Talk:e-dictionary

Discussion moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion

Artificial construct not actually used. Not even withing the Wiktionary community. Not withing the computing industry. There is a computer program called edict that has a synonym edictionary but that does not have the hyphen. This is just a made up term. --Connel MacKenzie 12:21, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Please. Do a bit of searching before making such statements.

Please. I most assuredly did. I believe the references you provided below are as nonsensical as saying this term is anything other than a protologism. Are you asserting that those quotes are not very narrow uses? Are you asserting that the first pageful of googles are not exactly as I said? Wiktionary image is not improved by adding BS like this. Readded {{rfd}} while this is still being discussed. --Connel MacKenzie 01:16, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Obviously you really, really want this term deleted.

Let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that all of the objections you raise to the quotes below are valid. So what? In what sense, then, is the term "not actually used"? It has, by your own estimation, been used in a student paper and by two putatively inept translators with a curiously good grasp of English grammar. In what sense is the word a protologism, given that it has been used both in a "student paper" presented in 2000 and on a current web site? What is the relevance of a term being used in a narrow sense?

More to the point, what, if anything, would constitute a "reputable source" in your opinion, and why? I've already explained in detail why I made the edits I did in CFI, I've apologized for any misunderstanding, I've added a prominent notice that the current form is controversial and I've started a forum for discussing the issue substantively, in the hope of hammering out some sort of consensus. I would be happy to respond to any points you might make in that discussion. I'm particularly interested in the reasoning behind your positions.

Until that discussion settles out, I'm willing to step out of the brewing edit war and leave these entries RFD, even though I find the reasoning behind this mysterious if not outright surreal. -dmh 05:10, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

1. I was upset that you removed the rfd during the conversation.

2. I was taken aback by your suggestion I didn't check at all (wildly untrue.)

3. I (from my POV) think of the artificial "e-" prefix as a pointless abomination.

4. At first blush, your attributions seemed contrived. I did not follow the links you provided, before offering my critique of them individually.

5. This term seemed like an attempt at constructing a protologism for Wiktionary, therefore was suspect to begin with.

6. I've had a busy week, and mised your edit to CFI, with the link to Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion/attestation. I'll sleep on that. I'll probably join that flamewar by the end of this (long) weekend.

--Connel MacKenzie 06:13, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps I was too hasty. Please understand that I've been through quite a few discussions on RFD that went like this:

• Random person posts an entry.
• Someone puts it on RFD, claiming it isn't used.
• I do a quick search and find several uses, note this and remove the RFD (or occasionally I find nothing, or find nothing good and independent, and note this).
• Nothing else happens.

This looked like just another case like that. After finding a conference paper (having read dozens of them I know that they look like, but just to be clear, following the links leads you to Stanford's Natural Language Processing group) and a couple of other references, it didn't seem like there was anything further to say. Plenty of terms have been accepted, after objections, with less.

Your first entry here ("Artificial construct not actually used ...") made it look for all the world like you hadn't actually done any searching. I hadn't considered the possibility that you'd found the conference paper and the others, rejected it but not made any note of it, but had noted edict and specifically noted it.

Be that as it may, I'm more interested in resolving the dispute over what constitutes a good attestation. From my point of view the quotes I gave were not only not contrived, but were exceptionally convincing. Almost as good as the ones for thankee. Obviously, from your point of view they're extremely suspect. I want to understand your basis for this. As far as I can tell, they're very good evidence that people are using the term and expecting it to be understood. In particular, students use the term to refer to a particular class of electronic device, but not to a specific make or model.

I can't think of any other plausible explanation for finding this particular set of quotations. It's clearly not a nonce. For example, the author of "Hands off that e-dictionary" is clearly using an already-familiar term for a familiar object. The conference paper similarly uses it first in a context where it is clearly expected to be familiar. Here's another example from the same paper: "Multimedia: a rare feature for an e-dictionary, is the ability to hear the words of the dictionary to understand their pronunciation." Granted, the comma is a little dodgy, but how can one possibly talk of "a rare feature in an X" outside a context where there are several X's already in existence and referred to by that name?

