 2 3. [Saviourofthe] ୨୧ 02:32, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

@Saviourofthe: yes, the OED lists it as a variant (obsolete) spelling of fancy (noun and verb). — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:50, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification! [Saviourofthe] ୨୧ 02:29, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

dont tread on me

• It was suggested in the RFD that there be a a usage note or something like that explaining the context of why there is no apostrophe. I added one earlier today but was undone by @Fenakhay. Can we discuss this? I think it should be re-added but I'm not willing to edit war to get it back in there. Purplebackpack89 16:40, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

  I think it should go under the etymology header, because it was explaining why the term is the way it is. A usage note is an explanation for how the term is used. -- 𝘗𝘶𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘺𝘪^{(𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬)} 17:02, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

• I have moved it from deleted material to an Etymology header. DCDuring (talk) 19:42, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Confederate flag

Am considering starting this entry, with the following two definitions

1. The Stars and Bars, the official Confederate flag
2. (contemporary) The rebel flag

In contemporary usage, when you see a sentence like "the protesters at the rally were carrying Tiki torches and waving Confederate flags", it usually means definition #2

Thoughts? Purplebackpack89 17:26, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I think sense 1 is SoP and shouldn't be included. As for sense 2, can you find at least three qualifying quotations unambiguously indicating that the rebel flag is meant? That may be hard. — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:47, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd think you could find images in Google Images that showed the rebel flag with the caption Confederate flag. DCDuring (talk) 19:18, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

The ADL entry for "Confederate flag" shows the rebel flag.

• 2021 January 12, “How the Confederate battle flag became an enduring symbol of racism”, in National Geographic:

  [caption to image of battle flag] Denounced as a hate symbol, the Confederate flag remains popular among white supremacists and Southerners who claim it as their heritage.

Frankly, I'd expect this to qualify under "clearly widespread use" in the US. All other flags associated with the Confederacy are much less known. DCDuring (talk) 19:41, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

(@Sgconlaw) I wonder whether sense 2 is actually any more idiomatic / less SOP than sense 1. It's a [Confederate] [flag]; that it was not officially the flag of the whole Confederacy, and so people may (debatably) be making a factual error to call it the Confederate flag, does not seem to diminish the fact that it's a [Confederate] [flag] which they are calling a [Confederate] [flag]. - -sche (discuss) 21:24, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Maybe I'm too tired and aged to think straight, but we have an entry for the common noun American black bear because it refers to organisms of the species Ursus americanus and not any other species of black bear. Please help me distinguish the cases. DCDuring (talk) 21:36, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I think it's because the "American black bear" is not just any ursine with a dark coat that exists in the United States, as you say. The difference between it and "Confederate flag" is that it is just any banner that the CSA used, with the rebel flag being popular in later years as a symbol of the Confederacy. The same could be said from "American flag" or "EU flag", etc. CitationsFreak (talk) 04:27, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I forgot to look to see whether we also have an entry for black bear. We do, with two definitions. It seems a clearer parallel. DCDuring (talk) 12:33, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

@-sche @Sgconlaw The analogy I would draw is this: the Gadsden flag is a flag flown by people of the United States (and during the American Revolution, no less). The Gadsden flag is an [American] [flag] in the same way that the Rebel flag is a [Confederate] [flag]...both were flown by people ascribing to that country/movement/government/whatever, but neither was the official flag of that C/M/G/W Purplebackpack89 13:04, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

It seems reasonable to include an entry explaining that "Confederate flag" can refer to either of these distinct flags. There is an existing entry Dixie flag.--Urszag (talk) 04:55, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

סאַפֿאַרי־⁠פּאַרק

Not sure this is the right place to ask about this, but for some reason it keeps saying that the "park" word doesn't exist and is a redlink, even though it literally does exist. How do I fix this? Insaneguy1083 (talk) 20:11, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

hello⁠. It appears you inserted a non-breaking space (U+2060) in your link somehow, an invisible (zero-width) character that caused your link to differ from the actual title of the entry, whence the redlink. I fixed it. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 20:33, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Is there a WM tool for showing all the Unicode characters in some text. An app? Could we have a filter for the particularly noxious characters? DCDuring (talk) 21:41, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I used this online tool to find the hidden character.

Perhaps a tag could work as an on-wiki solution, but I am not sure how to make one, nor do I have a clear view of possible offending characters that this tag would have to monitor. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 21:48, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I raised this at GP. DCDuring (talk) 21:55, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. I copied the original entry from the online dictionary. Going forward I'll probably just retype the word using the Yiddish keyboard. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 21:49, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Alternative pronunciation for microscopic

I don't know IPA so hopefully what i'm about to say will make sense but there currently seems to be only one pronunciation, when I'm 95% sure there's another common, if probably technically incorrect, pronunciation based on the pronunciation of microscope so "s-cope-ic" instead of "s-cahp-ic".

anyone else familiar with this? Akaibu (talk) 21:13, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I've never heard this pronunciation, no. I would call it an error too, but its existence would fit the pattern set by alternations in rhyming words like myopic and geotropic. Why I'd think this one might register as less acceptable, though, is that we have a clear pattern of vowel laxing when adding -ic to a transparent stem, so going from microscope to microscopic SHOULD change the vowel, whereas myope and geotrope are rare words at best, and most people only know the forms with -ic as standalone words. —Soap— 21:36, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

There are a few newly coined scientific terms for which we give this as a secundary pronunciation, such as amblyopic and chronotropic – none of which end on -scopic . I've never heard this, though, and would find it an unnatural pronunciation.  --Lambiam 17:40, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Senses of τίποτα

We give two senses for Greek τίποτα (típota). But is there any difference in sense as used in “δε ζητώ τίποτα” (usex for sense 1) and “δε θέλω τίποτα” (usex for sense 2)?  --Lambiam 17:14, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I tried to clarify, M @Lambiam as at sources. They are "nothing" and "something". The greek syntactic terms are apophatic and cataphatic but I do not know the English terms. Thank you ‑‑Sarri.greek ^♫ I 04:23, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

It appears to me that this is not an issue of Greek but of English. English tends to replace not anything by nothing. In spite of the definitions we give, one cannot* translate τίποτα as “nothing” in the negative clause “δεν θα σου δώσει ποτέ τίποτα”, because English also replaces not ever by never and the negative δεν has already been used up in translating ποτέ. This peculiarity of English forces one into contortions and artificial distinctions when defining the (by themselves straightforward) senses of ποτέ and τίποτα.  --Lambiam 07:41, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

---

*except in an informal register allowing double negatives

long

Will this interview take long?

I haven't got long to live.

They are in a hurry; they can't wait for too long.

Anyone care to hazard an opinion as to the part of speech of "long" in these examples? Presently we list them as adverbs. However, unlike, let's say, "He won't live long", where a clear adverb, such as "permanently", or "endlessly", or whatever makes sense, can be substituted, when we try to substitute a clear adverb into any of the above, it appears grammatically impossible; for example "I haven't got endlessly to live".

AH has "take long", specifically "This won't take long", as a noun. Possible objection is that "This won't take very long" is possible, but then "Very little is known" is possible, and what PoS is "little" in that? Also we can substitute "a long time", and while "a long time" can be adverbial, in the cases I can think of, it is for "for a long time", and "for a long time" is not substitutable.

What do you think? Mihia (talk) 17:37, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Will this interview take long? – It will take what it needs to take for us to decide whether to release you. I think that the underlined clause, which is not adverbial, fits the same syntactic category as long in the question required to fill the slot in the interview will take        .  --Lambiam 17:54, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Some prior discussion is at Wiktionary:Tea_room/2023/June#In_"taking_long",_is_"long"_a_noun?. At that time I and others felt (based on the POS of this won't take long) that this will take long wasn't using a noun, but I think we were focused on whether (more recent / MLE) this will take long was a different thing from (old) this won't take long; now I'm less sure about the POS question. I don't immediately see a reason to view "he won't live long" and "this won't take long" (or will this take long?, or this will take long) as using different parts of speech. I notice Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com both have "a long time" as a noun sense of long, with usexes like they haven't been gone for long and will it take long? Maybe they are all nouns... (I also wonder how adjective sense 12, this is long, is best viewed.) - -sche (discuss) 18:28, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

MWOnline's noun def. is "a long#Adjective period of time". This may not be considered complete because it does not fit modification by adverbs like too, very, somewhat, quite, so, a bit, middling, etc. I think this is an example of what CGEL (2005) calls a fused head in which an adjective functions 'externally' as a noun, but, within its phrase, as an adjective modifying an unspoken noun sometimes determined by context (In this case the unspoken noun could be time or distance.). (Something analogous happens with determiners.) We sometimes call it an elision, but that doesn't convey the mechanics very well. We might want to consider a relatively uniform approach to such items as part of a Style Guide for English. Should we have a usage notes explanation that the structure licenses the noun sense being modified by certain adverbs? DCDuring (talk) 20:11, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Another bit of evidence that long is not a morphological noun in this context is that it can be inflected to a comparative: "Will this interview take much longer? Though I don't like calling it an adverb either.--Urszag (talk) 00:10, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I think that would still fit within the treating it as a 'fused-head' adjective: "(a) much longer (time)". It would make for a longish, transcludable usage note for such terms. DCDuring (talk) 01:58, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I would expect fused-head adjective to be used to describe cases like "the poor", "the rich", "the sick", "the French", where the adjective functions as a nominal phrase, but not as a determiner phrase. The use of "long" in contexts like "won't take long" is rather different from these. I checked the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and just saw that it does explicitly categorize "long" as an adverb in contexts like "before long" or "for long" (p. 640), while acknowledging that it behaves exceptionally in its ability to be used as the complement of these prepositions or of "a few verbs such as take, have, need, spend, give and be" (p. 569).--Urszag (talk) 03:35, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

