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
  correspondent
  notch
  address
  carhouse
  RGSS
  series
  multivarious
  amen
  yaourt
  -stan
  s.l.a.n.
  silver
  червь
  speedometer
  maᵗⁱᵉ
  mandate
  چھہ
  half
  based
  α΄
  orignal
  dies Mercurii
  manso
  Schnellbomber
  basisdemocraat
  ၐြဳ
  ကာလယဲ
  pasar por las horcas caudinas
  monosemous
  monosemic
  hazelly
  Dağ Türkleri
  Aster
  smeť
  pajeet
  sis
  over skyerne er himlen altid blå
  ⲗⲁⲃⲟⲧⲉ
  hnnggg
  rumped
  Indon
  belly dance
  on purpose
  nasal cavity
  human being
  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
  for it
  ne bis in idem
  cornus
  code point
  one over the eight
  green privilege
  Chinese landing
  one's house in order
  native bread
  rhina
  after
  one's heart bleeds
  gender-neutral
  chicken-or-egg question
  otocrane
  

May 2023

cringe

Also posted on the talk page but apparently no one reads those.

In extended use, as internet slang, "cringe" can now just mean "bad" or "annoying" or "lame," without any nuance of "embarrassing" or similar. I'm sure other netizens can verify this.

Just one example of said usage which prompted me to post this: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1345u4y/salve_should_work_on_baba/jie12ld/ "Red x is a cringe mechanic"

Another example from a video I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqaLPivNc6Q "This method is very cringe..."

Another example from a different community to show that this is not at all Runescape slang specifically, emphasis mine: https://old.reddit.com/r/SSBM/comments/zr6dmj/goomwave_firmware_explained/j12cf90/ "Damn... I'm just gonna get a regular oem. This shit is so cringe. I just want a functioning controller man, this shit is so frustrating. I can't afford this" 97.94.140.148 07:06, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

omg, the cringe has already been bleached. – Jberkel 22:44, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

coleus#Latin

The vocative can't possibly be colee – no such forms exist in Latin. No doubt if it's used it will be coleus, just as Deus is the vocative of Deus. But the declension table is generated automatically so it's impossible to correct it. Kanjuzi (talk) 14:18, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Use |voc_sg=coleus to override the default vocative.  --Lambiam 20:27, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Eleanor Dickey wrote a paper about the vocative of words ending in -eus: "O dee ree PIE - The vocative problems of Latin words ending in -eus". According to Dickey, vocative forms in -ee do exist in Latin, but only in the "late empire": "Another factor suggesting that such vocatives were deliberately avoided in early, classical, and Silver Latin is the fact that in the late empire the avoidance apparently ceased. Suddenly, in the fourth century, vocatives in -ee begin to appear: vitree ‘glassy’, ignee ‘fiery’, ferree ‘made of iron’, putee ‘well’ and mallee ‘hammer’ are all attested in the that century, lignee ‘wooden’ appears in the fifth, and saxee ‘stony’ and tartaree ‘Tartarean’ show up still later. The late empire is also the period at which the vocative dee is attested, as well as the time of the one occurrence of a vocative mee which I have been able to find (Vulgate, III Rg. 21. 20. 2). This shift suggests that there was a change in the attitude toward vocatives in -ee" (pages 11-12).

Dickey's conclusion is as follows: "It thus appears that not only deus and meus, but all second-declension words ending in -eus were avoided in the masculine singular vocative. The avoidance began at a very early period and continued until the late empire, at which point vocatives in -ee became possible. By that time Latin speakers had already solved the most pressing difficulties caused by the avoidance, by using mi as the vocative of meus and deus as the vocative of deus. Since these forms were well established by the fourth century, they remained entrenched thereafter and were only very occasionally replaced by mee and dee, which had by that time become theoretically acceptable. Other words in -eus, for which no widespread alternatives to a genuine vocative had been created, simply developed masculine vocatives in -ee in the late empire" (page 12).--Urszag (talk) 01:56, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Interesting!
An IP has (re)added dee as the first/main vocative of deus and Deus, if you wanna add more of that information to deus#Usage_notes. - -sche (discuss) 02:04, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

latus rectum - maths

I'd like to assk someone to check the wording for latus rectum. It's one of these Webster 1913 buggers. I assume the maths hasn't changed since then, butt the wording may have, let's see if we can get to the bottom of it. Wonderfool April 2023 (talk) 20:17, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia defines the term as “the chord parallel to the directrix and passing through a focus” (of a conic section other than a circle). This is both snappier and (IMO) easier to grasp than the current text. One quibble with this definition (as well as the present one) is that there are in general two foci, and hence two latera recta, so “the chord” should be “a chord”’.  --Lambiam 21:25, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

launching

Usage note states: Launch suggests an event at a point in time. Launching suggests a process over time. That seems kinda dumb, whaddyall think? Wonderfool April 2023 (talk) 20:25, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

I do not agree with the usage note. Launching is a word you use instead of launch if you want to get your money's worth in a pay-by-the-word telegram message. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 20:28, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

The usage note seems 100% true and unexceptionable to me. Nevertheless, as this is something true of every English present participle, virtually as a matter of grammar, it does not belong in a usage note for this or any other present participle form. What I don't get is why we have a noun PoS section, for this garden-variety -ing-form. DCDuring (talk) 22:54, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Plurality, D. Wonderfool April 2023 (talk) 22:58, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

polyacron

Another geometry term. Defined as A solid having many summits or angular points; a polyhedron. Are these actually the same thing? Wonderfool April 2023 (talk) 09:41, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I think a polyhedron is more or less convex while a polyacron is spiked. See ᾰ̓́κρος (ákros). Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:11, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

More specifically, I think a polyhedron is equal to its convex hull. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:16, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Not necessarily.^[1]  --Lambiam 21:58, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

There may be variation in usage. The only time I would have cared we decided we could safely replace any shape with its convex hull and we never needed to clarify. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:14, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

An n-hedron is a polyhedron with n faces. An n-acron is a polyhedron with n vertices. The set of all polyhedra is the same as the set of all polyacra. The term polyacron was coined by Cayley, and almost all uses are by Cayley himself or inspired by one of his papers. It seems to have fallen into disuse.  --Lambiam 09:52, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

polycotyledonary and polycotyledonous

Are they the same thing? Wonderfool April 2023 (talk) 09:45, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

растя́жка

Does the military sense of растя́жка (rastjážka) refer to a tripwire alone, an explosive connected to a tripwire, or both? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:09, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I changed the definition to "tripwire; mine or grenade triggered by a tripwire". Vox Sciurorum (talk) 19:44, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

You are right. My mind was kind of blank when you first messaged. Technically the term does not even include the idea of “wire” in the first place, the constitutive for the naming is the being stretched out. Fay Freak (talk) 20:47, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

爭妍

Is the recent IP change to the definition right? - -sche (discuss) 15:01, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I asked a native Mandarin speaker about the word. She said the original meaning is flowers striving to be the most beautiful and it later developed the sense of a similar contest involving humans. Based on that the IP edit appears to be constructive. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 18:02, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

the shoemaker's children go barefoot

An IP suggested some changes to the equivalents in Portuguese (em casa de ferreiro, o espeto é de pau) and Spanish (en casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo), see talk page. They pointed out that in these languages, the English definition: "one often neglects those closest to oneself" doesn't accurately describe how they are used. It's not really about neglecting others, but rather about not using one's skills in one's favor, or having different standards professionally and privately, resulting in a conflict of expectations. I'm not familiar how the proverb is used in English, maybe our definition is too narrow/literal? Jberkel 20:36, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

lay

gooseberry lay, kinchin lay and snaffling lay are all archaic terms for thieving. I was disappointed to find we had no underlying term at lay. Does it exist? Wonderfool April 2023 (talk) 23:08, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Not sure how to represent this etymology on ear

So "ear" has several etymologies, first the anatomical ear and a few derived versions from that, then ear of wheat/corn-style ear, and one that I've never seen that means to plow. An "ear" on a baguette is the ridge formed on the top of the loaf after baking it and it seems like that is either etymology #2 or it's a calque from the French épi. I'm not sure how to represent this exactly on our entry for "ear". Can someone give me some guidance here on how to best represent this? Should it be a separate etymology entirely, as it comes from the French instead of the direct etymology #2? Thanks in advance. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:09, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

A single word calque is a {{semantic loan}} in the etymology section of the appropriate pre-existing sense. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 09:55, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Great, thanks. I'm hesitant to add the template or structured data to it for fear of not doing so correctly, but at least this confirms that it's situated in the correct place in the entry. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:09, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

mirror

Is there a reason for the odd formatting of the translations at this entry or is it a mistake? They go from a toc before jumping across and to the right and up the page and going from c to f. The you have to look diagonally across the screen to your left to see translations from g to o, only to then have to do the Hokey Cokey again and go from oo z!

Surely it would be better in a standard format where the translations run down the page from a to f, or thereabouts, and start again further up the page and to the right, going from g to z? Overlordnat1 (talk) 08:23, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

It was a typo in the code. We had colon-star where a star-colon should have been. Should be fixed now. —Soap— 14:31, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Yep. It’s one long list now. Overlordnat1 (talk) 15:00, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

vaughanite and vaughnite

Is vaughnite or vaughanite the mispelling?? 122.59.24.241 05:57, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

The source we link to from vaughnite spells it vaughanite, so I would say that the latter is the correct spelling and the former is the mistake. It's possible that at an earlier date the website contained the misspelled form, and that they've updated it. That would explain why the link we give on the vaughnite page doesn't go directly to an entry. That said, the site seems not to have been updated much recently, if at all, so perhaps the mistake was ours. —Soap— 08:38, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

It seems most likely we made a typo when creating the page, and then perpetuated it by switching out the original correctly spelled external link for a template that points nowhere. Should be pretty much an open-and-shut case now. The only other thing I'd add is that some sites seem to capitalize all mineral names, but I'm guessing we've made a choice at some point in the past not to follow that tradition. —Soap— 08:42, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Capitalizing mineral names seems analogous to capitalizing the names of animal and plant species, which is common in some contexts. We don't do that either, probably because it's completely predictable and generally unnecessary (though the French Wiktionary has a usage note on every species-name entry noting that it can also be capitalized). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:48, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

• I found use of vaughnite earlier (1926 - ~1960) than the discovery of vaughanite (1989). It was sometimes used in quotes. I did not see any mineralogical description of it. This makes me think it is not a well-defined mineral, but some kind of fairly common mix of materials. DCDuring (talk) 12:03, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Slutsky

The audio files give two different pronunciations, one with IPA^(key): /ʌ/, the other with /uː/ (marked as UK and US respectively). The IPA section indicates only the second one (with /uː/, closer to the original Russian). However, I have also heard /ʌ/ in the discipline, with both pronunciations having a roughly even distribution, regardless of region, and there seems to be no consensus. Should we also add the form with /ʌ/ to the IPA section? OosakaNoOusama (talk) 21:53, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

@OosakaNoOusama: It's always encouraged, AFAIK, to pronounce foreign names closer to the original. It makes even more sense here to use /uː/, unless you want to offend Slutsky by associatating with the word slut :). You can't stop people mispronouncing names, though, as in this audio:

Audio (UK)

(file)

. This includes media, officials, etc. Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:55, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

So I guess it would be better to remove that audio from the entry, and request a new one for UK? OosakaNoOusama (talk) 02:59, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Remember that we're a descriptive dictionary, so if a pronunciation is common, but discouraged, it would be best to keep it, but to label it (proscribed). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:44, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I've added (proscribed) to the current audio and added a {{rfap}} for the "correct" UK pronunciation. I'm not so certain on adding the IPA for the proscribed pronunciation, though. OosakaNoOusama (talk) 07:39, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

• That audio was from Wonderfool, who is a notoriously crap pronouncer, translator, programmer and lexicographer. All of their contributions should be reviewed, and probably reverted. Tbilsi Fin (talk) 18:05, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

In almost every audioclip there is at Youglish[2], including Eugene Slutsky's great niece (who has the same surname herself), the speaker says Slutsky so that the first syllable is a homophone of the word slut. All of the 54 clips are of American speakers, the vast majority of whom say the first syllable like slut, but I doubt that British and Australian speakers would say it very differently. Some people might perhaps say it with a PUT vowel in England, in much the same way that other foreign words like Buddha get pronounced here (as opposed to America), or just due to them being said in a Northern English accent, but 'Slootsky' (with a LOOSE vowel) sounds like a very unlikely and unintuitive pronunciation. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 23:19, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

no-longer-obsolete

According to Webster 1913, the term manuscriptal was obsolete. It seems to have come back into use, so is no longer obsolete. Out of pure curiosity, is there a term (or WT category???) for such words? exobsolete would be a good one that I'll coin now if nobody else comes up with something better Tbilsi Fin (talk) 18:07, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Our categories shouldn't use coined/invented words: better to take a longer phrase like Category:Words that are no longer obsolete. (If I had to make one up, I'd go with revenant!) Equinox ◑ 10:14, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

I think the term for when a word is brought back into use is revived: Tolkien google books:"revived the word" orc, you can have google books:"a revived word", you can even have entire revived languages, like Hebrew and Cornish and various Native American languages. It would be mildly interesting to track these ... but we'd have to watch out for cases where the earlier dictionary asserting obsoleteness is just wrong: Google Books Ngram Viewer shows manuscriptal was basically always about as common as it is now (with occasional small spikes). - -sche (discuss) 14:52, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

垈

(and Category:Ghost kanji more generally)

We say this is a ghost kanji ("kanji from unknown sources"), but we have both a Chinese section saying it's used in placenames and a Japanese section defining it as "swamp, wetlands; (Often found in some place name in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan.)" So is the categorization of it as a ghost kanji wrong? Wikipedia says there are 12 ghost kanji, but our category has 31 entries. Last year it had 29, so it seems like someone is (erroneously?) adding kanji to it. @Eirikr. - -sche (discuss) 22:01, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

(Jumping in about this particular kanji 垈) Confirmed in Yamanashi: Google maps. The current entry is very dubious: I used my 難読地名辞典 which has exactly one entry. Imaginatorium (talk) 17:11, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

@Eirikr Can we trust that Japanese definition? The diff where it was added suggests that user had no idea what they were doing, because it can't have a definition and be a ghost kanji: they just copied it from jisho.org. It also looks like it was added to this category back in 2007 by someone else, who also didn't have a clue what they were doing. I think that whole category needs to be looked at, as it's the kind of thing that attracts (un)helpful enthusiasts who just add this stuff blindly. Theknightwho (talk) 22:20, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Apparently it was listed as a ghost kanji on Japanese Wikipedia at the time it was added to the category. The list used to be longer, but was reduced to 12 as investigation uncovered sources for some of them. I would also point out that this is in the CJK Unified Ideographs block, so presumably character(s) in one or more other languages having the same glyph were given the same Unicode codepoint as the Japanese one. That doesn't mean the Japanese character is related to anything in any other language aside from looking the same.