Nor can we plausibly argue that the term is only used in one specific, closed group of speakers. As I point out below, we have the same term used in largely the same sense by Natural Language Processing researchers, teachers of ESL, software vendors and a museum curator, over the span of (at least) five years. Honestly, this is one of the stronger cases I've seen recently, and I was frankly not expecting any further objection, given my previous expriences.

For whatever it's worth, here's a random page listing several examples of e-dictionaries, including Wiktionary. -dmh 03:54, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Mind you, if I'd done a bit more research myself, I would have caught another sense of the term: It can mean both a dictionary in electronic for and a dedicated device containing/presenting it. -dmh 16:51, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

• [1] The low level of literacy in the region makes an e-dictionary potentially more useful than a paper edition, since its use is less dependent on good knowledge of spelling and alphabetical order. — Kevin Jansz, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Australia; Wee Jim Sng, School of Applied Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Nitin Indurkhya, School of Applied Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Christopher Manning Departments of Computer Science and Linguistics, Stanford University, in Using XSL and XQL for efficient, customised access to dictionary information, presented at AusWeb2K, the Sixth Australian World Wide Web Conference, 12-17 June 2000
  • Student's summary paper about their own project?
    • Um, no. This was presented in a refereed conference and published in the conference procedings. Game over.
• [2] "E-dictionaries are more fragile. Drop your paper dictionary. Go ahead. Hold it above your head and drop it. Now, try this with any lightweight plastic e-dictionary, and you'll be picking up the pieces. Don't think this is a fair test? Put both dictionaries in a backpack full of other typical things (your textbook, a box lunch, a note pad, a pencil case). Now, sit on this. Yes, just like you might do by accident anywhere. How many of you are willing to do this with an e-dictionary inside? " — Glen A. Hill in "Hands off that e-Dictionary!" The (few) merits and (many) disadvantages of electronic dictionaries from the author's point of view
  • Reference to a specific proper noun.
    • Interesting, then, that it's not capitalized (except at the beginning of the first sentence, of course). It's also not clear how "any lightweight e-dictionary" could refer to a proper noun. Perhaps I should have included the beginning: "Man has created a number of labor-saving devices throughout history. One that I find most disturbing (and oftentimes useless and irritating) is the electronic dictionary. Here, I'd like to address the (few) merits and (many) disadvantages of e-dictionaries from my point of view."
• [3] (on the web site of London's Tate Gallery) This illustrated e-dictionary of Blake's characters will enhance your enjoyment of his artistic and poetical works by helping you understand the significance of ten of his major characters.
  • Reference to a specific proper noun.
    • This seems even stranger, especially since there is an actual proper noun (Blake) in the same sentence, as if for comparison purposes.
• [4] Nearly every one of my 75 Chinese students has an e-dictionary, but they are almost all different and I find it hard to advise them on which e-dictionary is the best for them. Many of them are trying to pass the IELTS and go abroad to get a college degree. Some are college graduates who are still using the old e-dictionary they had in college.
  • Specific to a particular region, translation to English suspect.
    • Yep, this use is specific to China. The previous one is specific to London, the one before it to Japan, and the first to Australia. What exactly is this meant to prove? Are we meant to disallow any usage of any word if the usage pertains to a particular place or context? If so, why? As to translation, could you provide a pointer to the text from which this is translated, and reasons for suspecting there is something wrong with the translation? In any case, why would a bad translation be an less of an attestation? If I were to mistranslate "Deze discussie is helemaal waardelos." as "I do not like green eggs and ham", woud that indicate that "green", "eggs" and "ham" are not words?
• [5] "The MCOL e-Dictionary provides definitions of almost 750 of the most relevant terms of interest to managed care and health management professionals, including many terms regarding HIPAA, Health Plans, Medicare, Defined Care and much more."
  • Proper noun.
    • Fine, it might well be. It might also be poor capitalization.
• [6] "An e-dictionary in large type for readers who need or prefer larger than regulation size print ... A talking e-dictionary recorded by native speakers gives you instant translation and a pronunciations with the click of a mouse"
  • Again, translation to English suspect.
    • Again, why would that matter?