We have often added PoSes or let contributors add PoSes for minor usages (eg, all the Interjection headers in English). It is tempting to have both noun and adverb (as well as adjective) for long. I was hoping that something like "fused-head" adjective would cover some(most?) usage what we call adverb and noun. Maybe Huddleston and Pullum just lack the courage of their convictions. DCDuring (talk) 14:29, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I think that the "take longer" issue is essentially the same as the "take very long" issue mentioned earlier, and, as you say, both could be explained if "long" contains the idea of an adjective and an implied noun, i.e. "long" = "a long time". I think there are anomalies for these problem cases whichever PoS we decide on. Personally I find it hard to accept that these are adverbs, which would leave us with a choice of adjective or noun. My vote in that case would be noun, and live with the "take longer" / "take very long" anomaly, or mention it in a note. Mihia (talk) Mihia (talk) 15:00, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

And, as I mentioned, we do already gloss over similar issues in the case of e.g. little, where our pronoun definition has the example "Little is known about his early life", where "Very little is known about his early life" is equally possible. Mihia (talk) 15:12, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

AFAICR CGEL has little as often used in fused-head determiner constructions. Almost all determiners (not "articles", for example) can be used in such a way that the fused-head analysis fits — and fits well. We have the pronoun PoS in such cases because normal users don't even have determiner in their vocabulary, let alone the appropriate sense of head in fused-head. DCDuring (talk) 15:24, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

At "little" we have a determiner PoS as well as pronoun. I think we now routinely use the determiner PoS, which I fully support. However, even accepting the "fused head" theory, I think there is an case for putting "little is known" under "pronoun" (or noun, I don't mind), since grammatically it does behave like a noun, meaning "little information", or whatever. If we put it under "determiner" you can say "it isn't grammatically behaving like a determiner", whereas if we call it a noun you can say, well, why is "very little is known" possible. So, there are pros and cons both ways, as I see it. Mihia (talk) 17:55, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I was sloppy about this in neglecting little's main PoS, from which its determiner use derives. Consider: "Very little is yet known." In this usage, little is modified by an adverb as well as serving as subject of the sentence. I don't think calling little either a noun or a pronoun is any help at all: pronouns are distinguished by being very loath to accept modifiers of any kind and nouns are not modified by adverbs.

The help in calling "little" a noun or pronoun, as I see it, is that nouns or pronouns can be the subjects of verbs. Basically we have (according to the analysis that we are discussing) something with the grammatical property of "determiner + (implied) noun", i.e. grammatically a noun, that can e.g. be the subject of a verb, and yet the determiner part can be modified. Having said that, I am not actually arguing strongly that we should classify "little" and others similar as nouns/pronouns, and I wouldn't oppose folding this sense into "determiner" if we think our readership can handle it.

But, getting back to the original question about "long", all things considered, what do you think is the best, or shall we say least worst, PoS category to list these cases under? Mihia (talk) 21:37, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

The basic problem – not only here – is that natural languages, as they evolve, may develop occasional quirks that challenge any reasonable system of grammar rules expressed in terms of parts of speech, word classes and syntactic roles. You need to squeeze hard to make them fit.  --Lambiam 10:15, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Fortunately, most experienced contributors seem to recognize this, so the disagreements don't rise to be interpersonal conflicts. We seem to want to help readers by duplicating definitions under different PoSes. I hope it really does help. DCDuring (talk) 15:24, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

---

I see that @Urszag has made some edits to the adverb senses under discussion (not sure whether he or she was aware of this thread). Anyway, for the relevant senses, what we now have is this:

1. For a long time.

   Paris has long been considered one of the most cultured cities in the world.

   By eight o'clock, the food will be long gone.

2. A long time (see usage notes).

   Will this interview take long?

   I haven't got long to live.

   They are in a hurry; they can't wait for too long.

While of course I agree with splitting out the examples for which "for a long time" is not substitutable, I disagree that the new "a long time" sense is adverbial. Unless someone can disprove it, my feeling is that "a long time" is adverbial ONLY WHEN it is short for "for a long time" (or something essentially analogous, such as "over a long time"). Otherwise it is a noun.

I also note that substitution of the definition lines into the examples is still not idiomatic in all cases ("the food will be for a long time gone", "they can't wait for too a long time"). Perhaps we could gloss over these issues if the PoS of the definitions is put on a sound footing. Mihia (talk) 19:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

See my comments above, noting that the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language does explictly analyze this use of "long" as an adverb. "the food will be for a long time gone" isn't substitutable because of word order ("the food will be gone for a long time" sort of works). We could make a note about this sense usually being used before a verb form, as the CamGEL does. The 1925 Hughes example ("I've been waiting long") doesn't prepose the word long.—--Urszag (talk) 16:40, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Apologies, I did of course read your above comment at the time, but then I didn't make the association when I saw the edit. The PoS of "long" in these problem cases is certainly a conundrum, but what is the positive evidence that it is an adverb in, well, let's start with "take long"? We can "wait long", or "wait for a long time". We can even "wait eternally". Here, "long" is plausibly an adverb in a parallel role to "for a long time", "eternally", etc., describing the duration of the action of waiting. Similar for some other verbs, such as "live", "stay". Now we come to "take long". Can we in this sense say "take for a long time", or "take eternally"? No. Is there actually any indisputable adverb that can be used with this sense of "take"? Not that I can think of. Does "long" describe the duration of the action of taking? No. Does "long" seem to modify "take" in any kind of adverbial manner? Not to me. So what is the evidence that "long" is an adverb in "take long"? Mihia (talk) 18:25, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

It functions as a complement of a preposition or verb in those contexts, similarly to noun phrases (and unlike other adverbs), but it still inflects like an adverb and heads a phrase that takes phrase-internal modifiers like an adverb, not like a noun or pronoun: we can say "It won't take much longer", "I can't wait for much longer", "It won't take very long".--Urszag (talk) 18:39, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Right, though, as discussed above, this can be explained by "long" being an adjective fused with an implied noun, grammatically functioning as a noun. The inflections/modifiers apply to the adjective component. It still seems to me like a whole bunch of reasons why "long" seems nothing like an adverb, versus one aspect that can just about be explained away. (I admit that there are also other arguments against its being a noun. For example, we can say "it took a lot of time and a lot of trouble", yet "it took long and a lot of trouble", which one would imagine should work with parallel nouns, sounds odd.) Mihia (talk) 18:57, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

eat someone's lunch

This is WOTD, so this is a bit awkward, but... the definition seems wrong. All the quotations suggest that the meaning is something like "To take an opportunity from someone else, to gain market share at the expense of someone else", which is the way I've always understood it. Tesla hasn't thoroughly defeated Volkswagen and Nissan - these companies still sell more cars than Tesla - but it has taken customers away from them. (In the current definition's defence, it's more or less what the other dictionaries we cite say) Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:19, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Latin -nus entry a bit confusing

Over at Latin -nus, this is explained as:

Suffix

[edit]

-nus (feminine -na, neuter -num); first/second-declension suffix

1. derives adjective nouns from verbs.

Usage notes

[edit]

The suffix -nus is appended to a verbal root to form an adjective and nouns.

Examples:

magnus

plēnus

tribūnus

lignum

tignum

• What is an "adjective noun"?
• Why does the entry say that this suffix appends to verbs / verbal roots, when of the five examples given, only one (lignum) is derived from a verbal root? The rest are all noun or adjective roots.  ???

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:10, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

English contemporary included in Appendix:English contranyms?

This came up recently in a discussion in a Reddit thread.

For other contranyms like fast or hew, the opposing meanings arose over time from sense development, while for contranyms like cleave, the opposing meanings trace back to separate roots that led into converging phonological shifts.

However, for contemporary, I've never viewed this word as a contranym, as the base underlying meaning is consistently "with the times" — it's just an open question / dependent on context, as to which "times" are relevant.

What do others think? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:45, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd say no, and wager that the person who added thought "well the thing could exist a long time ago along with something else, or now!". Vininn126 (talk) 09:23, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I suspect the reasoning is that "contemporary" can be used both to refer to the present and the past, two contradictory ideas. CitationsFreak (talk) 01:15, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree that it doesn’t qualify as a contranym. An antonym of the sense ‘modern, present’ would be ‘former, previous’ which is not a possible sense for contemporary.

I might have simply defined it as ‘belonging to the same period (past or present)’. Nicodene (talk) 07:37, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

We do often have the opportunity to observe those who have neither naive common sense nor technical correctness in their contributions, but yet are 'normal users'. DCDuring (talk) 14:10, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

alambre

What is the difference between these two senses: "wire (metal formed into a long, narrow thread)", "wire (a thread of metal)"? - -sche (discuss) 21:22, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

@-sche: I believe the two are copied from the first two senses at wire: one is wire as a material and thus uncountable, while the other is a piece of it and thus countable. The part about "A piece of such material" was left out, so it's not as clear- the article in the second sense is the only clue. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:30, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

local

The last sense, "Descended from an indigenous population. Hawaiian Pidgin is spoken by the local population." Is this right? It suggests that for a given place, some of the local population (sense 1, even ones whose families have long lived there) are not local (sense 8), but it seems dubious to me that such a distinction could be made or understood, when the sentences the senses are used in are identical ("X is done by the local population"). Can anyone vouch for or against this, or provide better examples of it? (I haven't RFVed it yet because in my experience if someone adds a definition "# A blue shirt." to shirt and you RFV it, someone will just add cites where a shirt is indeed blue, though this does nothing to determine whether the claimed sense actually exists.) - -sche (discuss) 03:16, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

OED? “local”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring (talk) 03:28, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

I think you have to consider the source: [3]. Probably overly pretentious wording. DCDuring (talk) 03:40, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

I can't say I know what the author had in mind then. There might now be emerging some kind of class-like distinction between nationally or internationally minded people and others, but attributive use of local#Noun should cover that. DCDuring (talk) 03:52, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Some other dictionaries have a sense like this one from WordNet: 'of or belonging to or characteristic of a particular locality or neighborhood; "local customs"; "local schools"; "the local citizens"; "a local point of view"; "local outbreaks of flu"; "a local bus line"'