This entry does, however, need to be looked at, since it was created from the sometimes-problematic Unihan database by a bot, and only edited by one account that claims to be fluent in Japanese (the one that added "Often found in some place name in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan."). Chuck Entz (talk) 01:01, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz I have to admit that I’m much more inclined to trust someone who’s demonstrated some familiarity with Japanese, but of course it would be good to actually verify it. We know where to start looking, at least. Theknightwho (talk) 05:09, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

@-sche, @Theknightwho --

Jisho.org hasn't been terribly reliable over the years, so I am not a fan of using them as any kind of authoritative source.

The anon who added back in 2007 geolocates (now, anyway) to Boston, FWIW, and their brief contrib history suggests a focus on purported "ghost kanji" with no real research into what they are, beyond just looking at the JA WP article, presumably w:ja:幽霊文字.

That article currently lists 12 characters as "ghost kanji" with no known basis at all for their existence. The 垈 character is listed as one of the 71 or 72 characters formerly considered apocryphal, but later found to appear in historical references -- with the caveat that the references themselves might have miscopied the characters. Depending on how one defines "ghost kanji", these 71 or 72 characters might be removed from consideration, as they do have real-world use (albeit rare).

This gets somewhat complicated after the 1997 JIS encoding revision, since these characters are now made available by IME software -- leading to cases where they might be chosen erroneously, and thus real-world use dating from after the roll-out of the revised encoding is probably not solid evidence of the character's veracity.

FWIW, KANJIDIC provided as part of Jim Breen's dictionary data in WWWJDIC seems to get things a bit sideways -- their entry for the real character 𡚴 states incorrectly that this isn't used in Japanese, while their entry for the ghost character 妛 (note the extra horizontal line between the top 山 and the bottom 女 elements) gives the information that should be listed at 𡚴 instead.

My sense is that the w:ja:幽霊文字 topmost list of 12 is probably the extent of what we should consider as "ghost characters" -- characters with no clear provenance, and no usage.

And I agree with @Chuck's comment (which just appeared for me a moment ago) -- we should go through that category. My own bandwidth is quite limited of late, but I'll do what I can. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 01:43, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Understandable. Let me ping @Lugria as a recently-active native Japanese speaker who may be able to help with determining which of these characters are used in Japanese (especially prior to their encoding in the JIS and IME software, whereas 汢 says it owes some uses to its having been encoded!). - -sche (discuss) 14:14, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

The 31 entries in Category:Ghost kanji right now are

1. 幽霊文字 (the term "ghost kanji"),
2. 垈 (not among the 12 remaining JIS ghost kanji, and apparently used in placenames in both China and Japan, suggesting it's a real character we should stop categorizing as a ghost) : removed from the category
3. 垉 (not among the 12, has a Chinese section with pronunciation and a Japanese section with definition, but qualified with "(ghost character)": seems like that qualifier should be dropped) : removed from the category
4. 墸 (is one of the 12 JIS ghost kanji, but nonetheless has a Japanese definition and a Chinese section!),
5. 壥 (is one of the 12 JIS ghost kanji, but nonetheless has a Japanese definition and a Chinese section!),
6. 妛 (is one of the 12 JIS ghost kanji, but nonetheless has a Japanese definition and a Chinese section!),
7. 岾 (not among the 12, has Japanese and Korean definitions, apparently real) : removed from the category
8. 彁 (is one of the 12, and the first one which is laid out like I'd expect a ghost kanji entry to be: there's no Chinese or Korean section, and the Japanese section covers it as a ghost kanji, without giving it a definition),
9. 恷 (not among the 12, has a Chinese section and a Japanese definition),
10. 挧 (is one of the 12, but has a Chinese section with pronunciation and definition saying it's used in surnames, and has a Japanese definition, which all seems weird if it's a ghost character...!),
11. 暃 (is one of the 12, but has a Translingual definition(!) and a Chinese section with pronunciation, which seems questionable if it's really nonexistent...!),
12. 椦 (not among the 12, but is defined as a misspelling in Japanese; also has a Chinese and Korean section),
    • Note: 椢 is listed as one of the 12 JIS ghost kanji by Wikipedia but is not in the category, and our entry gives no indication of ghost-ness...!
13. 槞 is one of the 12, and is defined in the Japanese section as a ghost kanji, but then also has a Korean section: again, how can this be both a real character and a ghost character?);
14. 橸 (not among the 12, but only has a Translingual section with a definition saying it's used in Japanese placenames, and a Japanese section with rfdef)

    Google finds this character used in a Chinese placename, 橸子湾 = Jingziwan, Wuxi County, Chongqing, but we don't have a Chinese section; it also finds "橸縄" in some Japanese texts but these occurrences may be scannos

15. 汢 (not among the 12, but an interesting case, defined as two different glyphs, one an error, and one only used in placenames post-JIS),
16. 熕 (we categorize and define it as a ghost, but it's not among the JIS 12 and it has a whole Chinese section with pronunciation and definitions...) : removed from the category
17. 碵 (not among the 12, but has only a Japanese [no Chinese] section and asserts itself to be a corruption of another kanji),
18. 穃 (not among the 12, but has only a Japanese section and defines itself only as a ghost character...),
19. 粐 (not among the 12, but has only a Japanese section and defines itself only as an error for another character),
20. 粫 (not among the 12, has a Japanese section with definition and pronunciation),
21. 粭 (not among the 12, has only a Japanese section, pronunciation but no definition),
22. 糘 (not among the 12, has a Japanese definition and pronunciation),
23. 膤 (not among the 12, has a Japanese definition and pronunciation),
24. 蟐 (is one of the JIS 12, mostly laid out as I would expect, but does assert one real definition/attestation which would make it non-ghost, no...?),
25. 袮 (is one of the JIS 12, but has a Chinese section and a Japanese section with definition),
26. 軅 (laid out as I would expect a ghost character entry to be, both no sections besides Transligual/Japanese and the Japanese section just defining it as a ghost...but it's not among the JIS 12!),
27. 閠 (is one of the JIS 12, but has a Chinese section complete with pronunciation, and a Korean section),
28. 靹 (not among the 12; nonstandardly(?) has a "Mandarin" rather than a "Chinese" section, with pronunciation; has a Japanese section with pronunciation and definition),
29. 駲 (is the last of the JIS 12, but has a Chinese section with pronunciation);
30. 鵈 (not among the 12; has two Chinese [ety] sections and a Japanese section, all with pronunciations),
31. 𱁬 (not among the 12, said to be attested in names, said to be Japanese-created and indeed has no Chinese section).

I'm confused by the cases where something is said to be a ghost kanji, but has a Chinese section, sometimes with a pronunciation and definition: is it not actually used in Chinese, is the Chinese section a bot import from somewhere unreliable? In that case, we should remove the Chinese section, no? But if the character really is used in Chinese, then Unicode is correct to have it as a real character... and in that case, it'd be weird to call a real character a "ghost character" just because it was initially included at the behest of a Japanese standards body rather than the Chinese standards body it would've been included by if the Japanese hadn't already got it included, no? So I'd also like to loop in a Chinese speaker or two to help with assessing which of these characters that our entries define as Chinese are really Chinese, and determining what to do about any characters which are real characters in Chinese but "ghost characters" from the Japanese perspective: @Justinrleung, Mar vin kaiser. - -sche (discuss) 14:07, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

@-sche The concept comes from characters used in the JIS encoding scheme, so I imagine the logic is that these are ghost characters because they have never been used in Japanese, and it’s merely a coincidence that another language has actually used them. That being said, a character like Chinese 挧 (Yǔ, an archaic surname) very plausibly has been used in Japanese. The source for the Chinese entry is presumably this entry on zi.tools, which is generally trusted among Chinese editors, but it has been known to be wrong: without a copy of 《漢字海》 it’s difficult to check. The other two sources linked don’t give a definition, though notably the Japanese one gives three dictionary indices. I have no idea what any of the primary sources actually say, but it may be that the concept of ghost kanji is simply becoming outdated as the original sources are slowly being tracked down. Theknightwho (talk) 15:43, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

About "ghost kanji" which are attested in Chinese: I have a beef with Wikipedia, which apparently embodies a claim that the English word "kanji" has a quite different meaning from the Japanese word 漢字 (kanji) whereby it only includes "Japanese characters" which are completely different from "Chinese characters", except insofar as many of them are the same. In this worldview, even kanji which are attested in Chinese might be "ghost kanji". But there is obviously never going to be a way to track down which of these appeared in Japanese by accident (photocopies of folded paper, usually) and which had actually once, somewhere been used in Japanese. Of course I think this view is absurd, and we should go by the Japanese meaning of the Japanese word kanji. But there are well-attested ghost kanji which have been tracked down to misreadings. So any of the above list which have a Chinese explanation should be promptly removed from the list. Imaginatorium (talk) 16:56, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

• "So any of the above list which have a Chinese explanation should be promptly removed from the list."

... provided that we can confirm actual use in Chinese, and that any such Chinese explanation was not added by a troll, spoofer, or good-faith-but-clueless editor. 😄

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 04:10, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

coronation

Two translations are missing (under "act or the ceremony of formally investing a sovereign or the sovereign’s consort with a crown and other insignia of royalty"):

Galician: coroación (feminine).
Irish: corónú (masculine). 92.239.103.64 13:38, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

 Done. Thank you. --Thrasymedes (talk) 23:04, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

instafamous

Does this mean "instantly famous" (as defined) or is it an alt form of Instafamous? The citation in the entry is about social media... - -sche (discuss) 15:23, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

As defined. I have encountered this as well a few times. Can’t really get famous without being so in a corner of social media, in countries where everyone has a phone and a data plan. Fay Freak (talk) 15:36, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

I concur. A curious case of capitalisation being semantically important in a term that isn’t a noun or proper noun. Theknightwho (talk) 15:45, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

unlearnt

Does anyone know of any attestations of sense two of the adjective ("of a person: not educated")? The only one I have found is on Urban Dictionary (link). As a native English speaker, I have never encountered this sense of unlearnt; I have heard and read it only as an alternative form of unlearned (/ʌnˈlɜːnd/ or /ʌnˈlɝnd/). The adjective unlearned (/ʌnˈlɜːnɪd/ or /ʌnˈlɝnɪd/) has a different pronunciation, /nɪd/, so it would make sense if it does not conform to the pattern of /ˈbɜː(ɹ)nd/ → /ˈbɜːnt/. What do others think? --Thrasymedes (talk) 22:55, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

@Thrasymedes:  Done Added some. Equinox ◑ 18:53, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Interesting! Thank you. Bob Dylan's pronunciation of unlearned in the song "Masters of War" is /ʌnˈlɝnd/. I wonder how widespread this is. Merriam-Webster goes for /ʌnˈlɝnɪd/ for this sense, and has /ʌnˈlɝnd/ for that which is "not gained by study or training". We have only the /nɪd/ pronunciation for learned (adjective, sense "educated") at the moment, and we do not have learnt as an alternative form of it. --Thrasymedes (talk) 19:31, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

 Done Moved Bob Dylan. Equinox ◑ 19:35, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Translations of Mary and its synonyms

The translations tables in the entries for many of the synonyms of Mary (“mother of Jesus”) were recently removed by @LlywelynII (Our Lady, Saint Mary, Virgin Mary, Theotokos). Besides, all the removed translations were merged to the main entry (Mary). I think this change was not very useful because these near-synonymous terms are slightly different in usage and meaning, and each have corresponding translations in many languages. (For example, as a language learner, I would expect to find Hungarian Szent Mária at Saint Mary, Szűz Mária at Virgin Mary, Miasszonyunk at Our Lady etc. Instead, they are now all listed at Mary without any gloss or qualifier.) I would prefer if the translation tables were re-added, with {{trans-top-also}} linking to the related terms, but I would like to hear more opinions. Einstein2 (talk) 15:27, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

What is incredibly unhelpful is to have separate and poorly/partially maintained lists spread across the project. The previous half-lists were much worse. They weren't well-divided by sense, with some entries having off-topic synonyms and many missing languages or appropriate synonyms. Sure, things could be different if someone made it their mission to clean up and categorize additions to all these on a weekly basis. No, that can't be expected and clearly wasn't happening.

The main entry should have all the translations for its synonyms. Saint Mary, Holy Mary, &c. aren't really a thing in English, so nothing should be there. They should just be pointing straight at Mary, who as mother of Jesus never lacks the sense of holy, saint, &c. You're welcome to add the qualifiers.

There are some senses that should have separate lists. That should be explained in the definition (synonym of Mary but in her special role as ~) and they should be cross referenced in all the translations for the item using the translation-top-also template. There's not any difference between Mary as Mother of God and Mary as Theotokos: they're precise synonyms and the list belongs at the more common sense.