Do you have any reputable sources that show this term in running text? --Connel MacKenzie 01:16, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

e-dictionary

Added rfd to it as well, since it was created only for this conversation. --Connel MacKenzie 01:19, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

• Actually, it was created after finding several uses (as I'll perversely insist on calling places where words occur in contexts where they appear to have meaning) and noting that they tended to be spelled "e-dictionary" and only less frequently "e-Dictionary" or "E-Dictionary". This I did on the assumption that the entry would be kept, and therefore should be kept under its principal spelling. In other words, I (mistakenly) thought this conversation was over. -dmh 05:10, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

• • This "e-" use seems well established (with small "d", but not big "D"). The situation is similar to that with the earlier "e-business" and "e-quaintance". I will also be moving this discussion to the term's talk page with a bit of factoring. There still remains the question: How do we distinguish between terms that merit a Wiktionary entry and the similarly formed ones that are an obvious application of the prefix as a part of normal English word formation. Eclecticology 23:18, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Soapbox

My primary objection to e-nonsense is the simple fact that it is so much worse than leet.

From 1971 to ~1995 language pedants corrected computer geeks that email must be written as e-mail. In the 1970s, the additional character was generally deemed significant to computer storage! For two and a half decades, almost nothing else got e-'ed...the handful that did were quickly ignored into obscurity.

With the advent of the Internet, business freaks invaded computing culture; overnight we had e-this, e-that, eBay and e-Banking. Meanwhile, the original objections to email have died off. At the same time, the computing justification for disdaining e-mail has also (by two decades) disappeared. At the conclusion of the decades-long email vs. e-mail battle, inarticulate MBA's and marketing executives arrive on the scene and e- every word they ever learned.

To call e- a filthy disgusting prefix that is sometimes used by idiots is one thing. To validate each variation as it reaches some bizarre threshold of google "hits" on blogs is psychotic. In my opinion, that is not descriptivism, instead that is advocating and promoting incorrect usage. There is a good balance of descriptivism and prescriptivism somewhere. Just not at Wiktionary.

To call leet terms invalid at the same time as advocating e-nonsense is extraordinarily hypocritical. At least leet terms convey new meanings and new connotations...that is, at least there is some perceived "need" for those new connotations.

If we (Wiktionary) are going to accept e-nonsense terms, we should probably disable all the sysop's delete capabilities, and simply accept and amend every last piece of symbology imaginable. Perhaps we could rewrite our entire criteria for inclusion to be "Any term appearing in Wikipedia (or google search) that can be entered by keyboard, that is delimited by white-space or punctuation." --Connel MacKenzie 12:32, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As much as I sympathize with your concerns, there is still a need to find a practical solution to this issue. We also differ on the relative horror of leet and the e-voluptuary tendencies of this thread. I perceive leet to be nothing more than cutesy graphical variants of words with no new meanings, and where usage is limited to a sub-species of internet users.

Unlike the leet terms which are confined to their own asylum e-terms are ubiquitous. In our common context I know that I present myself as a linguistic conservative, As such I'm not about to support a long li9st of these obvious construction. I am also not one to use Google hits as the definitive criterion for what should be acceptable in Wiktionary. Being descriptive means accepting the fact that some of these terms are broadly used, and making some attempt to distinguish these from spur-of-the-moment coinages. Let's look for common ground on this. Eclecticology 05:01, 2005 Jun 12 (UTC)

I think my frustration is from thinking I know where Wiktionary generally draws the line, then having the definition of what is acceptable change right underneath my nose.