I think the point of these is that they are somehow not entirely limited to a place, perhaps like customs and neighborhoods (and dialects) taken from, say, a village to a neighborhood in a city. We do seem to have devoted a lot more love to the several mathematical definitions than to any subtleties that might be inferred from the ways local collocates with nouns. DCDuring (talk) 04:05, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

pulling a stunt

I'm wondering if there should be a page for pull a stunt, or if either pull or stunt should mention this common collocation specifically. One of the example sentences at pull does use "pull a stunt" but there's no explanation that this is a common phrase. Other dictionaries do generally have an entry for pull a stunt. Other dictionaries refer to it as doing something "silly or risky", while our example at pull says "To do or perform, especially something seen as negative by the speaker" and includes other usages, like "pull 12-hour days". Mazzlebury (talk) Mazzlebury (talk) 22:49, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

See “pull a stunt”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring (talk) 15:14, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

-er

If memory serves, we created identifiers to distinguish -er (@Etymology 1) from -er (@Etymology 2), and when we did, "agent noun" was chosen as the id for Etymology 1. I think this label selection may have been a bit shortsighted, as Etymology 1 is actually more than just a suffix for agent noun...it also denotes occupation. Should we update the id to read "agent/occupation" instead in order to more accurately describe the suffix, and thereby merge the categories wikt:Category:English_terms_suffixed_with_-er_(agent noun) and wikt:Category:English_terms_suffixed_with_-er_(occupation) into wikt:Category:English_terms_suffixed_with_-er_(agent/occupation) ? There is really only one suffix not two. Leasnam (talk) 23:39, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

@Leasnam: Having the same etymology does not mean we cannot have separate senses and categories for derivations from verbs and nouns. Also, should this not be at requests for mergers instead? J3133 (talk) 03:34, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Well, this discussion is not really a request to merge entries (maybe the categories), but it's also primarily a discussion regarding the suffix, so I suppose it could belong at either place. We absolutely can have multiple categories for individual subsenses of an affix, but the question is should we ? Off the top of my head I cannot think of another affix where we do this (- please help me if I'm missing one...). But I imagine if we did that it might be similar to a category where -ish denoting "resembling" (e.g. mannish) is a separate category to where it denotes "somewhat" (e.g. bluish) - one appended to nouns, the other to adjectives...but why ? It's the same affix. On the other hand, I do see a reasoning why we would want to distinguish -ish as in mannish, bluish from -ish on words like abolish, finish, because they are different lexical units that happen to look identical, and are therefore subject to confusion Leasnam (talk) 13:32, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

They aren't in separate categories, but this reminds me of the sorting into semantic groups done by User:Intersets on the page for the prefix bi-.--Urszag (talk) 14:05, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Right. I think the detail is great on the entry page, but is overkill in categories, but I realise others may feel different. Is this a direction we would like to go ? Leasnam (talk) 16:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

palimpsestuous

"Pertaining to the textual relationality of a palimpsest." What does this mean? (Given that this is a simple word + -ous formation, I wonder if, like palimpsestic, it just means ~"Relating to palimpsests.") - -sche (discuss) 02:27, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

My guess is that it is describing the relationship between the text that is visible and the erased text, over which it is written. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:39, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

I would add that the rhyme with incestuous is probably not a coincidence. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:24, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

After a bit of digging, several sources attribute the word to Anthony Burgess writing about James Joyce (which given Burgess's taste for sex jokes and Joyce's love of scatology makes me agree that the rhyme with incestuous is deliberate - Burgess even spells it palimpcestuous), and he was using it to describe a section of Finnegans Wake in which a letter within the story appears to summarise the book itself. I've tried to clean up the definition (which appears to mean "consciously referential or self-referential" - it's like a palimpsest in that it's written "on top" of earlier text). Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:21, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

(Ok, yes, it's deliberate - Burgess even wrote "palimpsestuous-or palincestuous") Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:05, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

business pronunciation with final /z/

Does this really have a pronunciation with final /z/? Sounds weird to me as a native GenAm speaker. Benwing2 (talk) 03:35, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Erutuon added it saying it was used "in some dialects of American English", perhaps he knows which ones. Merriam-Webster has it, with no indication of where it's used; the OED asserts it as an American variant. The occasional intentionally nonstandard spelling bizniz by Black and Korean rappers is suggestive of such a pronunciation. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's section on correct vs erroneous speech (in Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary of Difficult Words, 1882) actually prescribes pronouncing -z at the end of each syllable! But other dictionaries from the same era recognize only the pronunciation with -s. Maybe it's "uncommon, now nonstandard" if we can't find a more specific label (dialect). - -sche (discuss) 04:35, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

I *think* I’ve heard this in businesses, but not in the singular (which is especially weird, given the double-s being realised as /z/). Theknightwho (talk) 16:59, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Also a native GenAm speaker.

I've encountered the bizniz rendering (both in writing and speech), and my impression is that this is intentionally non-standard. It seems slang-y; I'm uncertain of any currency in, or even derivation from, AAVE.

Re: Brewer's comment from 1882, just by normal English orthography conventions, and considering derivation as well (as busy + -ness), business would have an unvoiced /s/ as the final consonant. The plural form businesses would have a voiced final /z/, but not the singular. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:53, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Mouses

Look at the entry mouses. It says that it is sometimes used as the plural of mouse, but only (this is an absolute word) when it means the computer device. Look in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". The book (published in 1957, before computer mice got their terminology in 1965) uses "mouses" as the plural for the animal. Can anyone make the definitions more flexible?? Georgia guy (talk) 00:18, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

"How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is a poem, and Dr. Seuss frequently uses humorous wordplay. That example doesn't show that it is normal to use "mouses" as a plural for the animal. Anyway, criteria for inclusion would require at least 3 attested uses. You could probably find others, but even so, this shouldn't be presented as a usual plural of the animal noun.--Urszag (talk) 02:51, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

@Georgia guy: I have added it as a nonstandard plural with quotations (including the one by Dr. Seuss you mentioned). J3133 (talk) 03:47, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

• Dr Seuss doesn't have a lot in common with James Joyce, but one thing I'd definitely say is that neither of them should form the basis of an entry without a lot of other quotations from more conventional authors. Smurrayinchester (talk) 07:34, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

"it" and "up" (and "it up")- verb-forming particles?

A sense that we don't have - as far as I can tell - at it and up is their role in forming slangy nonce word verbs from nouns. For example "We decided to bus it to the city" ("We decided to take the bus to the city"), or (from The Simpsons) "Bacon up that sausage, boy" ("Put bacon on that sausage"). While I was looking for this, I also came across this book describing it up as a particle with a similar use - "Trump it up" ("act like Trump"). Should we add these as particles? it pronoun sense 7 and up adverb sense 6 seem similar but the definitions we have at the moment don't really suggest this productivity. Smurrayinchester (talk) 07:26, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

As far as "bacon up that sausage" is concerned, I see this as adverb sense 6 of "up". I suppose you might say that "up" enhances productivity a little, but to me "bacon that sausage" seems possible alone. Mihia (talk) 20:32, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Similarly, I would say that "Trump it up" is also adverb sense 6 of "up", in that "Trump it" can exist alone (albeit less commonly, I would imagine, and also in this particular case there is the potential for confusion with "trump it" in the ordinary sense), and "up" intensifies this. Mihia (talk) 20:46, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

It may be that the wording of that non-gloss definition needs to be less restricted. Up seems to have suffered some semantic(?) bleaching. 04:20, 16 June 2024 (UTC)DCDuring (talk)

For the uses such as "Trump it up", similarly "ham it up", "camp it up" etc., I was thinking that the "thoroughly" sense at "up" covered it, but looking again, perhaps this is "thoroughly" in a slightly different sense than that intended by the definition at "up", not being thoroughly to completion as such, but done thoroughly in a kind of "thoroughgoing" way, for want of possibly a better way to put it. Perhaps we could split this out into a separate sense, and even describe the second one as "often in combination with it"? Mihia (talk) 20:09, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

body count

WTF are those hyponym qualifier labels on about? This, that and the other (talk) 10:00, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

@This, that and the other: I was trying to be gender-sensitive, don’t you see it? body count can be used for any sexual configuration, notch count requires a notch, cock count a cock, mileage a cock *and* a vagina at the other end, unless you provide evidence that it works with rearends or even vaginae per vaginam (hardly plausible), in which case I must admit to have had a mistaken impression about the term mileage (which was undocumented until my then attempt). Fay Freak (talk) 10:37, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

I think "notch count" just refers to the phrase notch on one's bedpost (the idea that someone might count partners by carving a notch into their bedpost for each one) rather than referring to anyone's anatomy. (I also suspect that mileage isn't quite right here - mileage is a continuum quantity, not a discrete counting one, and the sole quotation we have at mileage suggests that it just means "sexual experience" broadly rather than being a specific quantity of encounters. FWIW I'm finding that sense hard to cite, but I did find at least one song that seems to be using it gender-neutrally). Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:48, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

I considered that opportunity of interpretation them times there, and like the other word in your case (me I heard the indelicate sense of mileage in a few other songs over the years, not always getting around to add tangy quotes), from the limited purview when searching it could not claim any broader use for notch count than cisgender heterosexual encounters, where the application for females counting cocks can well be analogical. notch on one's bedpost may and may not be a related term, which is why we don’t link it under Related terms but See also, but probably notch count has both images playing into it; people usually find it difficult to comprehend when one assumes two origins for one word and moreover supposes that the meaning hinges on both. Fay Freak (talk) 13:41, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

These term apparently mean the same thing in my idiolect as in SMW's. Yours seems like more than a stretch, perhaps a poetic reimagination of the conventional metaphor. DCDuring (talk) 14:03, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

I would just remove them. AG202 (talk) 14:05, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

This is feasible. Am I correct though that they are all hyponyms, rather than synonyms, or perhaps near-synonyms? There is a certain likelihood of body count not being as trans-exclusionary as notch count, and poetic imagination varying. We would not need to write the reasoning for semantic relations assumed into the very place they are present, this is the arcane knowledge of a dictionary’s authors, sharper to them than to its users. Fay Freak (talk) 14:18, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