Our Lady and Virgin Mary are debatable, sure. My thought was that their senses are so central to Marian cults that they belonged at the main entry, same as Saint Mary &c. If they get restored, leave them in the main entry and include the cross-references as above. Our Lady and Queen of Heaven shouldn't be separate, though: one should be the main form. The Virgin, Blessed Virgin, and Virgin Mary shouldn't be separate: one should be the main form. &c. — LlywelynII 15:37, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

It is true that the translation tables across the entries were in a rather poor condition. I've added a comment to Mother of God (where I see you had restored the trans table) that will hopefully draw attention to the intended scope of the table. Weekly clean-up can't be expected, but that is true for every part of the project, so I don't think it would be a reason not to preserve the nuances of the different translations.

Regarding a principal entry, Mary seems to be a good choice, however eventually it might be adequate to limit the number of translations in each language to the commonly used ones, with the rest being placed in their corresponding English entries (e.g., Hungarian Istenanya at Mother of God) and in synonym lists of non-English entries.

In the next few days, I will try to look over the removed tables of the other entries and possibly re-add them with only appropriate translations. Einstein2 (talk) 18:44, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, I'll take a look as well. The different titles all have their own translations. They should definitely not be merged. As someone who actually does translation work, removing translation tables just because there's an approximate synonym is not at all helpful. So, if the translation tables are a mess, they should be stripped down or cleaned up, not removed. If two words are not only approximate synonyms but are truly interchangeable, then it is possible to have a single translation table. But even Theotokos and Mother of God could have distinct translations. In Latin, for instance, they are Theotocos and Mater Dei, respectively. There's no way that Theotokos, Virgin Mary, Our Lady, and Mary should be lumped together. They mean different things and have completely different translations. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:15, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

I did some major clean-up, but it was a bit rushed, so I missed stuff in languages I'm not familiar with and probably removed some translations at Mary that weren't at the other entries. With the other entries that I edited (Virgin Mary, Madonna, Our Lady, Holy Mary, Mother of God, and Theotokos), I tried to move terms to the proper entries rather than deleting them outright. The table at Mary was too bloated for it to be worthwhile combing through everything, but it would be a good source of translations (see dif). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:04, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Strongly agree with this approach. It irks me when senses get merged like this, and then we end up with translation tables at one entry where every major language has two or three translations with qualifiers, each specifying that they correspond to the different senses that got merged in the first place. Theknightwho (talk) 22:10, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

And it irks me when we have translations for the same senses spread out and poorly maintained for no good reason, as was the case here. If Mr. Sheedy did a good job separating, annotating, and crossreferencing, it would be one thing but he's telling you directly that he did a slipshod job when another editor had said they would do a more careful and thoughtful one. What's to praise? — LlywelynII 04:03, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

...probably removed some translations at Mary that weren't at the other entries...

Well, that was mistaken and unhelpful, but you already knew that. It was pointed out repeatedly that the previous translation tables were poorly maintained and we shouldn't blank content... and you seem to have just reverted my edits (restoring the previous poor tables) and then blanked content.

@Einstein2 had already said he'd do a better, more careful job. Why didn't you just let 'em? — LlywelynII 03:59, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

@Andrew Sheedy In particular, what do you think the daylight is between Mary Mother of God and Mary Theotokos (bearer in the sense of the act of childbirth btw and not in the sense of carrying)? or between Our Lady Mary and Mary Queen of Heaven? If there's an answer, peachy. Do try to mark them in the entries, though. — LlywelynII 04:07, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

On one hand, merging all these very different terms into one undifferentiated table with no qualifiers was bad (slipshod, to use the merger's word). If the merged translations table qualified/labelled everything (some translations are "Saint Mary", some are "Our Lady", some are "Virgin Mary", etc), I'd be ambivalent about whether a single consolidated table or many separate tables was better. Things like Our Lady = Notre Dame / Unsere [Liebe] Frau vs Mary = Marie / Maria vs Theotokos = Mère de Dieu / Gottesgebärerin do seem lexically distinct from each other despite having the same referent, and because a large number of translations exists for each, I think it's OK to keep the tables separate and crosslinked — compare Istanbul vs Constantinople or Königsberg vs Kaliningrad — although again, I'm not strongly opposed to a single carefully labelled merged table.
OTOH, Llywelyn is right that some of these don't seem very distinct, e.g. Theotokos = Mère de Dieu vs Mother of God = Mère de Dieu, and it does seem like a maintenance nightmare to have so many tables for different expressions that nonetheless have the same referent. Meh. I guess we'll have maintenance problems either way; if we have a merged table, people will recurringly remove translations which they think are of other terms, e.g. "the Virgin" and not "Mary"; if we have separate tables, people will add translations of other Marian designations to them. Prominently cross-linking all the various synonyms would help. - -sche (discuss) 06:05, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

I've tried to do some more clean-up with the translations (rescuing translations from earlier revisions or moving them from one entry to another). I've compared the current revisions of the relevant entries (Blessed Virgin, Christotokos, Holy Mary, Holy Mother of God, Madonna, Mary, Mother of God, Mother of Mercy, Our Lady, Our Lady of Sorrows, Queen of Heaven, Saint Mary, Star of the Sea, Theotokos, Virgin, Virgin Mary) with the ones from before all the recent changes. I might have overlooked some lines, but as far as I can tell, all the translations that were previously stored in the tables are now preserved in one of the entries (hopefully at their closest English equivalent).

As for the placement of translations, I don't think having all of them placed together in a single entry would be a desirable solution, even if they were properly labelled. Mary lists around 30 English synonyms, and I suspect some languages might have even more. If we were to present all of the translations in a single place, the trans table would become overcrowded and unmanageable. I would be less opposed to adding a second table to a “principal” entry (e.g. Mary) which would list the 2-3 most common terms in each language, regardless of their direct English equivalent. Einstein2 (talk) 11:15, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

暹粒

What variety of Hokkien is Siam-lia̍p? Is there a source for this pronunciation? @Weilimmas — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 00:23, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

collaborative client

How d'you do, fellow nerds? Is this entry... legitimate and/or worthwhile? I'm just not convinced it's a particularly idiomatic or standardised phrase. Is it sum-of-parts? Does the definition even work? ("A piece of software that allows a computer to run or link to another application on the Internet" could just define remote procedure call, or all kinds of things; it doesn't imply collaborative work, like a team whiteboard on Zoom.) Equinox ◑ 05:00, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Maybe of historical interest, sounds like a term from the Internet stone age. A quick GB search doesn't turn up anything useful though. Jberkel 07:37, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

We have a computing def. of client, so I'm inclined to believe it SoP. But it is an empirical matter whether it attestably, unambiguously has an idiomatic/standardized meaning in some context (ergo, RfV). DCDuring (talk) 16:32, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Uses of ¬

¬ is used to mark end-of-line hyphenation in Internet Archive OCR. Not sure if this is a standard practice- is it? If so, idk when it would become part of the entry proper. As here diff --Geographyinitiative (talk) 22:54, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this symbol is something that we should record. CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 16:01, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

New section in the "Talk:" page for [the verb to] "coerce"

A new section has been added, here:

Talk:coerce#meaning in the field of computing: room for improvement?

If you are having trouble finding it, (e.g., after it has already been archived and you do not know what to search for, other than the [new] "section name"), then this URL for the DIFF might prove helpful.

Please forgive me if this was not the right place to post this "notice". --Mike Schwartz (talk) 04:49, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Concise English for "cunning person"

I'm looking for a good one-word term for a cunning/crafty person, equivalent to (for example) German Schlawiner or Schlitzohr. Something like sly fox, but ideally one word (and avoiding polysemy like mischief). Jberkel 11:17, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Would schemer, rat or snake do? —-Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:44, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Those are all pejorative. I don't take fox to be inherently derogatory. Fox, by itself, almost always is unambiguous in context, despite its polysemy. DCDuring (talk) 12:12, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

slyboots? Einstein2 (talk) 12:34, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Looks like a good match, thanks! – Jberkel 13:31, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

gender-neutral

I don't really see a distinction between the first two senses (“applicable or available to all genders” vs. “(...) applicable or available to those of any gender and to those of no gender”). The usage examples are not very helpful in terms of telling them apart. (Note that the first def line originally had “either gender (to both males and females)”, but this was changed to “all genders” in 2019.) The third grammar definition could also use some improvement, as the pronoun-related usage examples under the first and second line could apply to it in its current wording. Einstein2 (talk) 11:34, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Looking through the edit history, I see there were originally (2007) two senses: one was the "In languages where [...]" definition which has been unchanged this whole time, and the other was "Phrased so as to be applicable to either gender." I split that one in 2011 because a gender-neutral restroom is not "phrased", but I muddled things by including he or she and gender-neutral restroom under the same sense; especially as rewritten since 2019, senses 1 and 2 are no longer distinct and could be merged, although another option is to rewrite them to express a different split: other dictionaries I looked at distinguish words (a gender-neutral word like person) vs things (a gender-neutral bathroom or nursery). - -sche (discuss) 15:47, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Do you think it's better to merge or use subsenses to express the difference in gender-neutral language vs gender-neutral restrooms? Btw, I'd like examples of sense 3, the "in languages with grammatical gender" sense: looking at the table in [[epicene]], is this sense saying words like ἀλώπηξ are gender-neutral, or words like enfant, or both? - -sche (discuss) 00:33, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the regrouping, I think the current subsense approach does a good job in illustrating the most common uses of the term. Unfortunately, I have no idea which sense of epicene sense 3 is referring to (or whether it is actually distinct from sense 2). Einstein2 (talk) 20:38, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

bioplast

I'm no biologist, but apparently bioplast refers to a since-debunked theory, and this should probably be reflected in the entry Skisckis (talk) 13:20, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Linking in definitions

I'm only an occasional wikt: editor so I ask for advice. I just made an edit to phonics, removing an obviously unhelpful wl on a very ordinary word ("normal") with no clear meaning in the definition, which is obviously not helped by linking to the ordinary definition of "normal". But then I seem to find very normal words everywhere being linked: is this a policy meant to help beginners? For example, the starred words in the following definition are all linked...

(deprogramming) The removal of the *programming* instilled into a person by a *religious*, *political*, *economic*, or *social* group associated with the *belief system*.

Not so bad, but what about...

(phonics) The *study* of how the *sounds* of *words* are represented by *spelling*.

I cannot see how the phonics example could conveivably help: if you need to look up any of those words, you could not possibly read the article, because you would never emerge from the recursive hell of reading the definitions. Is this really wanted? Imaginatorium (talk) 19:27, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

@Imaginatorium It's partially to help learners, and sometimes it can be a useful way to signpost the key words in a definition - particularly if they're being used in a less common way. Theknightwho (talk) 20:52, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

"You would never emerge from the recursive hell of reading the definitions." You could say the same about teaching yourself topics from Wikipedia. Equinox ◑ 20:57, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

@Imaginatorium: The links in definitions are supposed to be for the benefit of those whose English is weak. However, there are editors around who like a lot more links than others, so numerous links are often added to deny such pests the opportunity to claim a share in the copyright of a definition. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:59, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

You would think that we would not need to have wikilinks for words that were part of our basic defining vocabulary. Monolingual learning dictionaries (MLDs) have such defining vocabularies, but we don't. Longmans' MLD has a defining vocabulary of about 2,100 words. In that vocabulary appear most of the words that you indicate as 'normal', but not economic, belief system, programming, and normal. Furthermore, definitions in MLDs are supposed to only use the principal sense of each word in the defining vocabulary. I imagine that there may actually be more than one sense permitted. Many of our definitions (of English terms) and even more of our glosses of non-English terms are just awful because they rely on highly polysemic terms and fail to make it clear which definition of the polysemic is being used in the definiens to define the definiendum.

IMHO we would need to have a lot more clarity and consensus about Wiktionary's goals and how to reach them than we now have to contemplate even adopting our own defining vocabulary and, thus, which terms should or should not be wikilinked in which definitions. DCDuring (talk) 16:45, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Glup Shitto: proper noun?

Should Glup Shitto also be a proper noun? See the quotations at Citations:Glup Shitto. The creator of the entry, WordyAndNerdy, opposed: see Talk:Glup Shitto. J3133 (talk) 12:27, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

We're not all that consistent about archetypal names: James Bond is proper noun as the character and common noun as the archetype. John Doe, Joe Bloggs, Jane Roe, Joe Schmoe, etc. are proper nouns, Mary Sue and Prince Charming are common nouns. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:29, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: It is difficult to find proper-noun uses of Mary Sue. I was only able to find one. Another used it as a name for an author (“Mary Sue is an author who operates on the basic principle of “I want to be liked,” […]”). Others seem to refer to A Trekkie’s Tale Mary Sue (“Not all writers speak about Mary Sue with such compassion, however. Some […] have less patience with the feminine superteen, […] I hope I never do it again because it is the typical Mary Sue broken-hearted Kirk story.”) It does not seem to be usually used as a proper noun. J3133 (talk) 10:44, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes. It seems to be used both ways. The common noun is countable, so somebody can be "a Glup Shitto" (singular) or people can be "Glup Shittos" (plural). But when you just talk about "Glup Shitto" without the determiner, it is a proper noun: it cannot be adequately explained by a common noun entry. Equinox ◑ 14:31, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

numbered meaning "limited"

I was surprised that we don't have a sense either at numbered or number corresponding to the meaning in "His knew his days were numbered." Should that be listed as an adjective at the former entry or a verb at the latter? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 14:34, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

What might be a more serious problem is that we have 2 definitions for number#Verb where MWOnline has 7.:

transitive verb

1. : count, enumerate
2. : to claim as part of a total : include
3. : to restrict to a definite number
4. : to assign a number to
5. : to amount to in number : total

intransitive verb

1. : to reach a total number
2. : to call off numbers in sequence

MW uses a numbered-day example for transitive sense 3. DCDuring (talk) 16:03, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

smoothertalker

This is almost certainly enterable through WT:COALMINE, but is smoothertalker or smooth talker the main lemma? Vininn126 (talk) 14:41, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Eh? I see fewer than 10 Ghits. Equinox ◑ 14:42, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

I realize now it needs to be smoothtalker! Vininn126 (talk) 14:45, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

I also see it's some software or something. Quote hunting might be difficult... I think smooth talker might be more attestable, do we want to include it based on smooth talk? Vininn126 (talk) 15:02, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Screw it I'm going ahead and adding it! Good work team. Vininn126 (talk) 15:36, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

papi chulo

Definition: "a Casanova, a cutie pie, a teddy bear, a macho man". This seems to be at least two different senses. Macho men are not teddy bears, surely? Equinox ◑ 23:52, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

I like the teddy bear metaphor because as I imagine it it means someone you can cuddle up to, who at least stereotypically would tend to be tall and strong. I agree the definition is polysemic in its other parts though. —Soap— 04:41, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

I think that's the central distinction between a macho man and a "papi chulo", a papi chulo is not just dominant and powerful, he's gentle enough to cuddle with. Numbix (talk) 19:11, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

misgender

Hey: The verb 'misgender' clearly applies in the transgender context. Wiktionary has those cites. But are there examples of 'misgender' being used outside the transgender context? For instance, here's something that would fall under the current 'misgender' definition as given by both Wiktionary and Merriam Webster:

2008, Willoughby, Robert, “Northernmost Corner”, in North Korea (Bradt Travel Guides)‎^[3], 2nd edition, →ISBN, →OCLC, →OL, page 192:

Hoeryong is the base for many monuments to Kim Jong Suk, revolutionary anti-Japanese fighter (look him^{[sic – meaning her]} up on www.english.dprkorea.com/special/kim/ photo_list.php?ca_no=706&no=2).