I cannot agree with the notion the e-terms are ubiquitous. They apply only to the internet! Leet terms derive from upside-down calculators (fairly ubiquitous in their day) and telephone cracking (phreaking of the 70s and 80s) as well as all the various BBS and internet subcultures. E-terms are a much more recent construct than leet...decades younger, right? And the only people promogulating e-terms are illiterate MBA and marketroids. That's not an isolated, specialized construct?

I for one, would like to see some very, very, very concrete clarification of what en.Wiktionary means by "all words in all languages." I know that is ultimately impossible (there is always some flexibility) but I still would like to see a better attempt than we have now. Even my (half) joking, pithy definition of "anything typable" would be better than a definition that changes from week to week (depending on who's around.) --Connel MacKenzie 06:24, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I hope I didn't offend by correcting the pe[n]dant error above. It's always been a favorite error since the long-ago days when I was editor of the highschool yearbook, and I corrected the ad of a jeweller who for many years had been selling pedants in his store.

I think that you may need to exercise a little trust on this e-matter. There are several of us who recognize that these terms are a fact of life, but are not ready to let the matter get out of hand. Frankly, I had never heard of "leet" until after I became involved in Wiktionary, but my familiarity with e-terms is much older. I can neither confirm nor deny your claim that e-terms originated with illiterate Masters of Bugger All; I just don't hang out with that crowd, so I must have heard the terms elsewhere.

I agree that the term "all words in all languages" is a little hyperbolic and wishful. I also believe that verifiability and the need to cite sources are just as important here as in Wikipedia. "A language" is a subset of "all languages"; hence a word must belong to a language before it can belong to all languages. I don't think that the concrete definition that you seek will ever happen. Yes, having definitions change from week to week is disconcerting; that's the down side of the Wiki. But imposing solutions only leeds to a lot of complaining and bitching, often from those who have a narrow short term outlook. Eclecticology 19:51, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

Hmm.

I'm a bit tired of hearing about "bizarre threshold of google 'hits'" and (with due respect) "Google hits as the definitive criterion". There has never been, and I sincerely hope never will be, any numerical threshold of Google hits. Even if there are thousands of hits, you still have to look for quotes that support particular senses. At best, there is a sort of gentleperson's agreement that if there are thousands of hits there had better be a specific reason for RFD, and on the other hand one cannot assume from a handful of hits that a term is in broad use.

The entire reason for the changes to CFI was to summarize at least a year of "case law" here on rfd regarding the use of internet citations. It's not the wild west. The idea is to use the internet and common sense to find out what people are writing and saying. To disallow internet usages in an online dictionary seems restrictive at best.

While I tend to push for inclusion, and I've famously butted heads with Ec on several terms, I'm perfectly willing to let go of a badly-attested term. Conversely, Ec has relented in some cases, when presented with clear and specific reasaons (or perhaps just by the sheer mass of verbage :-). Other discussions have also occurred among other parties. The net result has been a sort of mutual understanding of what will fly and what won't, with frequent skirmishes along the borders.

When I started edting CFI, it was way out of date with respect to what was actually going on. I've tried to help bring it up to date, and others have, as always, helped move from rough beginnings to something clearer and more useful. Naturally, not everything in CFI is cut and dried, and there has been some give and take in the recent edits. That's a natural part of the process. I never saw the changes to CFI as changing the rules. The real rules are the Wiki process. CFI is more a guide to the perplexed documenting current practice. That's why it's editable like anything else.

Now, Connell, if you want to contribute to the debate, go right ahead. Define what an acceptable source is and how to document a citation in it. I've even provided a space for this, along with a prominent note in CFI alluding to "controversy" over legitimate sources. So far, though, I haven't seen anything.

On the other hand, if you're only concerned with barring words that MBAs might have made up and throwing around terms like "psychotic" and "hypocritical", I don't see what else there is to say. You've got admin privileges, and if you want to delete this or any other term on arbitrary grounds, I can't stop you. I note with appreciation that you've refrained from this so far, which is why I still hold out some hope of a reasonable resolution. -dmh 17:02, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hello. I did make an attempt at filling out Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion/attestation but lost that edit before posting due to either a browser crash or network problem. I was only attempting to address your (new) first question...questions two through five are reasonable concerns but not directly related, I think. I clearly did not address your fourth question (is a single usage enough) as I considered that to be a separate (albeit related) problem.