I would have 100% agreed with @Smurrayinchester and @DCDuring that notch count surely refers to notches carved as a tally. Then again, there is sense 4 at notch#English, which raises some reasonable doubt. —DIV (1.145.104.187 06:34, 14 June 2024 (UTC))

This is a case where, in the absence of other forms of evidence, I would like to go with a poll of native speakers. DCDuring (talk) 12:44, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Often that'd work, but I'm concerned about the *possibility* that notch count could have developed from a niche slang usage as per sense 4 of notch. It's already marked as US slang, and — based on the single citation given — I suggest it might only be known to fans of (21^st century) rap music. On the other hand, sense 4 of notch doesn't have all that much support currently, so perhaps that's also open to question. —DIV (1.145.114.112 13:37, 15 June 2024 (UTC))

Why don't we just RfV it, then? DCDuring (talk) 23:20, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

@DCDuring, any reason you RFV'ed body count instead of the actually controversial terms in this discussion? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:26, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes: because I'd like to see whether the claim of niche usage is true. DCDuring (talk) 23:28, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

But that claim was for notch count, not body count (which is not at all niche in current usage). Unless both claims were made and I just missed the one. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:50, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

@Andrew Sheedy, DCDuring, WordyAndNerdy: I wish we had a corpus of current spicy literature. Symptomatic to post-Covid fragmentation of discourse spaces, in spite of recurring internet, and real-life, discussions about average, high, and low “body counts”, and those of specific citizens, as even if the other sense did not exist, there wasn’t a single occurrence on De Gruyter Online, in spite of my specifically adding sexual, and despite the existing policy-relevant topic of “average number of sexual partners” or “lifetime sexual partners” where the slang term could at least be mentioned, and even Google Books lacks "her body count", so I have given up on DCDuring’s request. Fay Freak (talk) 01:36, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

I found a clear-cut "literary" use from 2010. I seems a fairly easy transfer of meaning from the military (Vietnam) sense, but the transfer doesn't seem to have occurred until the late(?) 1990s, judging from the 1993 "tailhook" citation. DCDuring (talk) 04:28, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

This thread is just...one I'd rather sit out. Academic literature isn't the first place to look when attesting slang. Try searching for novels on Google Books or the Internet Archive. Scan the cover art to weed out thrillers, true crime, and military history books that are likely to be using "body count" in the first sense. Look for romance novels and general fiction that are more likely to be using "body count" in the sexual sense. Took me ten minutes to find a bunch more cites. If one has a natural knack for processing information, it's probably easier to develop this kind of context filter. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 07:30, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Excellent sleuthing! We now have 6 cites using body count to refer to the total number of sexual conquests of a male and 4 of a female (one quote uses the phrase body count in both senses). Nobody can now claim this shouldn’t be passed and I shall label it accordingly on the RFV page. Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:53, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

There's three cites for notch count now too. More to be found on GBooks...but I think those three are enough. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 08:08, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

The cites for notch count are also exclusively PUA books. Thus the context label, while body count seems like general, all-purpose slang. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 08:26, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Because every ten-year old seems to know about “body counts” in this sense nowadays, and also “notches” I have discovered to be cited copiously since 17th century in the OED to designate the female genitals, while you were writing. There is nothing certain you can achieve there. Related terminology is older than anyone can remember, is able to relate its origin, or a woman is fertile. Fay Freak (talk) 23:30, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Is it current? Is it slang? Has it made it into print? If someone wants to claim widespread usage and others agree, OK. DCDuring (talk) 23:33, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Does it only mean over a lifetime or over one's lifetime to date or over any time period? DCDuring (talk) 23:37, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Lifetime usually. From TikTok they learn early about someone’s body-count, and I mean even the German kids do, "dein Bodycount", apparently even in public broadcaster’s sex education, yikes indeed, don’t know about the other European ones. Fay Freak (talk) 23:41, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

That's not sex education. That's just a radio-show episode where they discuss sex. I assume other countries have episodes where they discuss sex, even the American ones. CitationsFreak (talk) 08:08, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

• How many definitions does OED have for body count? The original and core sense is of dead bodies. Much usage soon came to be of victims of some process or event. Now, I'm sure that sexual partners are no longer necessarily considered victims. In addition, I expect that we can find other uses of the term that do not require being dead, a victim, or a sexual partner, and possibly not a human. DCDuring (talk) 15:47, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  One, the typical sense. I don't think the victim sense is per se intended. Could just be a quasi-pun. CitationsFreak (talk) 18:08, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  Doesn't fit my def. of pun. The victim sense is certainly sometimes intended, as in the Tailhook citation.

  MWOnline has a second definition: "the number of persons involved in a particular activity", which includes our second sense. I suppose our target users like to see sex-related terms highlighted, rather than included in a boring, broader definition. DCDuring (talk) 21:56, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  I meant "victim" in the sense of the person receiving SEX being considered a victim. I suppose we could make the SEX sense a sub-sense, and make a new sense similar to the M-W def. (Also, I did say quasi-pun, along with SEX. Bet that caught your attention.) CitationsFreak (talk) 22:53, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  Sorry, I'm too tired to have a sense of humor now. I don't have a strong opinion on the subsense treatment. Like many terms, body count has a striking well-defined particular use that brought it into wide use at least in the US. To me the Vietnam-era war-of-attrition use itself seems kinda SoP, transparent in context. OTOH many professional dictionaries (lemmings?) have the term, which I find sufficient for inclusion. Body seems to be doing all of the work in extended meanings. And when it doesn't, the expression just seems like an ad hoc metaphor. The sex (sub)sense is perfectly transparent in context, but that is not determinative of inclusion. That no OneLook dictionary yet has it gives us a chance to show (each other?) how au courant we are. DCDuring (talk) 02:43, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

EN-US: notch = woman?

Sense 4 of notch states that a US slang meaning is "A woman", and gives a single citation. Prima facie the citation provided does at least seem consistent with that definition; however, on closer inspection of the lyrics some doubt arises. The lyrics apparently go [4][5]
[...]
These ladies from the west got game
Who got the best, VA, DC, Georgia, New York, Texas, Louisiana, or Florida
The Middwest got some super notches
You eva seen Cali's finest, man, who could top us
A Cali girl you neva seen nutten like her
Walk into her room smile and make you ride her
[...]
You get that dyme peice treatment every where you go
The Cali flavor all the real playas know
California girls..
Can't forget about em'..
Super top notches..
You know about those
[...]

So, looking at the second instance, another interpretation could be imagined from the phrase top notch. Suppose I say, "Cheryl is a top sort" — the meaning can be obtained by treating that as a case of ellipsis, as in "Cheryl is a top sort of person/woman". In the plural I could also say, "Cheryl & Barbara are top sorts". But this doesn't mean sort = person/woman, does it? Then a super notch could, perhaps, be a mangled way of saying a top-notch woman.

digression: Well, I could be wrong, because sort not only has a sense given to mean "A person [...]." (sense 4), but also "A good-looking woman." (sense 6). With the current lack of any supporting citation, I'm not yet convinced of the merits of the latter.

Is there more support for this sense of notch to be found? And, if so, should it be narrower than just "A woman"? —DIV (1.145.114.112 14:02, 15 June 2024 (UTC))

A quick search online didn't return any relevant hits on "dated a notch" or "met a notch" or "married a notch". —DIV (1.145.114.112 14:06, 15 June 2024 (UTC))

Kinda assumed this might've started as an unflattering descriptive term for vulva (cf. gash, slit, axe wound) that became a slang term for a female sex partner through synecdoche (cf. pussy). But no, looks like it's just a bit of Wonderfoolery, spun out of whole cloth from a single lyric. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 22:50, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

This is obviously what Fay Freak assumed there, given that in certain languages there isn’t even a different word for the body part and a member of the respective sex. It might also mean an act of sexual intercourse, in either case there was a sense missing hereby quoted.

The term top notch is not related, it is actually a noun we are missing (OED noun quotes “at the top notch” starting 1808, adjectives 1869, with a similar expression “to the notch” from 1790). But OED has lots of explicit quotes for “female genitals” starting in 1659, there as notchweed, before actually notch in 1660.

Which does not tell us from which sense Too $hort figuratively, situationally, applied the word to refer to ‘women’: ‘vulva’ → ‘sex opportunities’, or ‘notch (on one’s bedpost)’ as a means of counting → ‘counted lay‘. But outside the phrase notch count we have not proven notch to mean “a lay” though, perfectly plausible and expected however. Fay Freak (talk) 23:17, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

If so, should we just nix that sense under notch? —DIV (1.145.80.164 06:47, 17 June 2024 (UTC))

Names of famous people

Thread moved to Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2024/June#Names_of_people

Formating shinner pronunciations

Slightly awkward question - I've added a pronunciation at shinner, but there are rhotic and non-rhotic variants. Normally, the UK pronunciation would be just non-rhotic /ˈʃɪnə/, but given that this is a term primarily used in Northern Ireland, should the UK pronunciation prioritise /ˈʃɪnəɹ/? Is there a specific way to format Northern Ireland pronunciations? Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:00, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Presumably the "Northern Irish" pronunciation should be on its own line indented under the "UK" line, if the two differ (e.g. in respect of rhoticness). - -sche (discuss) 22:34, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

We usually provide RP and GA pronunciations as a standard. An additional Northern Irish accent can be added under the RP pronunciation using {{IPA|en|[transcription]|a=NI}}. — Sgconlaw (talk) 11:55, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

metemptosis

There's another word for this, and proemptosis. I can't find it. The suppression/addition of a day into the calendar Denazz (talk) 10:23, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Intercalation? An epagomenal day? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:40, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

ask

• To request (information, or an answer to a question).

  I asked her age.

  I asked her (for) her age.

  I didn't know the answer so I asked around.

• To interrogate or enquire of (a person).