(Kim Jong Suk is assumed to be female.) Is that example there an example of the verb 'to misgender'? I would say yes, if following Wiktionary and Merriam Webster's definitions. But my issue is: are there examples (cites) where using the wrong pronouns outside the transgender context is referred to as 'misgender'? Here's what I'm looking for- a citation that says something like: "In his book, Mr. Willoughby misgendered the First Lady of our nation." I'm sure it's there, but I just want to see some citations for that, otherwise the Wiktionary and Merriam Webster definitions appear to go beyond the actual usage of the term. (See also Talk:misgender). If you find something that might be close to what I'm seeking, feel free to dump it here in raw form and I will sort through it and add it to the page/citations page. Thanks for all help. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 11:07, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

@Geographyinitiative: Does this one fit?

• 2023, Silva Neves, “Sex and gender”, in Sexology: The Basics‎^[4], Routledge, →DOI, →ISBN:

  Have you ever noticed how we are usually very careful not to misgender a baby for fear of offending their parents (especially if the mistake is misgendering a baby boy for a girl)?

J3133 (talk) 11:17, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

@J3133 Yes, this looks great! This is a great example. This is good, but I'm hoping to reach adults and children too-- maybe something totally deprived of connection to transgender/nonbinary discussion! The full paragraph seems to be discussing transgender and nonbinary issues, hence I have modified the definition on the entry to read "especially when discussing issues related to trans persons".

2023, Silva Neves, “Sex and gender”, in Sexology: The Basics‎^[5], Routledge, →DOI, →ISBN:

Taking people's pronouns seriously is important because it makes the difference between accepting or dismissing someone's existence. Have you ever noticed how we are usually very careful not to misgender a baby for fear of offending their parents (especially if the mistake is misgendering a baby boy for a girl)? When someone is pregnant, everybody is anxious to know the sex of the baby. Yet, many people in our society seem not to want to make an effort to use the "they" pronouns with someone who requests it. Isn't it a little strange?

You may say to me: "every use of 'misgender' is related to transgender issues on some remote level." I hear that, but I think that what I want is robust usage to describe a situation where a person is referred to by the wrong pronouns without connection to transgender discussion, such as my above hypothetical: "In his book, Mr. Willoughby misgendered the First Lady of our nation." To me, it's like body positivity: the nexus with fat acceptance is there, but Wiktionary should show usages outside a nexus with fat acceptance via cites if Wiktionary is to confirm the full scope of usage. That would make Wiktionary very valuable: the Outer Manchuria entry is infinitely valuable and shows Wiktionary's ability to be better than other sources because Wiktionary gave me a chance to think about what precisely the sources were talking about. Here too, there is a chance to reach powerful value to the reader, by clearly confirming via cites the larger usage outside transgender discussion. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 11:21, 11 May 2023 (UTC) (Modified)

It looks like the term came into use in the context of transgender and non-binary issues, but here is a use that I think is not related to such issues. The context is that Katherine Mansfield, in a 1919 review of the novel Children of No Man's Land by “G. B. Stern”, wrote, “Mr. Stern flings his net wide; he brings it in teeming, ...”^[6] But the author was Gladys Bronwyn Stern. So now, in 2021, someone quoting from this review writes that Stern is “misgendered by Mansfield”.^[7]  --Lambiam 21:49, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

As of now (almost midnight of 12 May 2023 UTC!) I think the entry looks quite good, and is well cited. I added one citation myself that was purely grammatical (gender of words, not people). Equinox ◑ 21:52, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Okay, well I guess that is good enough or close enough. I had speculated (as a non-expert) that 'misgender' might/could be entirely confined to discussion related to transgender persons, and that it might/could be a bona fide factual mistake if someone thought the word goes beyond those discussions. But it seems that the cites and sources and opinions above show that the term goes beyond discussions related to transgender issues. However, (of course) the term does seem to have a strong connection with those discussions, which is adequately reflected in the definition. I consider my personal request solved. I will make this my last post in this discussion because it is a sensitive, serious issue for people, and I don't want to offend more than I already have. Thanks! --Geographyinitiative (talk) 22:13, 11 May 2023 (UTC) (Modified)

clear verb

Has two ""Translations to be checked" translation tables, one on top and one at the bottom. Flāvidus (talk) 19:40, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

The first one has a note not applicable to those under the second. DCDuring (talk) 01:44, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Rearranged and {{t-check}}s added. DCDuring (talk) 01:52, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Usage Notes for Entry 'Legitimize'

Shouldn't there be a citation for claims in the Usage Notes? I have doubts about whether the UK claim is true. 108.36.229.19 20:44, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think we absolutely mandate it, but in the absence of obvious evidence you could remove such things. I imagine somebody worked this out by looking at search-engine results, etc., which are not always very reliable; or perhaps a corpus which they failed to name! Equinox ◑ 21:50, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

The usage notes look distinctly dodgy to me. Surely legitimize is far more than twice as common as the verb sense of legitimate everywhere, whether in the U.K. or the US? I can only assume that someone confused the adjective sense of legitimate with the verb sense when they came to a different conclusion. I agree that they should be deleted. —-Overlordnat1 (talk) 22:02, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Ciphering support and gasoline

After reading that Muharrem İnce, when still a hopeless candidate for the upcoming Turkish presidential elections, had faced criticism for potentially ciphering support from the main oppositional candidate,^[8] I found several texts talking about ciphering gasoline (with a hose, from one tank to another).^[9][10][11] Can this sense of cipher be labelled a “misspelling” of the verb siphon?  --Lambiam 21:24, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

It seems to go beyond spelling : I doubt the writer thought er was how to spell /ən/; I'd guess they either thought the word was /saɪfɚ/, or typoed it, or autocorrect failed them, so I'd probably use a different template: Perhaps it's a "{{lb|en|NNSE}} {{n-g|Error for}} {{l|en|siphon}}", since the AP reporter seems to be Turkish? Or a {{misconstruction of}}? (But I'm not sure it's a "construction" per se, either, even in the broad way cowbell for bell cow or hoved for hove etc is; it's more just an "error for": should we have a template {{error for}}?) (I also considered whether we should just not cover this at all — we wouldn't define "frog" as "a toad" just because sometimes people can't tell the difference; at best we might put a usage note that people often confuse frogs and toads — but this seems more a case of someone using words wrong [i.e. lexical], than someone using frog to mean "frog" and just being wrong at identifying real-world animals.) - -sche (discuss) 00:24, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Personally I cannot accept a "misspelling" that needs to be pronounced differently (e.g. tpyo). I would accept "misconstruction", as far as I understand it, though I hope we will only include extremely common ones and not become a spellchecker's garbage dump. Equinox ◑ 00:36, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I get email notes from the Garner American usage factory regularly that point out common mistakes of this kind that they find regularly in works published by native speakers, often lawyers. I suppose we could include this kind of thing under "See also", though that further undermines the fantasy that "See also" is about semantic relations not otherwise classified (See WT:Semantic relations#Otherwise related). {{q}} or similar could be used to label the nature of the mistake if we choose to go this route. DCDuring (talk) 02:03, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

This seems more like a malapropism, although it's a rather boring one. It's a completely unrelated word substituted solely because it sounds similar and the speaker can't remember it's real meaning. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:17, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I suppose we should, as Equinox says, hold this to (at least) the same standard as misspellings and expect a malapropism to be common before we include it, in which case, is this one common enough? - -sche (discuss) 06:28, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I find more than a few uses in books.^[12]  --Lambiam 07:53, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

A true malapropism or merely an eggcorn?  --Lambiam 08:04, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

blackamoor (definition 3)

Definition 3 is "(heraldry) A stylized Negro." Now, I could just clean up the dated word "Negro" to something along the lines of "a dark-skinned black person", but ... we already have this sense, it's definition 1; it's only "stylized" in heraldry because everything in heraldry is stylized. So I'm tempted to just merge it into definition 1. Thoughts? - -sche (discuss) 03:12, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps mention under Usage notes that sense 1 is used in heraldic descriptions of charges that symbolically depict black persons’ heads (a blackamoor’s head ; three blackamoors’ heads).  --Lambiam 09:26, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

@-sche, Lambian: If the current definition is correct, then we should keep the idea of 'West African'. By the current definition, it wouldn't include an Australian Aborigine. --RichardW57 (talk) 11:29, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

@RichardW57: I presume you mean ‘North African’. That’s seems like too precise a distinction though, perhaps we should just say ‘black African’ instead? I suppose we could say ‘dark black’ but that may be inaccurate as I’m not sure of how black these heraldic depictions actually are and such a category would include, for instance, Sri Lankans in any case. —-Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:58, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

No, but I do have my doubts about the current description as 'Negro'. From a quick look, possibly contaminated by rather than assisted by the concept of a "Moor's head", some of the renderings seems distinctly Maghribi; others seem definitely West African. However, they might not all be correct, and I suspect such heraldic concepts may not translate well. Onions' Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology traces the word back to the 16th century and glosses it as 'Ethiopian, Negro', which would include Saint Maurice, variously described as a Nubian and from Thebes in Egypt.

I fear some serious heraldic research is required to settle the semantics for sense 3. Wikipedia is inadequate. --RichardW57 (talk) 18:31, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

AFAICT there's no specificity or generality that definition 3 can have that 1 can't or vice versa (because it's one sense which has been a bit variable in scope). - -sche (discuss) 19:04, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

floater, a piece of faeces that floats

"Unsinkable" appears as a translation in "British English" of floater, under the sense "A piece of faeces that floats". Shouldn't this be a synonym instead? Nakakaano (talk) 07:38, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

If you look at unsinkable entry, there is a sense saying "a piece of faeces that floats" (same editor?), but it's clearly wrong because it's listed as an adjective, but the definition can only cover a noun. A very quick GBooks search for "unsinkables" suggests that a noun exists, but it probably isn't about faeces. I'd be inclined to delete this low-quality IP jazz. Equinox ◑ 21:16, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I've made several senses subsenses. This doesn't seem worse that some of the others. DCDuring (talk) 17:51, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

I've just cleaned up the unsinkable entry and tagged and listed the dodgy sense, relabelled correctly as a noun, to RFV. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:55, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Lower Sorbian ⟨ꞩ⟩

At ꞩ, I haven't been able to discovere whether the Lower Sorbian value was the same as Latvian, or if it corresponded to modern ⟨ś⟩. kwami (talk) 02:33, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

about to

This is classified as a phrase. There's a discussion from several eons ago on the talk page, but it doesn't seem to have led to any particular consensus about what to do with it. It seems to me if the "to" part is a required infinitive "to", then why isn't this a definition at about? It doesn't strike me as a phrase at all. Numbix (talk) 23:59, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

First of all, there is a definition at about (the third one in the Preposition section). Either way, though, that has nothing to do with whether this is a phrase. The question is whether it's the sum of its parts. It seems to me like the relevant sense at about has pretty much died out in mainstream US usage, at lease. I would also note that when one is asked whether one was thinking of doing something, one might say "I was about to, but I decided against it". It may be that the phrase has become fossilized into a single lexical unit, though I'm not sure how to test for that. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:36, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

This can be analyzed as about#Adverb + to#Particle + infinitive of a verb: "I was about to go home." If there is no verb apparent after to, then a verb must be inferrable from the context: "Are you going home soon?" "I was just about to." Since learners can't be expected to know this it might help them to have a redirect the right sense of about and to have a label there to explain complement and a usage example to show omission of complement.

Some other dictionaries have an entry at be about to, but that might requires that a learner be aware that some "copulative" verbs can substitute for be, eg, seem, appear, look, sound, smell, etc. That might also be a good place for a hard redirect.