Having spelled out that *I* think a valid source is the sort of thing you could check out of a library or buy at a bookstore, a couple times, I'm not sure what remains unclear, but I will try again to compose it and get it posted there.

I think using a lack of google hits as decent evidence that a term is not used is valid. But observing how many random typos get massive numbers of hits (e.g. "renumeration") makes it clear that the opposite can never be true. I'm sorry that you find that repetition tiresom; I'm tired of having people say that a thousand google hits is justification for inclusion. A thousand google hits can't possibly be justification for inclusion! Even if each of those one thousand hits are valid running text, the google search itself proves nothing. If you were to assign a number to when a gentelman's agreement might exist, I would suggest 600,000 as a threshold...that is approximately 0.01% of the pages google currently has indexed.

I'm apologize for blowing up over my pet peeve. Our lives are colored by our individual experiences; the caliber of person I've met that uses "e-" words causes an immediate reaction for me (an overwhelming sense of revulsion, obviously.)

I think I've said before, that I generally liked the majority of the revisions made to WT:CFI, it was just that one zinger that stood out as being both against general practice and contradicting the previous wording that caused so much contention.

What confuses me the most about Wiktionary, perhaps, is that there is an aversion to labelling words as protologisms or neologisms. The sense that it is better to delete than label correctly, is perhaps at the heart of what I've been talking around (above, here.) I agree that the majority of these questionable terms should be deleted; but a dictionary that is taking a descriptivistic approach cannot afford that luxury. Therefore, it seems that not labelling them but instead requiring the much harder justification for deletion is what wastes so much time here on WT:RFD.

It does seem that I am sitting quite opposite the community consensus on the "e-whatever" issue. It is about time I simply accept the community opinion on this matter. --Connel MacKenzie 19:22, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Please, it is only one "l" in my name, Connel.

First, may I apologize for misspelling your name. I hate when that happens to me, and I doubt anyone really likes it.

Before turning to the larger question: There is existing "case law" about misspellings, and this should be brought into CFI. As it turns out, most random misspellings are pretty rare, but there are a few that stick out because, rather than being several orders of magnitude less common than the prevalent spelling, they're only a hundred times or so less common. In this case, renumeration is about 70 times less common than remuneration. My personal opinion is that it should go in as a "common misspelling" of remuneration. One could be picky and say "rare but not exceedingly rare spelling", but personally, I'm comfortable with "misspelling".

The discussion of spellings on CFI should also include a note that a term should not be included if it is only used in the same sense as a similarly spelled term which occurs more than (say) 100 times more often. This would exclude remumeration, which happens to get 833 hits and would be admissible under the criteria as they stand.

Back at the larger point, sheer numbers of google hits are not enough. I don't believe anyone has ever claimed they are. I certainly haven't meant to. Common sense has to figure in as well, and CFI should formalize this common sense as well as possible.

While it's clear from the history that CFI has mentioned published sources from the beginning, it's also clear that all sorts of internet postings have been accepted in discussion on RFD, certainly over the past year or so at least. So from my point of view of trying to bring CFI in line with practice, any exclusion of blogs and other random internet sites was a novelty. The only consistent exclusion I was aware of was for obviously self-promotional sites, and I tried to cover this under "independence". There may be other valid exclusions, but there needs to be a clear basis for such exclusion. It's clear to me that "no blogs allowed" is much to broad.

Restricting evidence to published sources would be a change in practice, CFI notwithstanding, and one I personally will argue against. But we can take that to CFI/attestation. If you're participating in that, great. Please understand I had no way of knowing you'd tried and been tripped up. I'm quite hopeful that we can hammer out some sort of consensus there, though perhaps one we'll want to revisit in a few months.