  I'm going to ask this lady for directions.

Very long-standing distinction at our entry, but I can't quite see why these are separate senses, based on the usage examples. What is the essential difference between asking someone for their age and asking someone for directions? Are there examples to better illustrate the difference, if there is one? It could be that the first sense could be broken up depending on number and nature of arguments, but that's a different question. Mihia (talk) Mihia (talk) 20:08, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Actually, sorry for this running commentary, but now I'm thinking that perhaps this is the origin of the distinction. Perhaps once we had "request (information)" and "enquire of (a person)" as distinct senses, and then the "I asked her (for) her age" was added to the former thus muddling the distinction. Mihia (talk) 20:38, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

@Mihia: yes, the object of the transitive verb is different in the two senses. — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:40, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

words for seasonal streams / water bodies

There's bourne (winterbourne, nailbourne) and arroyo, wash and wadi; as non-stream examples there's vlei (intermittent wetland) and lavant (intermittent spring). What other intermittent water-body words are out there? - -sche (discuss) 22:46, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

• playa, prairie lake, chott. Technically salt pan and its variants, although the emphasis there is not on the body of water but what is left when the water is absent (we have sabkha as a synoynm of chott, although I think that refers to the salt pan too). Could count floodplain. Would you also want tidally-intermittent water? foreshore, tide pool and the like? For human-made bodies of water, there's spillway - I imagine drydock and caisson are too far removed from what you're looking for. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:27, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

@-sche: also coulee, donga, draw, nullah and oued. The last one may be just French. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:44, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Lots of small streams are seasonally dry. Some of the words for small streams are more typically applied to seasonal or ephemeral streams: eg, lick, rill, gully. Also, w:vernal pool. DCDuring (talk) 14:04, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Marecock

Marecock. Proper noun. A surname. Example: "Bob Marecock" in this news that was originally broadcast in 1973-03-22 —- https://www.radioechoes.com/?page=series&genre=OTR-Variety&series=American%20Forces%20Radio%20Vietnam —- sounded like "Bob Mar-cock" or "Bob More-cock" when he said it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE0agyTnQc

marecock. noun. "(fandom slang)" or "(fandom)" penis of an imagined futanari pony character of the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (Or more a more general definition.) This word is like a decade old, but I guess it's still a "neologism." I don't have some "reliable source" for this.

P.S.: replug backwards is gulper. —-2601:281:D87E:D6E0:5160:1A4E:4319:1DD3 16:57, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Fandom slang often makes it into academic literature after a decade. This is how I was able to attest clopfic. That said, if you can round up some Reddit posts with this term, feel free to create an entry for it. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 06:20, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't think of whether or not Reddit "counted." You say it does, so now I know. Oldest instance of "marecock" from searching DesuArchive: "Fri 17 Aug 2012." Older than a decade, "4404 results found" in /mlp/ = 4404 posts with that word. --2601:281:D87E:D6E0:31A5:BC5A:2B4A:63BF 20:07, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

es: œdema

The entry for œdema already has English and Portuguese listed. However, there was a single instance of usage in Spanish at Citations:œdema. I have added two more citations in Spanish. Assistance is needed on a few remaining points:

• adding Spanish to the œdema entry itself (which I think is now fully justified, but I don't really speak Spanish, so am not best suited);
• please check/complete my transcription, especially for the source from 1576 (where there is a bit of text I couldn't discern);
• please suggest if there's a better page reference for the source from 1576 than "page 51 OVERLEAF" (sorry, it's the best I could come up with at this moment — maybe there's some clever jargon, like verso? or maybe it's the "facing page" of page 52?) and correspondingly a tweak to the URL; and
• translations for all three citations (can wait).

—DIV (1.145.104.187 06:16, 14 June 2024 (UTC))

"baby X" coinages

I added the sense "one who is new to an identity or community" to baby some time ago, based on the existence of baby dyke ("newly-out lesbian"), baby witch ("new occult practitioner"), etc. Now I see we have a number entries in that vein, including baby gay, baby trans, baby queer, and baby vamp. Are these SOP? Set phrases? Curious how these should be handled. Baby bat at least seems idiomatic. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 03:47, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Good question... it looks like each of those terms was entered by a different person, who might only have been aware of the one (thus nontransparent) term and not the general trend, but considering how productive "baby" is (in addition to the redlinks you mention, I can find "baby metalhead", "baby luthier", "baby Lutheran",...), it seems better to view at least most of these as SOP. Was one of them, maybe baby gay, the originator, keepable per JIFFY? And some, like baby trans, claim to have unspaced variants that would COALMINE them in iff actually attested. But most, like baby queer, are probably best redirected to the relevant sense of baby (and listed as usexes / cites there), or deleted. Baby bat, I agree with you, seems idiomatic (we don't currently define bat as a goth). - -sche (discuss) 04:14, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't see how these can be called coinages, rather than just ordinary applications of baby to various nouns, perhaps with a modest extension of the meaning of baby. Early attributive uses of baby to occupations or social roles are abundant. It seems a trivial extension to apply it to identity groups. DCDuring (talk) 15:21, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd say that baby vamp (both senses) and baby witch are transparent. But I'm leaning toward caution with the LBGT-specific terms. One: there's a narrowness of meaning that isn't present with the other coinages. "Baby" is functioning as an indicator of recent coming out or self-realisation rather than temporal age. I.e. "baby trans" means a newly-out trans person rather than a trans child. Two: The adjective-as-noun trend is consistent and somewhat non-standard. Using gay, trans, and queer as nouns is often considered a faux pas. That leads me to conclude these are tongue-in-cheek set phrases created and used specifically within the LGBT community. It kinda strikes me as a self-deprecating way to signal "I'm new here" by mimicking the phraseology of well-meaning but out-of-touch non-LGBT people. (Think: that older relative who isn't homophobic but will never unlearn "the gays.") Three: Consistency of word choice. It's usually baby dyke, not baby lesbian, baby lez, or any other form. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 21:54, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

The 'narrowness' is just the definition of baby, isn't it? It seems to apply to all of the baby X terms that use this sense of baby. (I might view baby vamp "a young-age person, who is a vamp" as using an at least somewhat different sense of baby.) The "baby luthier" is likewise someone who just started luth-i-ing, the 80-year-old "baby Lutheran" apparently (AFAICT) just started Luther-ing, etc. I spy no shortage of instances of google:"baby lesbian", but even if some collocations are more common than others, (a) to me, there seem to be too many baby X collocations (the process of adding baby to things seems to be too unrestrictedly productive) to view them all as idiomatically ... doing the same thing, adding the same sense of baby to X to obtain the same sum / meaning baby [new] X; and (b) whatever influences the choice of second element in baby X constructions and lets it be trans, gay, etc, also seems to influence it in other Y X phrases: e.g. in the same way people say baby trans they similarly ?colloquially/jocularly? say they feel like (or think some other trans person is) "a bad trans" (1, 2, 3, search for "a bad trans and" in the 1st and 3rd examples), "a good trans" (4), "a bad gay" or "a good gay" (5, 6), etc. ("Disaster X" / "X disaster" phrases seem to operate the same way, e.g. a "disaster trans", "bisexual disaster", etc, which led me to suggest in January that disaster X and X disaster were similarly too productive to view every phrase as idiomatic, vs viewing them as something to handle at disaster, and at bi#Noun, trans#Noun, etc.) - -sche (discuss) 23:25, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

We should probably have disaster bisexual/disaster bi. That one strikes me as a set phrase distinct from similar uses of disaster. Maybe it's not a case of JIFFY, but it calls to mind other SOP-at-first-glance archetypes like mad scientist, secret admirer, etc. These terms all carry cultural connotations that can't be discerned strictly from the component words. "Mad scientists" aren't usually just crazy scientists – they're trying to save the world or destroy it. "Secret admirers" don't just admire someone in secret – they make a point of declaring their secret admiration. Similarly, "disaster bis" aren't just bisexual disasters. They're "disasters" in ways that are characterised as uniquely common among bi people (sitting in chairs wrong, making awkward hand gestures, etc.). There's also the fact that disaster bisexual didn't emerge from use of disaster in general conversation but from a jokey D&D-style alignment meme.

In general, I think SOP is a good tool for assessing inclusion-worthiness, but sometimes it can flatten context that isn't readily apparent. We have plenty of entries for medical and technical terms that will scan as SOP to those unfamiliar with such jargon. Ideally, we should aim to document LGBT slang with the same eye to nuance. Baby gay etc. strike me as more similar to disaster bi than baby vamp or baby witch. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 06:06, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

killing a judge

Is there a -(i)cide word for this the way there's fratricide, deicide, femicide, etc? Closest I can find is juridicide, but that's destruction of the rule of law, rather than murder of an individual judge. judicide gets (AFAICT) one hit and I can't tell whether it means "killing a judge" or killing the law/justice the way juridicide and justicide seem to. - -sche (discuss) 05:39, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Are there are any statistics on how many times it actually happened? Surely it did not happen often enough for them to exist. It would be termed but in fiction. I think in a paradoxical contrast to police deaths there is no confirmed case in the whole history of the Federal Republic of Germany, barring of course some conspiracy theories.