It may be that translations in some languages are more natural for one or the other of the two multi-word expressions than for the adverb. DCDuring (talk) 13:13, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I would be against redirecting it, for the very reason you point out .... about to can end a sentence quite naturally, so it is not just "about" + "to". I'd say it's in the same category as going to, which I assume we would never redirect to go. —Soap— 18:53, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

We don't have entries for every similar ellipsis. Which languages need an entry for a distinct translation for about to? Which for be about to? (Do you see what I did there?) DCDuring (talk) 22:32, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

We can argue over whether there's ellipsis or not, and whether it's serialized or not, but really my point is that I'm against anything that makes it more difficult for a language learner who doesn't already know how to use the verb construction they're looking up. If we redirect to about, we won't have room for a usage note explaining how it

must be followed by to;

can appear at the end of a sentence, unlike the superficially similar out to;

can be preceded by be or a conjugated form thereof, but is not required to ("the cat, about to leap, began to hiss");

maybe other things that I can't think of offhand.

Redirecting to a less helpful target is against my reasoning even if the argument makes sense from a grammatical standpoint. Yes I see your illustration of ellipsis, but I didnt mention ellipsis in my post and whether it exists or not in this construction isnt part of my reasoning. Thanks, —Soap— 12:10, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Among OneLook references only Collins joins us in having an entry. DCDuring (talk) 14:49, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Gender of cornus

An IP editor added an RFV template for Latin cornus with the comment "for the gender. Gaffiot and Lewis have it as fem.; but Georges as masc. ([13], [14])." Confirmation of gender is better suited for the Tea Room. User:Fay Freak added quotations from Pliny using cornīs as the ablative plural in a context where gender did not matter. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:23, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

@Vox Sciurorum: I added it before this IP requested gender confirmation, apparently for the story about the origin of the cherry related by Pliny around the mentions of the cornel, to exclude the etymological relation to its name. In other occurrences, of which there are many in his Natural History, the feminine gender as of every tree in Latin is revealed.

Plin. Nat. hist. 15.LXXVI.206: “ab iis proxima est cornus …” “Next after them comes the cornel”.

Grattius Cynegeticon 128–129: “plurima Threiciis nutritur vallibus Hebri cornus et umbrosae Veneris per litora myrtus”, in the edition of Steven J. Green p. 27 “Very many a cornel tree is nourished in the Thracian valleys of Hebrus, and there are shady myrtle trees along the shores of Venus” Fay Freak (talk) 21:32, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

code point

our definition, since 2008: "(computing) A numerical offset in a character set, etc., as opposed to the character or item it represents."

From a UniCode glossary: "Any value in the Unicode codespace" and "A value, or position, for a character, in any coded character set."

WP has a definition similar to the Unicode glossary's second. Is our definition dated or wrong? DCDuring (talk) 01:24, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the definition is wrong, I've added a few bits to clarify the code point–character/grapheme distinction. The code point = character generalization is not correct for all code points. – Jberkel 09:00, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Why does no other work that defines this include the word "offset" as the defining hypernym? The kind of people who don't have to look up offset are the same kind of people who don't have to look up code point. DCDuring (talk) 12:14, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't agree. The complex terminology around character encodings also confuses the kind of people who know what offsets are. – Jberkel 20:48, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

The new definition only allows for sets of characters. The original one allowed general "items". Equinox ◑ 14:37, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Hm, are you referring to non-printable character entries? They would be control characters. Or what other non-character item would it be? – Jberkel 20:27, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jberkel: Variation selectors perhaps. Wiktionary calls them metacharacters. It claims that metacharacters are also characters, but the definitions of character are doubtful. Does not fall under ”9. One of the basic elements making up a text file or string: a code representing a printing character or a control character.” There is a contradiction here since variation selectors, unlike defined under metacharacter, aren’t ”used to signify something other than its literal form”, having only their single use and not another one, whether or not they be characters. Fay Freak (talk) 20:49, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Does not fall under definition number nine of character whether they be control characters or not, due to they dubious claim about being “basic elements”, which is hardly specific enough, too. They are considered control characters by Wikipedia, but then our definition of control characters is false since it requires that with them “some actions occurs” (or occurred in the past), meaning something more meaningful than the pure electronic effect. It is clear however from Unicode usage that they are characters, while the section about variation selectors does not mention “control”. There may be another problem of circularity: This definition of character requires that one knows what a printing character and a control character are, and if not then those are defined by using “character“ in this meaning. Fay Freak (talk) 21:06, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, at least in Unicode the definition of what constitutes a character seems to very broad: special character, noncharacter, private character etc. In their glossary they call them abstract characters. – Jberkel 21:39, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jberkel: No, I mean that other codes (not text character codes) might use the term "code point". For example a system of semaphore flags, or musical sounds. Equinox ◑ 12:06, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it helps to make this definition unnecessarily generic. The context label is "computing" and "code point" almost always refers to some character encoding scheme, and now specifically to Unicode (which was created to replace all the older encodings). Jberkel 14:29, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

• Should we define altitude as "an offset from sea level" and height as "an offset measuring the vertical extent of an entity"? Offset seems like a poor choice of words for a definiens. Why isn't there a characterization of what the offset is from? The other definitions seem to suggest that code point refers to an absolute position in a sequence. DCDuring (talk) 12:48, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  We're talking about data structures and not geometry here, so numerical offset is appropriate. How about index or position? Value I find to vague. "A number pointing to an item in a character set, etc.…" "The numerical position of an item in a character set, etc." Jberkel 13:12, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  Offset from what? "Numerical address" might be an improvement. I am being cautious because I am far from being a techie, but techies seem to have lost their ability to imagine the needs of ordinary users. DCDuring (talk) 13:49, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  It's the offset from the beginning of the table, counting from zero. U+0000 is the first code point in Unicode, U+0001 the second etc. Jberkel 14:17, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  Right, but how would a relatively ordinary user know that? And, if we are merely counting from zero, why bother using the term offset? DCDuring (talk) 14:29, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  Offset usually implies a zero-based count from some reference point. But you're right, this is from a programmer's perspective. We can change it. Jberkel 14:39, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  @DCDuring @Jberkel Technical language often requires a technical explanation. Sometimes, it’s good to split it into formal and less formal senses: see lease. Theknightwho (talk) 17:23, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  If only there were some way we could have only a click away more elaborate technical information for a dictionary entry without making the entry itself more verbose than users expect and thereby less useful to them. If only […] DCDuring (talk) 17:41, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, maybe it makes sense to have a specific/formal Unicode definition for this, given that Unicode has a different/non-intuitive notion of what a character is. Jberkel 08:26, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I am inclined to agree that defining this in terms of "offset" seems like an odd move (or to be blunter, seems misleading, since a character's "code point" seems to be fundamentally the point it's at, not—or only secondarily—the degree to which that point is "offset" from something else). "Position" could be better. - -sche (discuss) 02:22, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Value of Okanagan letter ə́

(This occurs in both orthographies though only counts as a distinct letter in one.)

If the acute accent marks stress, and /ə/ cannot be stressed, then what does the letter <ə́> stand for?

Thanks, kwami (talk) 04:30, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Is it possible that the acute accent doesnt mark stress? The Wikipedia article never actually says that, but it's hard to find information on the language outside of Wikipedia, so I can't really say what else it might mean. —Soap— 11:30, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

My understanding is that /ə/ can be stressed, it's merely traditional to view it as inherently unstressed in English, but this does not apply to every other language, and even in English some linguists argue it can be stressed (as discussed here and here). - -sche (discuss) 19:40, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

I.e., perhaps Wikipedia's unreferenced footnote is similarly mistaken in suggesting it can never be stressed in any variety of Okanagan. Lois Cornelia Pattison, Douglas Lake Okanagan (1970), says about the vowels schwa and a in that variety of Okanagn (p. 10 of the paper, p. 19 of the pdf): "Two types of schwa occur in Okanagan words. The stressed schwa varies freely with stressed a in short stems. Unstressed schwas are epenthetic and largely predictable; therefore, they are omitted in the phonemic transcription."; "a is basically a low, central vowel with frequent variation to a more front allophone [æ] or lost when unstressed and to a more mid central allophone [ə] when stressed in a short stem. [x̣ást] ~ [x̣ə́st] x̣ast good". It's not 100% clear to me that that would translate into ə́ being a letter of the (phonemic) alphabet for Douglas Lake Okanagan, as opposed to occupying a similar space as ə in English (where it's, you know, not a letter of the normal alphabet, but added to the "alphabet" used by phonological respellings that otherwise use only letters of the alphabet, like Wikipedia respelling cedilla "sih-dih-lə"), but other Salishan languages like Klallam also have stressed schwas, so it's plausible. This 1983 paper about James Teit's 1908 Okanagan wordlists says that epenthetic schwa "never occurs stressed", but then describes its allophones (p. 35) e, î, and notes (p. 34) that only e cannot occur "with ´ which often corresponds to stress or syllable peak" in Teit's data (i.e., schwa's other allophone, î, can occur with ´). Perhaps the language admins listed here could answer this question. - -sche (discuss) 15:44, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

baiser

The disambiguation in the etymology is confused. I know it's a difficult topic. The comparison appears to be meaningful, even. But, what are they really saying, "logically"? 2A00:20:6002:3180:26FE:8A2A:FDB7:DAC4 17:37, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

"Logically" maybe because it matches the literal meaning and has not shifted semantically? Anyway, very clumsy phrasing. "For reasons unknown…had been put into baiser" is also wrong, it's most likely just euphemistic, analogous to "sleep with" in English. Jberkel 18:21, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Right the literal meaning. I'm just not looking at it from a literary point of view. As far as I'm concerned, the literal meaning of "baise moi" is fairly clear and it's certainly not kiss me.

You might mean the etymological meaning, But that's betting the question. 2A00:20:6054:1499:5790:8761:FDF2:AD0B 22:08, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

It just doesn't make sense to me, neither the use of "analogous" nor the use of "logically". We should avoid the use of a judgemental "should" anyway, regardless of any imputed logic. Le Trésor labels the sense of having carnal knowledge “by euphemism”. I think one can make the following comparison:

foutre : baiser  =  to fuck : to make love.

 --Lambiam 11:05, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Seeking feedback on how to include an informal English suffix

I saw this post on Language Log about the suffix "-tucky". As someone from neighboring Indiana, I have heard others use "footucky" on many occasions. A durable citation is from (e.g.) chapter 77. "Indytucky / How Did I Come To Live In This Land" from the book Illiana: The Border Area Between Illinois and Indiana (→ISBN). The term is used in two ways: one is things literally near or associated with Kentucky. The other is that by extension, it is used as a pejorative for anything rural, underdeveloped, associated with rednecks, etc. Since the usage of this suffix is almost always 1.) verbal and not written and 2.) only used as a one-off coinage ("I have to go to a family reunion with my mom's side of the family and it's just reuniontucky" or "I went to the warehouse to investigate why they are so backlogged and if I never go back to warehousetucky again, it's too soon", etc.) I'm not sure how to include it here. I can't find much attestation, so this may just scuttle me adding it entirely, but assuming that I can find attestation, how do I add a suffix that is not used for certain terms, such as -ology is consistently used in words like geology, but is instead used spontaneously in a myriad of coinages? If my question doesn't make sense, please let me know. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:51, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

• You could start with a usage note at Kentucky: "As the second word of a blend, reduced to -tucky, adds a sense of rural or redneck to the first word. See Pennsyltucky." Vox Sciurorum (talk) 19:30, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

• See schm- for a prefix used in informal, spontaneous coinages. It's more common than -tucky. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 19:50, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

• (e/c) If this is truly a suffix, then adding it is just like adding any other suffix, like -a-palooza, no? And then just spell out whatever needs to be spelled out (e.g., forgo saying it's restricted to particular words, like -ology). But it's hard to be sure when something has become an actual suffix as opposed to being a blend, as Vox says; Talk:-ussy and Talk:-mentum were decided not to be suffixes, while -mageddon was decided to be a suffix. - -sche (discuss) 19:52, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd say at all the one-offs at -tucky. CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 01:08, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

What a suffixflation… Jberkel 09:07, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

carfare = US, busfare = UK???

We claim that "carfare" is the US equivalent of "busfare". I don't believe this for one bit; I've never heard "carfare" used in this way ever, ever, ever. What you pay to get on the bus is (naturally) the bus fare (the spelling "busfare" looks wrong to me and Chrome even underlines it in red). I suppose "carfare" could be the fare you pay to get on a streetcar, to the extent those things still exist; but even in San Francisco, where I used to live and which has streetcars, nobody said "carfare". (Depending on whether you were getting on the MUNI or the cable car, you'd say "MUNI fare" or "cable car fare" -- logically.) Benwing2 (talk) 22:52, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

There are a lot of dictionaries listed at onelook.com giving essentially the same definition as we do for 'carfare'; we have citations on the page itself and more can be found on GoogleBooks and online more generally, some of the other dictionaries even supply supporting quotations themselves. Most Google Books hits seem to use it as an American synonym of 'travel expenses' in what seems to be a more technical accounting sense than simply 'bus/streetcar fare'.

As far as 'busfare' is concerned, it seems to be only used half as much as 'bus fare' in a Google search, both terms being used more often in the UK/Ireland/the Commonwealth than in America (though also used there). Online news websites and books that can be found at GoogleBooks show a clear preference for 'bus fare' over 'busfare' though'. A Google search of 'carfare' shows that it is between 'busfare' and 'bus fare' its level of online use globally and it seems to be an exclusively American term. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:05, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

OneLook also has air fare/airfare, cab fare, subway fare, taxi fare, and train fare. Also attestable are trolley fare, tram fare, boat fare, ferry fare, railroad fare, and railway fare. Spelled-solid forms cabfare, taxifare, trainfare, boatfare, tramfare, ferryfare all seem attestable. Sufficient relative attestability of the spelled-solid forms would be an argument for the idiomaticity of the spelled-open forms. IOW, we seem to be missing a few. DCDuring (talk) 02:48, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

@Overlordnat1 Whether it's American-only doesn't make it the equivalent of "busfare". As an American I can attest that the bus fare is the "bus fare", not a British-only term. Possibly this is a regionalism, e.g. it might be specific to the Northeast; I am from the West. Benwing2 (talk) 03:34, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

As a Southern California native, I've only encountered it once- in a George Carlin routine. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:41, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, Carlin was from New York (and born in 1937, i.e. he grew up when streetcars were still around in NY). Our two cites of this term are (1) from Woody Allen (also from New York, born in 1935), and (2) from from Mary Roberts Rinehart (born 1876 in Pittsburgh PA; our cite that claims to be from the year 2000 is of a book written in 1920). This suggests to me this term is both dated and probably Northeast regional. Indeed, the Cambridge Dictionary marks this term as "old fashioned" [15]. Benwing2 (talk) 06:09, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

OK, I have cleaned up carfare, busfare and bus fare. @DCDuring Most of those seem transparent SOP's; the existence of spelled-solid terms maybe allows the corresponding open-spelled terms to exist due to WT:COALMINE and some terms might need to exist as translation hubs, but I would only say airfare and carfare are not clearly SOP (and airfare IMO isn't SOP only because it's a clipping/univerbation of 'airline fare', which is SOP). Benwing2 (talk) 07:23, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

We haven't repealed COALMINE, and we do give some weight to lemmings, so we are lacking entries, of which some are dated. Of the ones above only trolley fare, railroad fare, and railway fare have support from neither lemmings nor COALMINE. Many of these are probably dated. DCDuring (talk) 12:07, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

I suppose we should also consider train fare and trainfare (and even hyphenated forms such as bus-fare, rail-fare, …) —-Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:55, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

A couple of links to Chinese counties to fix

鬲 leads us to nonexistent WP page Ge County, likewise 𰛄 to Shenju County. I can't figure out if it was a misspelling on the Wiktionarian's part, or if those Chinese counties do actually exist, but have different spellings or (unlikely) don't have a page yet on en.wp Skisckis (talk) 07:38, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

The first one might be the historical 鬲县 (秦朝), a county established in the Qin dynasty in southeastern Dezhou, Shandong, later merged into a state in the Eastern Han dynasty.

From the reference on the second one, it should be in 横溪镇 (仙居县)(Hengxi Town) in Xianju County, Taizhou, Zhejiang. The only matching village it refers to is “支爿”, which turns out to not be 𰛄, so this is an invalid example. Mcph2 (talk) 08:33, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Would you mind correcting the entry? I shun editing in Chinese Skisckis (talk) 08:43, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Of course, give me a moment Mcph2 (talk) 08:50, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

員 needs a second MC reading

Should be 云仙三合 平王權-重鈕, as per Kangxi p189#31. Iwsfutcmd (talk) 09:45, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

can do this all day

Is this worth keeping? We've got all day (er, no pun intended). Or should it even be at can do something all day? Equinox ◑ 16:28, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Use of tilde sign ~ to indicate a playful, flirty tone in netspeak

Is it Translingual (multi-language) or only English? Surely English stole it from Japanese, though? See [16]. Can anyone advise? I'm not enough of a 3DPD anime girl to know the answer. @J3133. Equinox ◑ 04:55, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

I feel like weebs stole it from Japanese, yeah. CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 20:26, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

psychotype

psycho- +‎ -type.

From Ancient Greek ψυχή (psukhḗ, “soul”) and Ancient Greek τύπος (túpos, “mark, type”).

psycho- (relating to the soul, the mind, or to psychology) + τύπος (túpos, “mark, type”). The set of recognisable mental and cognitive characteristics or traits of an organism. An organism's psychotype results from the expression of its genetic code and the influence of environmental factors, which interact to further affect the psychotype. When two or more clearly different psychotypes exist in the same population, the species is said to be polypsychic. 146.212.52.216 11:12, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

rhina

Calling all archers and fletchers

Latin: "A kind of shark, of whose skin arrows were made"

I assume that the skin would have been used where feathers are used. Is that true? Can this be worded so non-fletchers and non-archers could get the meaning? DCDuring (talk) 14:05, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

The relevant part of Pliny seems to go "rhine, quem squatum vocamus". I'm not sure where arrows come into it.--Urszag (talk) 22:50, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

squatus may be refer to the same fish as squatina: angel shark (Squatina, which genus has 3 species in the Mediterranean). The WP articles make no mention of any use in arrows. The skin was apparently used for polishing wood and marble. The sole member of Rhina (from ῥινη (rhinē, “file, rasp”)) is not found in the Mediterranean, so Squatina spp. seems the likely referent DCDuring (talk) 14:16, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

after

A very common and productive construction is of the form "[NOUN] after [NOUN]", as in day after day, time after time, but also beer after beer, mile after mile, nanosecond after nanosecond, role after role, dress after dress, and many others. See day after day for numerous examples attestable at Google Books. We had nothing for this at Appendix:English snowclones.

1. Shouldn't there be a definition at [[after#Preposition]] that fits this specifically? A non-gloss definition?
2. Do we use attestability and contributor boredom to determine which examples are included here? MWOnline has only a few, all for common time periods, as well as time.
3. Is this a construction that is useful as a translation?.

I think we should make sure that we have an entry for each attestable expression of this form that any other dictionary has. DCDuring (talk) 22:26, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

I've seen upon used in a similar way, and it has such a definition. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:53, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Analogous (but different) constructions include day in, day out, and by, as in "minute by minute" Chuck Entz (talk) 23:16, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Thinking about inch by inch vs. inch after inch, by-expressions seem to imply progress toward a goal (or regress) or, at least, a change of state, whereas after-expressions seem to imply mere repetition, even if a change of state does occur objectively. DCDuring (talk) 00:41, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

I definitely think we should add a sense, illustrating that it is reduplicative. Vininn126 (talk) 23:00, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

The series can be extended to emphasize that it goes on far longer than it should: "day after day after day..." Chuck Entz (talk) 23:16, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

I was amazed at how productive it is. Just about anything that came into my head was attestable. Measures of time, distance, volume, weight; containers, events, anything that could be repeated or came in multiple instances or variations, especially tediously or surprisingly. There are also variations, like "[A] after [B] after [C]". Day after day appears in Google Books from the late 16th century. DCDuring (talk) 00:21, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

"clean up after"

This is an unrelated topic, but I thought this might be a good place to put it where people will see it. I think clean up after is a common expression, and it doesn't seem to be well-covered by any of the definitions we have listed. Should we add yet another sense? I don't know how to describe it, except that it changes the patient of the verb from (usually) a person to the mess they made. Yet, English being what it is, we still use the object form of the pronoun: clean up after me, not *clean up after I (even though I am not being cleaned). I think all of this should be made clear, and perhaps it clean up after should have a page of its own, but I'm not always good with words and I can't even think of a good way to word the definition. Would something like acting upon the result of someone's action work? Though it seems like it's almost unique to the verb clean, which suggests maybe it belongs on a page of its own anyhow. Thanks, —Soap— 09:10, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I think this is a type of government that does effect the meaning - I think that when we finish making the government template we'll be able to include this along with the meaning. Vininn126 (talk) 09:13, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I'll sleep on this for a while, but having given it some more thought, it occurs to me that the original expression may have been pick up after, since it involves a literal use of up, and others like clean up after and mop up after were formed on its model. They all seem to involve cleaning and all use up after, though as I said, it may have originally been a literal use of up that later got changed into the completive sense (as with eat up). Our pick up after entry is currently a redirect, but when (if) I get to this, I'll want to start there. —Soap— 11:44, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

The particle up (as well as down for the verbs where that orientation makes more sense) adds the element of "to completion", "completely", or "perfectly". The predictability of the meaning these and other particles give to at least the more literal sense of the verbs they are used with makes if much easier for a language learner to learn "phrasal verbs" than depending on a distinct entry in the mental lexicon, let alone a dictionary. DCDuring (talk) 01:20, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

pull up

A meaning of "pull up" is absent from it's entry, but since it's colloquial I just wanted to check here. The term is frequently used as slang in Australian English to mean "faring" or "feeling" though specifically in reference to the recovery after a recent arduous event (usually a hangover, sometimes injury). If you saw your friend at a party, quite drunk, the next day you would start the conversation by asking "How'd you pull up after last night?" "Not bad, I'm a bit dusty..." Another example would be "How'd you pull up after the marathon?" This concept has caught out quite a few of my non-native friends (even Brits) so I feel like the entry would benefit with the inclusion. Crossboarder (talk) 15:17, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Do you think it is derived from the aviation usage? DCDuring (talk) 16:56, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Ace

Look up ace. It says:

ace (plural aces) (card games, dice games) A single point or spot on a playing card or die usually representing the number one.

The ace is not perceived by modern American society as the smallest card in a deck. It is perceived as the largest; the numerical equivalent of its value is 14. Please fix the definition to make it clear that it doesn't say that the ace is always perceived as a 1. Georgia guy (talk) 16:52, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

An ace is usually worth 11 in Pontoon/Blackjack not 1 (and never 14, though that might be true for some other games). --Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:16, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

The number 14 comes from the ascending sequence 10, jack, queen, king, ace in poker. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:20, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

That sounds about right, someone who knows more about card games than me could have a go at improving the entry to reflect the fact that an ace can be an 11 or 14 then. I've added a quote to ace which is clearly using ace to mean the number 1 though (and it's American, though perhaps card-playing conventions have changed since 1948 when it was written?). --Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:45, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

There are definitely card games that are played aces low. The ace can be a 1. However I've never heard the symbol on the card itself, that is the pip, called an "ace". I could just be wrong about that, but if the pip is called an ace, is it only called an ace on the ace card? And on a die, is it only the dot on the "1" face? —Soap— 09:23, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I can't find any evidence it can be a synonym of pip, spot or dot. There's some interesting information on Wikipedia about ace cards, apparently it has a value of 1 in cribbage and most forms of lowball poker and is high for most other games but in Triomphe it has a position (and arguably value?) between the 10 and the Jack and in rummy it can be high and low, players can 'go around the corner' by playing K-A-2. I'm not sure how much detail we'd want to go into though. Perhaps we should have entries for ace-high, ace high, ace low, aces high, aces low, Aces High/Aces Low (a type of Patience),Triomphe and go around the corner (or at least some of these)? --Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:40, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I tried to improve the definitions based on the discussion. Nosferattus (talk) 04:31, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Looks good now. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:54, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

micronova

At User talk:Soap § "an etymology is not [...] who coined it", Soap stated that “Coined by the Suspicious0bservers citizen science team, led by Ben Davidson.” should be removed from the etymology, calling it “encyclopedic information”. What do others think? J3133 (talk) 12:26, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

What is the point of {{coined}} then? Vininn126 (talk) 14:01, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

I think the opposite. I think that's it's useful to have where the word originated, along with the year. (I think we should indicate somewhere for all languages, but it would get a little funky with, say, Latin). CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 19:29, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Tracking years is also very important for etymology - I use {{etydate}} on most entries, this is the same thing as knowing what year a word was coined. Vininn126 (talk) 19:31, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the replies. I'm in a weak position here because I wasn't planning to get started on this until after I'd looked through Category:English coinages (or perhaps Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:coinage), but since I expect that task to take a while, I wasn't planning on doing it for at least a couple of weeks as I'll be somewhat more busy than usual until then. But I realize I'd look like a clown coming back here in a month after this thread has scrolled off the page and saying "okay, well now I'm ready!". I'll try to think of a more positive response, but until then, I just want to make clear that i'm not against {{coinage}} in general; i just see a few pages such as micronova where I think we would be better without it. (Again, as on my talk page, note that even Wikipedia doesn't mention the YouTube channel in its opening paragraph, it just tells us what micronovas are and provides links to a few astronomical research papers.) Thanks, —Soap— 09:36, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

pronunciation of Almain

An obsolete English word for "Germany", Almain (also Almayne and Almany) is listed in Wiktionary, with the pronunciation /ˈæl.meɪn/. There is no indication of the source for the pronunciation. Might it have been /ˈɔ:l.meɪn/? Or is the pronunciation presumed to have been influenced by the French Allemagne? 2A00:23C8:A7A3:4801:733E:646C:63DA:CF9D 12:48, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

We also find /æl/ in alma, almagest and almude.  --Lambiam 16:15, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

So I take it you don't know the answer. 2A00:23C8:A7A3:4801:733E:646C:63DA:CF9D 21:46, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

rheotrope

I'm no scientist, but is rheotrope just an old term for a commutator? I found a few old diagrams of rheotropes in Google Books, and compared them to recent diagrams of commutators, but was none the wiser Wonderfool69 (talk) 13:19, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

 Done Yes. Equinox ◑ 16:37, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

cut a deal

Where is the discussion page for deleting this? None was provided on the entry's Discussion page. And how is this even arguably SOP at all? You can't literally cut a deal. פֿינצטערניש (Fintsternish), she/her (talk) 15:11, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

But you can have, and do have figurative senses at cut. The 14th gloss “(transitive, slang) To make or negotiate.” contains two usage examples one of which is with the object “deal”. Fay Freak (talk) 15:42, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

It was deleted within minutes of creation on the grounds that it was 'blatantly SoP'. cut a deal at OneLook Dictionary Search reveals that at least three dictionaries and one idioms book have entries for it. Two idioms dictionaries have entries for make a deal, which is more SoP IMHO. The entry itself was OK IMO. I'll undelete it. It can go through normal RfD, if someone wants to challenge it. DCDuring (talk) 16:03, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

bang up usage note

It says: "In all senses the object of this verb may appear before or after the particle up. However, if the object is a pronoun, then it is placed before the particle." Should this be here? It seems to me that it applies to any phrasal verb of this large class: you don't say "phone up him", "pick up her", etc. Equinox ◑ 16:36, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Agree — I see nothing specific to that verb about those ideas. A ux at idiomatic describes the general case. Quercus solaris (talk) 04:38, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Also agree but I would add that so-called 'double object constructions' like give it me are extremely commonplace in most of the English Midlands and North, much of the West Country and even in small pockets of East Anglia, North Wales and North West Scotland (see the map here[17]). It's not quite the same phenomenon but I would say that while pick her up sounds more natural than pick up her, pick Jolene Bloggs up and pick up Jolene Bloggs both sound acceptable to my ear - though I would probably normally say pick Jolene Bloggs up (to coin a jokey variant on Joe Bloggs - thinking about it, I could've just used Jane Doe). --Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:58, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

 Done Removed it. Equinox ◑ 14:12, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Chelosauria lovelli

Shouldn't Chelosauria lovelli be Translingual? 71 Brick Walls (talk) 18:23, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Is it used in any language other than English? Is it accepted or even taken seriously by biologists? Taxonomic names that have been published and that are taken seriously by biologists are presumed to be Translingual. Cryptozoological terms need to show evidence of use in multiple languages. DCDuring (talk) 18:50, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

It is not in Pedia, Species, or even Commons, nor Palaeontology Database, World Register of Marine Species, or Catalog of Life, strongly suggesting that it is not taken seriously by biologists. DCDuring (talk) 19:01, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

It was apparently taken seriously by (some) biologists at the time, though it's hard to be sure that the biologist who named it was completely serious (here is the original description). My take on it is that he might have been at least partially serious about the possibility of it being a real creature, but was joking about his taxonomic name and description being real or taxonomically valid- his reference to '"Moha-Moha" soup' certainly doesn't look serious. Even if one takes the description as a sincere attempt to publish the name, it would have to be dismissed as a nomen nudum since there isn't enough taxonomically useful detail in it to establish what the creature was.