It might be the highest in Italy with her mafia problems, and apparently a term exists not in Italian even. Fay Freak (talk) 08:41, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

In principle it should be *judicicide. Admittedly that would be ripe for haplo(lo)gy, resulting in your judicide. Nicodene (talk) 09:03, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I have added one newspaper quote each to Citations:judicide and Citations:judicicide. Einstein2 (talk) 14:42, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I've added one book quote each. So now each one is one cite shy of CFI... - -sche (discuss) 15:29, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Here is a 19th-century use of “culpable Judici-cide” in a weekly paper, The Railway Chronicle, written as that, with a hyphen. Does it count? (The “judge” whose presumed demise is presumed to involve foul play is not a natural person but “The Board constituted by the Minute of the Lords of the Committee of Part Council for Trade for the Transaction of Railway Business”).  --Lambiam 07:16, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

In the past, I would have opined that if we can't find three instances of the same spelling in the vast English corpus it's too rare to include, but over the past several years people have seemed more inclined to accept combining variant spellings to meet ATTEST, and I don't care to object, when we've got two in the same spelling. - -sche (discuss) 23:33, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

ain't

We list five possible meanings, all labeled as 'dialectal or informal':

1. am not
2. are not, aren't; is not, isn't; am not
3. have not, haven't; has not, hasn't (as auxiliaries)
4. don't, doesn't
5. didn't

I don't think this does justice to the reality:

• For one thing, am not is listed twice.
• For another I don't think ain't is dialectal in general, as pretty much everyone uses it to some extent or another in sufficiently informal or colloquial speech.
• Furthermore, not all of the above expansions are on equal footing. In particular, #4 and especially #5 are not anything I recognize and I would probably misparse something like "’Cause if I ain't love you as much as I do, we wouldn't be together right now" as "don't" instead if "didn't". The quote for #5 from Jay-Z and Kanye suggests this is part of AAVE, but not all quotes seem like AAVE quotes.
• So maybe it's best to label #4 and #5 as dialectal and the others as colloquial?

Benwing2 (talk) 04:22, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

@Benwing2 We probably want to label it "originally dialectal" or something like that, as it derives from han't (which very much is still dialectal, though you'll still hear it all the time in Yorkshire). Theknightwho (talk) 04:27, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

@Theknightwho I think that maybe belongs in a usage note but not as a label attached to the definitions themselves. Benwing2 (talk) 04:28, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Its main origin was as the perfectly correct contraction of "am not", but it started to be substituted for just about every pronoun + "n't" contraction imaginable. After it merged with the reflex of "han't", the prescriptive authorities seem to have panicked and they banned it even from where it was formerly correct. Proscriptions don't have much effect on dialects, so a contrast emerged between heavily proscribed nonstandard usage in mainstream speech and more normal usage in dialects, leading to the fiction that it was just dialectal. All of which is a bit too complicated to explain with labels...Chuck Entz (talk) 06:47, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz OK sure, but there's absolutely nothing "dialectal" about e.g. Twisted Sister shouting "No, we ain't gonna take it!". From examples like this it's clear it's not really proscribed in colloquial speech, just in more formal (and maybe standard conversational) speech. Hence my assertion that we should change it to "colloquial" instead of "dialectal or informal". Maybe "proscribed or colloquial" would be better, but let's not perpetuate the "dialectal" fiction. Benwing2 (talk) 06:54, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

I think the point of calling it dialectal is that it's colloquial in more or less all dialects, but can also be used less colloquially in some. As I understand it, ain't could be used in court by a lawyer or in a legislative debate by a politician in the US South (although likely not in writing), but not in England. Second-person plural pronouns like y'all, yous and ye are in a similar situation - almost every form of English has a colloquial one, but in some dialects (US South, AAVE, Irish, to a lesser extent Geordie, Scouse...) these are also valid to some extent in more formal settings as a standard feature of the dialect. Smurrayinchester (talk) 07:09, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

@Smurrayinchester Maaaaaaaaaaaaybe but I still think saying dialectal way overstates the "dialectal" nature of it. I'm also a little unconvinced that a US Southern legislator would ever say "ain't"; legislative debate tends to be conducted on the formal level and formal Southern English is much like formal English everywhere in the US. Possibly in that situation a might could or similar would slip in, but I doubt you'd find ain't since it's so heavily proscribed at the formal level. Benwing2 (talk) 07:14, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

I do feel like the word would be said sometimes in formal settings, either as a subtle announcement that you're proud to be a member of an ain't-using class, or out of it being a common word, and it just "slipping out".

(The U.S. Court of Appeals Eleventh Circuit takes place in the deep South, and they have oral arguments. If anyone has searchable copies of them, I'd love to see if the judges use the word.) CitationsFreak (talk) 07:41, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

I broadly agree with Benwing here and would label at least "am not" as just "informal"/"colloquial" (dropping "dialectal"), maybe "proscribed" + usage notes (or just usage notes without "proscribed"); we don't label words "dialectal" just because they're also used in dialects in addition to being used 'outside' "dialectal" speech (e.g. "the" is used in lots of dialects, and yet we don't label it as "also dialectal"). If Smurray is right that the point of calling it dialectal is that it's colloquial in more or less all dialects, then "dialectal" adds nothing beyond what "colloquial"/"informal" is already saying; and I have to agree with Benwing that it seems mistaken to think it could occur in formal speech in dialects today; the only circumstance under which I can imagine a Southern legislator using it is if that legislator were . . . using informal language, e.g. protesting something as "this ain't right, it's hogwash" (or speaking at a friend's wedding using similar informal language), using informal language to convey being folksy / down to earth and so forth. Formal language like a law would not say "it ain't allowed to murder folk", even in South Cackalacky. - -sche (discuss) 15:26, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

• Can I dispel the idea that "pretty much everyone uses it to some extent". I NEVER say "ain't" (except intentionally for special effect, or perhaps in certain fixed expressions such as "if it ain't broke don't fix it", but even in those cases I would be aware that I was intentionally saying "ain't"). There are plenty of other people here in England who, like me, would NEVER use it in normal language. Mihia (talk) 15:08, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

  In Canada, it's almost exclusively used for special effect. Pretty well nobody says "ain't" as a regular contraction here. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:24, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

  I suspect this is more of a class thing, I will normally only say "ain't" in a very colloquial register (more of less "for effect") but I suspect working class Canadians will use it more commonly (again only in colloquial speech but not necessarily for effect), as with working class Americans and British people. Song lyrics commonly use "ain't". None of this is dialectal. Benwing2 (talk) 19:20, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

  I would agree with your first sentence also as far as modern usage in England is concerned. Usually it is a class thing, though I couldn't definitely say that there is no regional dialect where it is considered differently. Mihia (talk) 20:42, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

  @Benwing2 The American style of saying it is pretty much exclusively used for effect in the UK; it's not that I never say it, but it's definitely not part of my standard vocab, and that goes for most speakers in the UK. The dialectal forms like han't are different, but then, they're spelled differently too. Theknightwho (talk) 20:18, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

  @Theknightwho FWIW, Wikipedia disagrees with you:

  Ain't is found across regions and classes of the English-speaking world and is among the most pervasive nonstandard terms in English. It is one of two negation features (the other being the double negative) that are known to appear in all nonstandard English dialects. Ain't is used throughout the United Kingdom, with its geographical distribution increasing over time. It is also found throughout most of North America, including in Appalachia, the South, New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the Upper Midwest of the United States and Canada, particularly in rural communities and the Western Provinces. In its geographical ubiquity, ain't is to be contrasted with other folk usages such as y'all, strongly associated with the Southern United States.

  In England, ain't is generally considered non-standard, as it is used by speakers of a lower socio-economic class or by educated people in an informal manner. In the nineteenth century, ain't was often used by writers to denote regional dialects such as Cockney English. A notable exponent of the term is Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion; "I ain't done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman". Ain't is a non-standard feature commonly found in mainstream Australian English and in New Zealand, ain't is a feature of Māori-influenced English. In American English, usage of ain't corresponds to a middle level of education, although its use is widely believed to show a lack of education or social standing.

  The usage of ain't in the southern United States is distinctive, however, in the continued usage of the word by well-educated, cultivated speakers. Ain't was described in 1972 as in common use by educated Southerners, and in the South used as a marker to separate cultured speakers from those who lacked confidence in their social standing and thus avoided its use entirely.

  Benwing2 (talk) 20:46, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

  @Benwing2 Fair point - I completely forgot about Cockney. Theknightwho (talk) 20:48, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

  Agreed: it is also rarely used in Australia. Regarding the quoted WP article, I would emphasise that being able to find some speakers in several (or even all) English-speaking countries does not prove that "pretty much everyone uses it to some extent" [emphasis added]. —DIV (1.144.107.158 01:32, 1 July 2024 (UTC))

  "Everyone" may be a slight exaggeration, but I seriously think the people in this thread who think that "ain't" is rarely used in their country or region are incorrectly generalizing from the fact that it's rarely used in their social circle. Wiktionary (and Wikipedia) editors are disproportionately well-educated and upper-middle-class, but that's not the majority. Benwing2 (talk) 01:41, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

See you later, cocreator

Rhymes:English/eɪtə(ɹ) § Four syllables lists:

• cocreator (one pronunciation)
• cocurator (one pronunciation)

What might the other pronunciations be?  --Lambiam 06:54, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

It's presumably a matter of pronunciations with non-penultimate primary stress, which do not rhyme according to the strict definition. Curator is often pronounced with antepenultimate stress in American English: MW, AHD, Collins. I wasn't familiar with co-creator ever being pronounced with antepenultimate stress but surprisingly, MW gives the pronunciation as "(ˌ)kō-krē-ˈāt -ˈkrē-ˌāt".--Urszag (talk) 13:45, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Old English smelting

Does Old English smelting, Middle English smulting really mean “amber”? Or isn’t this much more likely just another translation error from Latin electrum? Cheers  _hugarheimur 08:53, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Looks like @Leasnam added that when adding the "Old English" section in this edit in November 2020. @Leasnam, can you shed any light on this? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:08, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Scottish-Gaelic creamh: 6. beer

This article seems to suggest the 6^th definition of creamh is beer. I cannot find this on Am Faclair Beag. Please join me in the appropriate discussion forums (such as the article’s Talk Page, or on WT:RFVN if you have evidence to the contrary! –Konanen (talk) 12:52, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Status update: per WT:RFVN#creamh, the contested sense has now been removed. –Konanen (talk) 12:41, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

long (2)

• (finance) An entity with a long position in an asset.
• (finance) An investor having a long position in a security.