At any rate, it raises some interesting questions about Translingual taxonomic names. It's certainly not taxonomically valid, but it may very well be independent of any specific language: here is a publication in French that cites the name in the same format any other language would cite it. The history of taxonomy (especially the early years) is full of invalid, useless and simply wrong publications of taxa. If a name isn't taxonomically valid, is it still a translingual name? On one end of the scale, you have made-up imitations that have never been used by taxonomists, like Lanigera glacialis, and on the other you have names sincerely published by real scientists that have been rejected as not having been published in a recognized journal or taxonomic work, or not having a type specimen, illustration or usable description. There are names that have been standard in the literature for decades or even centuries before someone tracked down the type specimen and discovered that it didn't match the taxon the name was applied to. I'm not sure where we draw the line. I'm not a taxonomist, but I'm not sure even the most expert taxonomist would be able to definitively answer that question. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:49, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

It appears in running text in modern "cryptobiology" works (including on in Spanish) as well as in reports (including one in French) citing Miss Lovell's report as included in the work by William Saville-Kent on the organisms of the Great Barrier Reef. One could determine that the early reports were mentions or not independent, but many organism names don't seem to have better citations. DCDuring (talk) 01:02, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

• Added to RFD 71 Brick Walls (talk) 21:17, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

  We need citations to include it. That a name isn't accepted taxonomically does not mean we would delete it. DCDuring (talk) 22:48, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

  I have removed the speedy deletion request. DCDuring (talk) 01:02, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

caoutchin

Defined as An inflammable, volatile, oily liquid hydrocarbon, obtained by the destructive distillation of caoutchouc in Webster 1913 dictionary. The term has gone out of use since then, so I assume the hydrocarbon goes by a different name now. Vague Googling and zero knowledge of chemistry doesn't bring up anything, but the words biokerosene and isoprene appear a lot. Are they the same thing? 71 Brick Walls (talk) 21:48, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Arabic رعشة

{{R:ar:Wehr-3}} has a word رِعْشَة‎ (riʕša, “tremor”) with i as the first vowel. The borrowings Persian رعشه‎ (ra'še) and Ottoman Turkish رعشه‎ (ra'şe) have a as the first vowel sound. The Maltese descendant is regħxa. Was there an ancient form pronounced رَعْشَة‎ (raʕša)? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 16:01, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

martagon

@Mlewan left a note at Talk:martagon: "I strongly suspect the Turkish etymology to be an urban legend that ended up in some dictionaries. There doesn't seem to be any such Turkish word, neither old Ottoman nor new." Indeed most of what I see is repeating of the legend. I found a use of the word in Ahmet Vefik Pasha's Lehçe-i Osmanı̂ from 1876[18]:

چلبی سلطان محمد تاج پادشاهی مشابه‌سنده مارطغان […]

Çelebi sultan Mehmed taç padişahı müşebbesinde martağan […]

This is centuries after the term was said to have originated. It is hard to search Ottoman texts, which are much more OCR-resistant than English, and I find pre-19th century handwriting very difficult. Does anybody have thoughts on this word and its legitimacy? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:58, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

There is a thoughtful article in Spanish on some blog. If I dare summarise it, it says that nobody knows for sure where the word comes from, but the Turkish connection is spurious. Mlewan (talk) 18:04, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Phono-semantic component for 靜

Apologies if I'm not formatting this correctly or not posting in the right place, it's the first time I'm doing this.

The entry for [靜](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%9C) states that it's a

>Phono-semantic compound (形聲, OC *zleŋʔ): semantic 青 + phonetic 爭 (OC *ʔsreːŋ).

I'm fairly sure that it should be the other way around, that is semantic 爭 and phonetic 青, no? 2001:818:DDA6:A00:DACB:8AFF:FEC0:574A 21:08, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

The Wenlin dictionary (great resource) says: Strangely, 青 qīng (‘green’) and 争(爭) zhèng (‘struggle’) both seem to be phonetic in 静 jìng. Compare the variant forms 靖 and 竫, both with 立 (lì) ‘stand’ and either 青 or 爭 as phonetic. 靖 is still used in the word 绥靖 suíjìng ‘pacify’, whereas 竫 is obsolete. 2A00:23C8:A7A3:4801:733E:646C:63DA:CF9D 23:21, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

bare minimum Monday and Bare Minimum Mondays

Currently bare minimum Monday and Bare Minimum Mondays are included as separate lexemes, both of them common nouns. I don't use the phrase and hadn't seen it before today. But in the examples I have found letter casing seems to be variable, and since the lower case version is countable it's hard to tell whether there is a plural-only sense.

• 2023, Dave Smith and Matt Turner, “Salesforce’s Marc Benioff says tech CEOs everywhere might soon unleash their inner Elons”, in Business Insider:

  But first: Insider’s Rebecca Knight is a Gen X working mom who tried TikTok’s “Bare Minimum Monday” trend. Read on to find out how it went.
  Gen X tries ‘Bare Minimum Mondays’
  When I first heard about “Bare Minimum Monday,” the latest TikTok trend to emerge in the workplace, I thought it was nonsense, Insider's Rebecca Knight writes.

• 2023 April 17, Lin Grensing-Pophal, “Bare Minimum Mondays”, in HR Daily Advisor‎^[19]:

  “Bare Minimum Mondays” is a new social-media-inspired trend popularized by Marisa Jo Mayes. […] “Bare minimum Monday devotees instead make the conscious decision to coast on the first day of the working week, thus conserving their energy,” [Holly] Thomas writes.

Therefore, it seems that these might just be variants of the same lexical item. @Equinox, ChronicleBooks885, Theknightwho: other thoughts? Cnilep (talk) 02:02, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I think that they are variants of the same lexeme. It's just that this term's new, so capitalization hasn't set in. CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 02:45, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Funny, speaking of theme days just discovered today, I had never heard of cheap-arse Tuesday until today. But speaking of quiet Mondays, I think of a phrasebook phrase that's stuck with me since long ago: Montag ist Ruhetag. Quercus solaris (talk) 04:30, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Should "helicopter" be categorized as suffixed with "-copter"?

Should helicopter be included in Category:English terms suffixed with -copter? 206.204.236.108 02:17, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, for the same reason that biology is categorized among terms suffixed with -logy: It is one via surface etymology even though it isn't one etymonically (diachrony and synchrony). This is the distinction covered whenever an etymology says "From such-and-such [historicallly]; equivalent to a surface analysis of such- + -such." Although some of those are excluded from the category via "nocat=1", whether that is done comes down to what is useful and not misleading to the reader. ISV terms warrant inclusion in such categories because for fluent speakers of scientific, technical, and medical English, they belong together cognitively irrespective of historical quirks. Quercus solaris (talk) 03:32, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

For biology, the second morpheme in folk comprehension is ology. --RichardW57m (talk) 14:47, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I agree, yeah. That's a topic we can take up in another thread if anyone's interested .... I don't think -logy is productive in modern English, and the only words I'd assign to it are early coinages like genealogy and perhaps some scientific words not commonly spoken out loud. The fact that words like fairyology exist (not *fairylogy) tells me that the productive affix in English is now -ology. —Soap— 15:27, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

The most common terms ending in "copter" can best be viewed as blends, which would suggest that -copter is not a suffix, with the implication that it would be misleading to show helicopter as having even a surface derivation heli- + -copter. However, I suspect that there are probably sufficient indications that -copter is productive to support -copter's emergence as a true suffix. Blending often leads to lexicalizion of affixes. But I don't really see why helicopter should show -copter as a morpheme, when helicopter is the source of the -copter morpheme. Is heli- even a productive prefix now? If it isn't, then heli- + -copter is more in the nature of a folk etymology than even a surface one. DCDuring (talk) 12:00, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

@DCDuring This is the distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis, isn’t it? i.e. a surface-level analysis of the morphemes as they exist now, versus the historical chain of events of what actually happened. Both have their value, in my opinion. Theknightwho (talk) 12:30, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Maybe. I don't generally object to the idea of surface etymology, but this seems to border on abuse of the idea. DCDuring (talk) 15:30, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

@DCDuring: We current list 18 derivatives of heli-! So it is productive, even if it makes helicopter tautologous. --RichardW57m (talk) 14:53, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I should have looked and not relied on my imperfect instant recollection of my own idiolect (which does include helipad). DCDuring (talk) 15:25, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it should be because it doesn't feel like a compositional term to me. Yes, both "heli-" and "-copter" are used as meaningful elements in other words, but I agree with analyzing those as more like blends... "helipad" seems like it is just short for "helicopter pad", and has no separate meaning. Should we categorize "hamburger" as being suffixed with "-burger"?--Urszag (talk) 20:35, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I think we could. To be honest, that was the first thing I thought to check when I saw this thread. If we can accept turkey burgers, veggie burgers, chicken burgers, and the like as hamburgers, then I'd say hamburger still retains its original etymology in our minds. If not, then i'd say hamburger itself is now thought of by most people as a compound ham + -burger, despite most people probably realizing that the patties are not made of ham. —Soap— 09:09, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't thing people think of an "X burger/Xburger" as an "X hamburger". There may have been a time when they did, but I think it was not for long. I think people, especially in the US, especially in spoken English, forgot all about Hamburg as an etymon and then dropped ham altogether, even for those made with beef. (Changes in Google News make it hard to get relevant facts.) I conclude from this only that hamburger/burger is not a perfect model for helicopter/copter, probably because, in the US, burgers are part of everyday life and helicopters are not. DCDuring (talk) 14:19, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree on both points. I was typing something similar up right now, in fact. I was saying that -burger isnt really a suffix anymore, it's a standalone word burger, but also that -copter probably cant be similarly reduced to copter because 1) people usually say the full word helicopter, and 2) i think burger and hamburger are not quite synonyms, so it's a true compound, whereas -copter is semantically vacuous, being just a short form of helicopter.—Soap— 14:27, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Just like most people don't want to know what goes into a hamburger, they also don't want to know what goes into "hamburger"- it's a single, unanalyzed word. The fact that -burger comes from hamburger is just a matter of etymology. I would say that helicopter is likewise an unanalyzed word. The etymology of the word and the affixes that came from it is rather odd, since it's really "helico" + "pter"- but "pter" violates English phonotactics and the word was reanalyzed as "heli" + "copter" to come up with the affixes. As for the word in question: it was originally just someone being silly and playing around with words. I suspect that the "L" in "ROFL" reminded them of the the "el" in "helicopter"- which would make it a blend. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:09, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Sure. Nobody's brought up roflcopter yet, though, unless it's in a parallel discussion. This thread started out with a question about the parent word helicopter. —Soap— 15:40, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

cross-link - computing sense

"To bolster up the references of databases or elements in a database to each other, to deorphan sensu lato." I work with databases every week and I don't understand this. The phrasing is really stilted. Can it be improved? Equinox ◑ 20:31, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Pretty incomprehensible definition, surely it can be improved. Some abstraction is needed; where do we typically speak of cross-links in computing? I don’t remember well what I thought when giving this shallow definition, but in an untechnical sense websites are also databases and webpages can be cross-linked, hypertext. On the other hand, there is also a general sense, and the European Commission speaks of “cross-linked airports”, which may be Germanish, translated from vernetzt, translating so in many contexts. Fay Freak (talk) 20:46, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

athermanous

Is it just the same as insulating? Zemely Nashka (talk) 21:20, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

"Insulating" can also refer to something that blocks the flow of electricity whereas "athermanous" specifically refers to heat, but in the context of heat, they do appear to be synonymous. I would suggest not using "athermanous" outside technical writing, because it is not a well-known word and is likely to confuse readers. 206.204.236.108 16:46, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

According to the Maxwell quotation on the page a diathermous substance allows radiation to pass through without heating up, i.e. it is transparent in the infrared, while an athermous substance transmits heat by conduction, i.e. it is opaque in the infrared. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:17, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

thyme

According to Merriam Webster, Random House and the occasional American and Irish contributor in this FaceBook group [20] some people say the word thyme not as a homophone of time but as thime with the ‘th’ pronounced as in the word ‘think’. How widespread is that pronunciation and is it worth adding here? I couldn’t find much evidence at Youglish when I looked (but then there are over 900 hits and I haven’t clicked through them all). Overlordnat1 (talk) 22:55, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

That looks like an ad hoc pronunciation that someone would make up if they had never heard it pronounced, like talking about "Lahndonn" (rhymes with wonton) on the "Thaymes" (rhymes with James) river. In the half century I've been an herb hobbyist, I've heard that pronunciation only once or twice. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:21, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I suppose we shouldn’t bother adding it then but it is strange that this pronunciation is fairly widely mentioned, if not used. In the first 30 or so clips I’ve looked through on YouGlish there’s one clip of the hostess of an American cookery show saying it that way as a joke (but then jokes don’t really count). Overlordnat1 (talk) 02:28, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

June 2023

(humorous) ways of indicating deleted words

There's a couple of ways in online (mostly geeky?) writing of showing "deleted" words or phrases for comedic effect. I think it would be nice/fun to make a list of those. Maybe even more general, a list of geeky slang, including things like "O(fun)" (perl community?).