Can anyone see what the difference is supposed to be? Or perhaps I should say why the second is not entirely included in the first ... Mihia (talk) 15:03, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

I can't. Good catch. DCDuring (talk) 17:13, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Semitic source of αγαπαω

Our entry ἀγαπάω says that it may come from a Semitic source, and besides אהב it mentions "אגב". I think this is a mistake and it should say "עגב", but I can't check the reference. Can someone help? Pleas Ping me. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 10:12, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

@Eric Kvaalen: I’ve fixed it. Also, you can. Fay Freak (talk) 13:29, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

absentee

Adjective sense, e.g. "absentee father", "absentee landlord".

Anyone agree/disagree that this is a true adjective, as opposed to attributive noun? Personally I think it is a bit dubious, and I think I would make it a noun; however, some other dictionaries do call it an adjective. Mihia (talk) 17:53, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

My initial reaction was that it seems like an attributive noun, but upon looking into it I have to admit I find a lot of uses of google books:"more absentee than" and google books:"a very absentee", e.g. Citations:absentee. - -sche (discuss) 19:45, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

OK, fair enough. I must admit I did forget to search for these kinds of cases. Mihia (talk) 20:37, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

northern US vowel breaking

Is there a term / accent-label for this? I'm familiar with Southern US vowel breaking, but I also see a northern editor adding things like two-syllable heel /ˈhi.əl/, real /ˈɹi.jəl/ periodically (under the GenAm label or even as pandialectal), and I'm wondering if any more specific label is more appropriate. - -sche (discuss) 19:37, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

I suspect this is an impressionistic attempt to render the fact that there's a slight (usually considered nonsyllabic) schwa that everyone pronounces before dark l. It's vaguely possible some people distinguish real from reel (the former with two syllables) but I doubt there's any substance to the given heel pronunciation. Benwing2 (talk) 19:24, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

extra meanings of دھوپ in Urdu

Hi all,

دھوپ (dhoop) in Urdu, as many of you know, means sunlight or refers to the rays themselves. I was discussing with my sister, who's also learning Urdu for the family, about vocabulary in Urdu. When I brought up the topic of the translation of the word 'sun', things got a bit odd. She said that according to our grandmother (a native Urdu speaker who grew up in Pakistan), دھوپ could be used to refer to the sun itself. This got me wondering if, by extension, دھوپ could possibly mean sun in Urdu, and if the same could apply in Hindi (as its sister language).

Of course, I'd probably have to review this with my sister and grandmother just to be sure that's what was said, and if I'm mistaken, I'll delete this entry. Anyway, sorry if this question comes off as too basic or cretinous for the Tea Room. Sumxr (talk) 02:32, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

@Sumxr Hi hope you're well! First of all, the Tea Room is exactly for these types of conversations, so feel free to start discussions like these!

As for the definition of دُھوپ (dhūp), from my experience as an Urdu speaker, it usually means 'Sunshine', but I can see how it could also refer to the 'Sun' itself, by extension, and some dictionaries have given the an additional definition of 'the Sun' for دھوپ, I've been meaning to clean that page up, so I'll add it on (as well as some of the other meanings of that word), but feel free to contribute yourself as well! نعم البدل (talk) 06:07, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Alright, thank you so much. I didn't want to add that definition to the entry myself just in case it was incorrect. Sumxr (talk) 11:18, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

gratin dauphinois

The French definition of this term is the term itself. While technically not a circular definition, since it links to the English definition and not itself, it is nevertheless unintuitive.

Perhaps, since the term is of French origin, the detailed informational content ("A dish based on potatoes and crème fraîche, from the Dauphiné region") might be moved to the French language block and the English block changed to "a French dish", with a q.v. link to the French. 173.71.89.33 09:15, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

A piece of china from France? An attractive French person? A product of CAHORS?

I personally wouldn't object to a French definition that repeated the English. But either laziness or policy seems to lead contributors to the result we have. DCDuring (talk) 16:36, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

Personally I'm not keen on an English definition referring to a foreign-language definition for the full meaning. Do we ever do that? Mihia (talk) 20:34, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

Not that I know of, but there are probably other examples besides this. And, I don't think we should use non-English words in definitions of words in any language. I suppose that en.wikt is guilty of cultural appropriation itself and of facilitating the massive cultural appropriation perpetrated by English speakers everywhere. Oh, wait, is it the other way around? DCDuring (talk) 14:37, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't think calling something what it is constitutes as cultural appropriation. (Also, is it really non-English when the word exists in English?) CitationsFreak (talk) 08:41, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

deep

• Thick.

  1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter V, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

  Here, in the transept and choir, where the service was being held, one was conscious every moment of an increasing brightness; colours glowing vividly beneath the circular chandeliers, and the rows of small lights on the choristers' desks flashed and sparkled in front of the boys' faces, deep linen collars, and red neckbands.

What do people understand "deep" to mean in this quotation? Does it really mean "thick"? Mihia (talk) 19:30, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

To me a ‘deep collar’ is one that extends further down towards the torso than a typical collar. This seems consistent with that appears on Google Images. Nicodene (talk) 05:14, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

For choristers, I'm speculating that it may be referring to something like the picture at https://markaspen.com/2017/03/12/angel-cakes-or-cake-eating-angels-choral-evensong/. Presumably what the writer calls the "collar" is the frilly part, and the "neckband" is the part that wraps around the neck, black in this picture? If so, what property of the collar would "deep" describe? Top-to-bottom extent? Outer-to-inner extent? Whatever the case, to me "thick linen collar" would almost certainly refer to the thickness of the material. Unless "deep" also refers to the thickness of the material, which seems pretty unlikely, I would say that the quotation does not usefully support the definition "thick", unless someone can demonstrate otherwise. Mihia (talk) 08:49, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Klass is missing a German entry

There is no German entry for Klass, even though it is referenced in the English entry. —Coroboy (talk) 01:50, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, because we cannot have a red link to the same page, so we have a dead anchor. Should this confuse people? Fay Freak (talk) 05:15, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

 Done. Voltaigne (talk) 14:56, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Separate the etymologies of the noun form and verb form

I came across smell where the noun and the verb has a small difference in etymology. Should it be separated (ie. Etymology 1 for the noun and Etymology 2 for the verb) or left be? Duchuyfootball (talk) 04:11, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

@Duchuyfootball: if the noun and verb derive, for example, from different Middle English words, I would use separate etymology sections for them. — Sgconlaw (talk) 05:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. Duchuyfootball (talk) 06:02, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

What do you do if there is the cognates and comparison section also? Duchuyfootball (talk) 06:02, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

@Duchuyfootball: some editors don't like cognates and just remove them. I tend to leave them in if they are already in the etymology section. If possible I would separate the cognates which are nouns from those which are verbs, and put them into the appropriate etymology sections using the following markup:

{{rel-top|cognates}}
* {{cog|nl|XYZ}}
* {{cog|de|XYZ}}
* {{cog|fy|XYZ}}
{{rel-bottom}}

I'm not sure what you mean by "comparison section". Can you give an example? — Sgconlaw (talk) 17:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

It's the last sentence of smell's etymology (Compare smoulder, smother.) Duchuyfootball (talk) 05:36, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

I strongly believe that etymologies should not be split for "closely related" parts of speech of the same word. I think it is confusing for readers. It makes related words look unrelated. Etymology splits should be reserved for "truly different" words. Don't ask me to precisely define the terms in quotes! On the face of it, noun "smell" and verb "smell" seem to me too close to be in different ety sections. Of course, the separate development can be explained in the one section. Mihia (talk) 21:36, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Readers perusing the ToC will encounter a high-level split based on etymology, and many would assume that the separate sections are thus for (practically) unrelated words — such as, apparently, at smell#Norwegian_Nynorsk.

Alternatively, if Wiktionary were entirely reorganised, you could have splits based on ...um, topic. Thus, smell would have a ToC hierarchy of

language (English; ...; Norwegian Nynorsk) > topic (odour; ...  ; noise, impact) > Etymology > PoS.

The introduction of a "topic" level into the hierarchy would clarify to readers that the ...um, general idea of noun smell and verb smell is the same, despite (potentially) having separate etymology sections.

But given the existing ToC hierarchy, English smell should stay as a single etymology, IMHO.

—DIV (1.144.107.158 01:53, 1 July 2024 (UTC))

I don’t think adding a “topic” heading is workable. Many terms have multiple senses, so it would be very difficult to decide what the relevant topics should be. — Sgconlaw (talk) 05:03, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm trying to make an etymology tree for "smell" but don't know what to do since the Middle English ancestors of the two are different. Duchuyfootball (talk) 02:01, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

air

1. (uncountable) The substance constituting Earth's atmosphere, extended also to atmospheres on other planets.

[...]

3. (physics) A gaseous mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and various trace gases.