Off the top of my mind I can only think of the following, but there's more, I think. Hard to google for these...

• Thanks for your s/money/time.
• Thanks for your ^money^time
• something with Emacs style control characters? ^D? can't put my finger on the exact format

doesn't look exactly right still: Thanks for your money^W^W all the fish?

• ...

Maybe we could brainstorm a little right here, collect some examples (and citations) and determine if there's enough for, say, an appendix?

--Azertus (talk) 10:19, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, you've brightened my mood. I really wish I could add more, but I dont know any other ways to indicate deletion. It doesnt seem to have caught on with emojis, for example. All I can think of are:

People typing out a partial word and stopping, and then finishing with something else.

1. Ive had a rough day. Im going to the corner store to get myself a few bottles of w-- ...ater. I think this more of an imitation of speech, though, than a convention of online chat. And it only works when two words overlap at least somewhat closely. (e.g. in the above, i could have made it clearer that i was starting to say wine if it were out loud, but it doesnt always work well in print.)
2. Censoring a word, particularly a word that wouldnt normally be considered offensive. But, that's not really what you're talking about either.

Thanks, —Soap— 18:15, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

@Azertus: You're thinking of ^H. Equinox ◑ 18:24, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Audible /l/ in balm, qualm, etc.??

User:Paintspot has been adding lots of these. Are they correct? Major dictionaries do not seem to have this /l/ pronunciation. Equinox ◑ 21:59, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

They're without-a-doubt real — for example, they exist in my dialect of U.S. English. Also, while maybe not the MOST common pronunciation of these words, the version with the audible /l/ was already present/listed on the balm and calm and palm pages, for example. Paintspot (talk) 22:03, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Like, if you listen to the audio file for balm#English — the audio file is already of someone saying the "-aLm" version. It seems to be a regional difference. Paintspot (talk) 22:04, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh also, User:Equinox btw, the page Rhymes:English/ɑːlm already exists, and already lists ALL of these one-syllable words as rhyming with /ɑːlm/ in "one US pronunciation". (And to clarify, these one-syllable words were already on this list before I added the fact that "embalm" rhymes with whichever-pronunciation-of-"balm"-you-use, and that "becalm" rhymes with whichever-pronunciation-of-"calm"-you-use.) Paintspot (talk) 22:06, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

They definitely exist. I think I recall reading that they were reintroduced into English as spelling pronunciations (primarily in North America, I think). I hear them all the time. My own pronunciation is inconsistent, as it happens. I pronounce psalm, balm, and alm with /ɑːlm/ and the rest with /ɑːm/. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:18, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Mine is inconsistent as well. I pronounce psalm, alm, and qualm with /ɑːlm/, but I think that balm and palm go back and forth between /ɑːm/ and /ɑːlm/ for me. On the other hand, I consistently pronounce calm with /ɑːm/. Tharthan (talk) 22:54, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

baulk/balk, falcon and almond are the words that immediately come to mind as having optional l's, at least in the U.K and I believe in the U.S too. Everyone says words ending with -alm and -alk (except baulk) with a silent l here but I not only recall hearing -alm words said with an audible l from some Americans but even very occasionally hearing words like 'walk' and 'talk' said with an audible l - the words talk and even half are said like that within the first 3 minutes of this YT video of broad Appalachian dialect speakers[21] --Overlordnat1 (talk) 23:14, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

If you find regularities, they should have their place at w:English-language vowel changes before historic /l/#Historical L-vocalization. But there probably are none but various hypercorrections due to irregular reflection on particular words. As fault and vault got /l/ added when the l-drop was new and not equally distributed in England, so others are present or not present because of exposure to a term in front of speakers of particular dialects, and others due to engagement with written language, then others are arbitrarily manipulated analogically by internal comparison in a speaker because he had to consider a particular term. And hundred years later Wiktionary information about one such word may be outdated already, like pronunciation information on ant hundred years ago, or off. Some meme on TikTok can be responsible within a decade and nobody will be certain. Fay Freak (talk) 03:31, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

FWIW, Merriam-Webster and Longman do give pronunciation with /l/ as a possibility in the US in both balm and qualm, and both have audio of qualm with /l/ (although in the MW audio the vowel is fronter than I'd expect). In my experience, /l/s are reasonably common in the US, more common in some words (e.g. qualm) than others (balm, calm), which fits with how both dictionaries' American pronouncers produced /l/ in qualm but not balm, and with Tharthan's observation above. - -sche (discuss) 04:01, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Should attributive forms be under "alternative forms" or "derived terms"?

I added pedal-pusher (“attributive form of pedal pushers”) under “alternative forms” as “pedal-pusher (attributive)”. Sgconlaw moved it to under “derived terms” (“pedal-pusher (attributive form)”). This is the discussion from Talk:pedal pushers:

Pedal-pusher: form or derived term?

@Sgconlaw: I thought that attributive forms (e.g., britch, Falkland Island, pajama, Quad-City) are “forms”, not “derived terms” (because they are not per se their own/separate terms). J3133 (talk) 09:51, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

@J3133: I'm afraid I don't know. I thought the "Alternative forms" section was only to be used for alternative spellings or forms which differ only because of hyphens or spaces. You should probably raise this at the Tea Room. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:45, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

J3133 (talk) 14:42, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

To me, the examples mentioned seem not lexical but grammatical. Should the singular of every noun have a non-gloss definition "used attributively with both singular and plural meaning"? DCDuring (talk) 20:43, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

This does not apply to every noun, only pluralia tantum, which, also, do not always have attributive forms. Do you think we should not have trouser (“(used attributively as a modifier) […] trouser leg”)? J3133 (talk) 22:03, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Meh. DCDuring (talk) 13:30, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I personally would lean towards alternative, but it's hairy. Vininn126 (talk) 13:31, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't mention them at all, this being a trivial matter of a punctuation convention, but if the consensus is these hyphenated attributive uses of two-word nouns (shaggy-dog story,^[22] old-money family,^[23] Gen-Z youngster,^[24] ...) are to be mentioned at the entry for the non-attributively used noun, my preference is under Alternative forms.  --Lambiam 21:46, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

First the easy part: these aren't derived terms- goose isn't derived from geese, it's just a different form of the same word. One could make a case for the singular forms of pluralia tanta being alternative forms, but it would be better not to have them under any separate header. It would be better to have a usage note that says that the singular, [X], only exists in attributive use, but such usage isn't universal (for pretty much every phrase like "trouser pocket"/"scissor blade" you can also find "trousers pocket"/"scissors blade"). Pluralia tanta are rare enough that it's better just to explain that than to decide on a standard header under which to put these oddities.

I will say that using plural forms attributively is one of the most common errors I've seen second-language English speakers make, but I don't know if it's worth it for us to list the attributive form for literally every single English noun that has a plural in the same way we list diminutives for nouns in Dutch. There are all kinds of unwritten rules that we can't possibly cover in every applicable entry: "the lion is a social animal", but "lions hunt in groups" (though I wouldn't be surprised to see "the lion hunts in groups"), not to mention the limitations we have on the use of the present indicative- for instance, you can't say "I'm tired. I sit down now". Chuck Entz (talk) 00:05, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

teniente

Spanish noun sense 3: "having, holding". Is this actually meant to be a noun? If so, a better definition might be "(state of) possession". Equinox ◑ 20:26, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

There's no corresponding noun sense in the RAE's dictionary. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 00:07, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Charlemagne

The pronunciation shown for Charlemagne is /ˌʃɑːrləˈmeɪn/, but Daniel Jones' English Pronouncing Dictionary (a source for pre-war RP) has /'ʃɑːləˈmain/. I agree the version shown in Wiktionary is far more common, but it's odd that the Wiktionary editors are unaware of the traditional pronunciation of this name in British English. 2A00:23C8:A7A3:4801:7DF4:5784:30EC:E069 15:32, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Swiss bank account

A couple of possible issues here: (i) "any place considered safe or secure to put things in" seems too broad: that could refer to a chest of drawers, a hotel safe, etc. I think we need a more specific definition. (ii) Swiss bank is given as a synonym; I've never heard of that used metaphorically. Anyone? Equinox ◑ 18:06, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

In the US, IMHO, the Caymans has a similar sort of meaning, along with connotations of ill-gotten gains, tax-avoidance, and money-laundering. DCDuring (talk) 18:21, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

per pale, per bend, per bend sinister, per chief ...

in bend, in pale, in bend sinister, in chief ...

We have entries for one term from each set, but not others (in chief is an &lit) : are they idiomatic and we should add the rest, or SOP and we should delete the two entries we have? AFAICT you can construct per and in phrases for each honorable ordinary, but that's a small finite number. And the meanings seem straightforward (once you know what in bend is, and what a bend sinister is, you know what in bend sinister must be, etc), but OTOH some have interesting usage restrictions (e.g. per chief [X and Y] is attested since at least 1611 but now nonstandard, it'd be blazoned Y, a chief X), or unexpected translations (what in English is per chevron argent and gules is in French de gueules, mantelé d’argent). - -sche (discuss) 08:02, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

dexter chief, sinister chief, dexter base, ...

Similar to the section above: we have dexter chief but not sinister base, etc. There is a small finite number of such terms but they seem pretty transparent. Are they idiomatic or should we RFD? - -sche (discuss) 08:02, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

d'or#English

See old discussion on talk: is this an adjective or a prepositional phrase? On one hand, it's basically an alternative form of the adjective or, used to avoid homography with the conjunction, and it functions as part of a set with other adjectives (vert, gules, etc). OTOH, in French it'd be a prepositional phrase, and there are other things in English heraldry which go in the "adjective slot" but are prepositional phrases, e.g. an eagle displayed (adj.) but a pelican in her piety (prep. phr.). (But the part of speech in French where it's two words doesn't necessarily carry over to English, where it functions like one word.) - -sche (discuss) 01:29, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

exostosis and ectostosis

They're the same thing, right? Elevenpluscolors (talk) 08:11, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

otocrane

Is this the same thing as the tympanic cavity? Elevenpluscolors (talk) 08:26, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

cuned

What's it mean? In Legh's Armorie, he shows a shield "party per Bend Beuile, Argent, and purpure. Never charge this, for there can be no better cuned cote caryed." - -sche (discuss) 17:38, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Ancient Greek - θεῶμαι is contracted

θεάομαι Can somebody who knows how the table works change Present: θεῶμαι (Uncontracted) to Present: θεῶμαι (Contracted)? Thanks Mzkysn0417 (talk) 18:46, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

nonstandard English verb forms

What are nonstandard English verb forms (tenses, aspects, modes, combinations thereof)? I know of the various AAVE verbs, like the remote past, habitual be, and I know of the Appalachian like to, plus the Irish after and the Dorset repeated past.

I'm asking if there are any verb forms I've missed, either dialectical or historical. Is there a good place to find an overview of this? I’ve looked through Category:English auxiliary verbs. 73.87.242.65 20:46, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Forgive and ignore this reply if it is not relevant enough to what you're seeking, but it did come to mind when I read the question. Within multiple dialects and sociolects of English, in the conjugations of certain strong verbs, there are truly normative principal parts as run, run, run (inf., pret., pp.); come, come, come; and see, seen, seen — which is to say, that is truly the usual and normative way in which that variety conjugates those verbs — but there is an epistemological misapprehension whereby most people believe, and schools have long taught, that those are [inherently, inevitably] erroneous because they differ from standard English's conjugation. People misapprehend what it means to call them nonstandard: it only means that they are not normative in the standard variety; it does not mean that they are inherently wrong in the same way that *run, runned, runned is wrong (that is, never normative in any variety). This idea that they are inherently wrong is a prescriptive misapprehension that people mistake for a descriptive effort. I am not doing masterful justice to the argument, but the point is that when one is listening to a raconteur who speaks one of those dialects or sociolects of English telling a story and they say something like, "then I run down to the store and I seen him comin back from church," there is zero epistemologically valid ground for saying, "Oh, that poor ignorant man, he doesn't even know how to speak English correctly." No, F you, he speaks his variety exactly correctly, and you don't properly understand the epistemology of how natural language truly works, although that's not your fault because you were miseducated by others who also failed to understand it properly. End of rant. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:29, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure you didn't mean ill, but I don't think anyone asked for the rant. It doesn't give the impression you read OP's request very carefully... Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:12, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

@Andrew Sheedy — I take your point; I just reread OP's request and this time appreciated that auxiliary verbs were really the main focus of it. However, I still think that nonstandard-but-not-incorrect principal parts are not irrelevant to the request. One can delete a single sentence from my post (miseducation etc) and de-rant-ify it.Quercus solaris (talk) 04:43, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this is the sort of verb form you have in mind, but how about AAVE/Southern American done to replace "have" and "had" to form verbs in the perfect/pluperfect? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:12, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm more looking for new tenses, not new ways to express the same tenses. But also helpful, thanks. 73.87.242.65

There is the literary, historical, or narrative present (standard verb form) used for events in the past, present, and (sometimes) future. DCDuring (talk) 14:33, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Derartu

It's pushing it a bit to call this English, isn't it, when it's apparently only the name of one person, who is Ethiopian? Equinox ◑ 16:15, 8 June 2023 (UTC)