Is there really a "physics" subsense that is distinct from "substance constituting Earth's atmosphere"? Mihia (talk) 21:26, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

There is a w:U.S. Standard Atmosphere, an w:International Standard Atmosphere, and others, which are assumed to consist of standard mixes of gasses (ie, no dust particles and "dry" (no water at all?)). This would be important for all kinds of engineering. They do seem a bit like spherical cows. DCDuring (talk) 22:41, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

It seems to me that that definition should go at standard atmosphere rather than air. Mihia (talk) 20:50, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

clothes

Bebe clothes

Hi! What do we call these clothes? I'd call them sleevies and cross-strappies, but apparently not. Denazz (talk) 21:41, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

commons:File:XXXPerience 13 anos (4136059136).jpg is in category:halternecks at Commons. I don't know how a halterneck differs from a haltertop. Crossed-strap sounds like a good attributive noun for it. The gloves just look like long ones, apparently cut from the same cloth. They are not arm-warmers. DCDuring (talk) 22:07, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

haltertop/halter top is used in the US about as much as halterneck. They seem synonymous. The critical element is the bare back that they allow, but etymologically the connection is with halter. DCDuring (talk) 22:26, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree, it looks like a halter-neck or halter-top dress (however you want to hyphenate or space that, e.g. halterneck, halter top). This, where the straps don't cross, is referred to in the caption as a halter-neck dress, and a pink instance of the crossed-strap variety is referred to as a cross-halter here and a halter top gown here. A google image search turns up various examples of such garments being specified more specifically as "cross-strap halter neck"/"cross strap halter top" or "criss-cross halter-neck". The gloves are evening gloves. - -sche (discuss) 23:06, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I added the image to the pages. I found Criss Cross Halter Top and cross over halterneck top too. Denazz (talk) 14:05, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Fisadi

Fisadi is an adjective and it's derived from the Arabic root ف-س-د and words like فاسد. I'd edit the page myself but I dont know how I don't really do this. Can someone tell me how or do it for me please? Ziadkijani (talk) 01:58, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Romania

At Romania we have an audio file of someone saying Romania with a LOT vowel for the first syllable but the IPA there says it should be a GOAT vowel. Also, most people in practice say the word in one of the ways listed for the variant Rumania/Roumania, in other words with a LOOSE vowel for the first syllable, despite the change in spelling over time. A significant number of people say it with a schwa (COMMA vowel), which we don’t list (though it’s the version heard in the audio for Rumania), or a high schwa, verging on the PUT vowel version we list at Rumania but I can’t find anyone else saying it with a LOT vowel after doing a YouGlish search. At the very least, surely we should list the LOOSE vowel variant as an alternative pronunciation in the Romania entry? Overlordnat1 (talk) 14:58, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

To me, the audio does sound as if it could be GOAT vowel. Myself, I say "ROOmania". I'm surprised that isn't listed since it seems pretty common, as you say. Mihia (talk) 20:48, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

long

3. Having great duration.

His speech was long and dull.

The pyramids of Egypt have been around for a long time.

I took a long look at the house, knowing it was for the last time.

4. Seeming to last a lot of time, due to being boring or tedious or tiring.

• [1877], Anna Sewell, “A Strike for Liberty”, in Black Beauty: […], London: Jarrold and Sons, […], →OCLC, part II, page 109:

  What I suffered with that rein for four long months in my lady’s carriage, it would be hard to describe, but I am quite sure that, had it lasted much longer, either my health or my temper would have given way.

• 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter II, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:

  I had occasion […] to make a somewhat long business trip to Chicago, and on my return […] I found Farrar awaiting me in the railway station. He smiled his wonted fraction by way of greeting, […] , and finally leading me to his buggy, turned and drove out of town. I was completely mystified at such an unusual proceeding.

Is there a reason to think that the 1897 quotation is not simply sense #3? In fact, are there any instances of #4, as distinct from #3, where "long" modifies something other than a fixed time measure, such as "day", "hour", "month" etc.? MW has definition "lasting too long : TEDIOUS", example "a long explanation", but again, this example seems like ordinary sense #3. There is nothing in sense #3 to say that something cannot be boring, tedious or tiring in addition to, even because of, literally lasting a long time. For #4 to be distinct, we need "long" to clearly contain the idea of seeming longer than it actually was, it seems to me. However, I did also wonder whether "literally long, also implying tedious" merited a subsense of #3. For example "It was a long speech". Or is this just a general feature of English whereby adjectives can have contextual positive/negative connotations? Mihia (talk) 20:42, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

When a sports team loses a close, important away game, sportscasters often refer to the team being about to have a "long ride home". To me this suggests that we should have a reworded def. 4. "Boring, tedious, tiring" are only some reasons that something might make time seem to pass slowly. I don't think MW has it quite right either.

Oxford Learners': "seeming to last or take more time than it really does because, for example, you are very busy or not happy"

Collins COBUILD: "If you describe a period of time or work as long, you mean it lasts for more hours or days than is usual, or seems to last for more time than it actually does."

MW 1913: "Slow in passing; causing weariness by length or duration; lingering; as, long hours of watching."

I am reminded of W.C. Fields: 'Philadelphia, wonderful town, spent a week there one night'. DCDuring (talk) 22:18, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

"long ride home" seems like a good example, as long as we're sure that "long" refers to time seeming long and not distance seeming long. Mihia (talk) 23:54, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

The idea is that it is longer than it would have been 'normally' or if they had won. The time is somewhat fixed by the assumption that the trip would be the same point-to-point trip. DCDuring (talk) 01:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

I understand that "long ride home" means that it seems longer than normal/expected for the same trip. However, what I am wondering is whether this means longer in time, or longer in distance (or both). To me it seems somewhat ambiguous. Mihia (talk) 08:05, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

I've always understood it to be referring to the experience of the trip, using a given mode of transport. In the sportscasters' use, the trip home is shared by a whole team that has just suffered a loss, which probably worsens ("lengthens in perceived time") the trip. If you aren't relying on muscle power for propulsion, the experience is about time, not distance. DCDuring (talk) 16:18, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I guess it's reasonable at least that it should refer to time, or include time, so I'll add that example. Mihia (talk) 17:31, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Template similar to English Wikipedia's talk quote inline?

Is there a template here similar to Wikipedia's Template:Talk quote inline, commonly abbreviated tq? If not, what do people suggest that I use to quote other users or external sources on talk or other discuss pages? Brusquedandelion (talk) 15:54, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Template:talk quote inline / T:tq? - -sche (discuss) 19:22, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

@Brusquedandelion {{tq}} is what you want. It looks like this. Theknightwho (talk) 21:56, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

joke

I don't really understand this sense:

1. (figuratively) The root cause or main issue, especially an unexpected one

Chuck Entz (talk) 04:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

The definition must be intended to cover cases where joke is used to express the speaker's attitude toward "the root cause or issue". But that kind of usage should be covered by other definitions of joke. Joke would not be limited to "the root cause or issue" but to any jokey, non-surface aspect of a situation. I can't imagine that one could find citations that unambiguously support this particular def. DCDuring (talk) 15:09, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree. I expect that a representative ux for what the definition-writer intended would be something like, After a post-accident investigation, the joke turned out to be that the designer of the product was unqualified for the job. Which would be nearly equivalent to, After a post-accident investigation, the punch line turned out to be that the designer of the product was unqualified for the job. As I try to encapsulate in a single sentence the reason why a general dictionary needs to exclude such a sense, I am finding it hard to express or summarize, but it boils down to the theme that the sense is slightly too devilish for a general dictionary. If a general dictionary were to include such senses then the barn door would be wide open to countless others, such as "life (noun): a joke played by the gods on man." Quercus solaris (talk) 19:35, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Isn't Occam's razor enough of a rationale for excluding duplicative and marginal special cases? DCDuring (talk) 03:04, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

No doubt. I think I was examining a different facet or angle of the phenomenon — the idea that there are countless possible metaphors and that they don't all qualify as figurative senses that can be entered in a dictionary. Quercus solaris (talk) 03:49, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree, but I'm not sure what procedure works to limit spurious definitions. Metaphor accounts for much polysemy (See head, set].) RfVs would work, but, because attestation for uncommon senses of common words can be very difficult, some legitimate definitions would likely be removed. I suppose that we don't really have to worry about users failing to understand most novel metaphors because the meaning is almost always obvious in context. The kind of spurious definition under discussion does perhaps serve to illustrate how misconstruction leads to new definitions, but we are not obliged to accelerate the process. DCDuring (talk) 14:51, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Well put — I agree completely. At the risk of invoking a cliché, it does remind me of the old quote about pornography: analytically defining the cutoff line where it begins is difficult, but (1) "I know it when I see it" and (2) there is an important/necessary practical value in holding the line. In this instance (regarding joke), I Support removing the sense/def. Quercus solaris (talk) 15:48, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

how to present English (accusative?) objects

back out and back have To draw from behind the back [with accusative ‘a knife etc.’], using {{+obj|en|acc|means=a [[knife]] etc.}}. Now, I could just change "accusative" to "objective" (I think English is usually analysed as having one object case, rather than separable accusative and dative cases), but I can't find any English verbs that present their objects this way: I think the usual format is to just use parentheses, To [[draw]] (a [[knife]], etc) from [[behind]] the [[back]]., which seems clearer to me. So, I could just change these two entries to that format (which is what I think would be best), but before I do that, I want to check whether anyone thinks that in fact we ought to be using {{+obj}} for English verbs. - -sche (discuss) 19:43, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Have you seen Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2024/June#new_version_of_Template:+obj? Vininn126 (talk) 20:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's indirectly how I found this. I tend to think it should only be used for languages that have proper case systems, or at least, that English gets by better with parentheses. I suppose I'll copy this comment over to there. - -sche (discuss) 00:28, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

I could see use in English definition lines for {{+obj}}, possibly for the the infinitive verb phrases/clauses that follow some English verbs in some definitions, also prepositions, but {{lb|en}} could accomplish what is necessary. The case display is simply irrelevant and distracting for the most part in English. DCDuring (talk) 02:59, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Category tree: misreadings

I got an idea for a new category tree: Misreadings. Category:Misreadings in Vietnamese could have từ vựng. Jidanni (talk) 10:17, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Misreadings, accidental borrowings of wrongly typed signs or even only wrongly perceived signs, is what Category:Ghost words by language is for. Fay Freak (talk) 17:37, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

July 2024

dunnarf

This had no headword template, so I added one, but I'm not 100% sure this is an adverb, since it's built on a verb phrase. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:05, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

At first glance it seems to function like an adverb, but it seems it can't replace really in phrases such as, "I can really see your point", which would more likely become, "I dunnarf see your point".

Can you call it a "contraction", like innit? —DIV 1.144.107.158 02:09, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

lowercase proper nouns in English, especially loans

strawberry generation is categorized as a proper noun, even though it's lowercase. It's perhaps better phrased as the strawberry generation. Would this be better if we keep it as a proper noun? Also, since it's a calque of Chinese 草莓族 (cǎoméizú), should that also be a proper noun, or are the rules different in Chinese due to the lack of a definite article? Appendix:English proper nouns mentions that proper nouns can be lowercase but gives no examples nor details on how they're defined. Sorry this isnt better written. Im just looking for advice since this is one word but there could be hundreds. —Soap— 10:09, 1 July 2024 (UTC)