Finally, as to protologisms. I have no problem with the term, but I would prefer to see it restricted to its original meaning, in which someone proposes a term to fill a perceived gap, knowing that no one is using it. This is a siginficantly different process, as far as I can tell, from the usual one by which new words enter the language. Usually someone coins a nonce to fill an immediate need — not an anticipated one as is the case with protologisms. The readers/listeners immediately pick up on the usage, generally without need of a formal definition, and decide to keep using the term. This is neologism, and in a few lucky cases we can see it happening. But usually, by the time something shows up in wiktionary and we search for it, the usage is already well-established. In the case of e-dictionary, for example, the term was clearly (IMHO, at least) in common use when the usages I cited were made. For my money, it's long past proto- or neologism. It's just a word. -dmh 20:32, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Still working - still haven't restored my accidental rollbacks, but I want to just toss in an "ah-haa!" here. How long should it take for a word to go from neologism to "just a word", given it takes a full year for a term to go from complete nonsense to a neologism? IMNSHO, it should be about a decade to become just a word. --Connel MacKenzie 20:57, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

<Jun-Dai 21:31, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)> Just to jump in for a sec. Most of the times people cite Google hits, they also point out that the first few pages of hits are valid in one way or another. There's a clear reason that Google is cited: it's the only mechanism that we have available to easily cover a tremendous number and wide variety of documents in a single search. There's really no alternative, beyond hearsay (which, as you know, is even more the basis of our entries than Google, and not even a little bit more reliable). If Google has 10,000 hits for some token, and most of them are not some kind of company name, or taken from the same (or even same sort of) document, then the information is worth something. It is never proof, but it is reasonably strong evidence--the strongest kind we can give, at any rate.

It seems pretty clear that something like e-business qualifies as a word. It's a word that I detest, but it meets pretty much every criterion that I can think of for a term. It has print usage, it has spoken usage, it is common, it is used in more than one field (granted, it is usually limited to the uber-field of business/computing/economics, but it is generally understood), and the meanings are pretty clearly defined. Leet terminology, on the other hand, is limited to a single subculture, though a few tokens have slipped out into the more mainstreem (1337/l337/leet being one of the most common one. hax0r, pr0n, and the like could also be argued for). In these cases I think some arguments can be made, but one of the problems is that, while the underlying terms might qualify, in many cases the terms are constructed with some permutation of alphanumeric symbols. These do not each indicate a term on their own and they are not recognized as a specific term (i.e., there is no distinction between wareZ and war3z or w4rez or w4r3z. The latter are understood not as recognizable tokens, but as resembling a recognizable token), which makes identifying what the "term" in question is (we can start with leet and warez and list alternate spellings, but where to we go with pr0n, and what about the other variations of recognizable words that have not gained new meaning, as in sp34k in l337 sp34k, or leet speak? The fact that these words do not always have a consistent pronunciation is just another hurdle to overcome). Additionally, many of these terms do not have clearly defined and recognizable meanings, which is an additional argument against their inclusion. This is surely enough material for a whole policy page, even if we agree that it should follow the same basic policies as any other words. Compared to all of this, e-business (32.8 million GHits) and e-commerce are pretty easy. E-dictionary is a little bit harder, but I'd say there are some decent arguments in favor of it (mostly supplied by dmh). E-quaint and its variations, on the other hand, are pretty clearly not ready for Wiktionary. They are on the far side of a threshold that threatens to swamp the Wiktionary with meaningless gibberish. </Jun-Dai>

I'd like to respond to "How long should it take for a word to go from neologism to "just a word", given it takes a full year for a term to go from complete nonsense to a neologism? IMNSHO, it should be about a decade to become just a word."

As far as I can tell, new words never go through a "complete nonsense" stage. As I said, they seem generally to be coined with a clear meaning off the bat, and then find wider usage (or not). I doubt there's any fixed time limit on this process — there are probably documentable cases of words being coined on the spot on live TV or radio and persisting in general use thenceonward.

And here's a handy example. The faux-Bushism misunderestimate debuted on Saturday Night Live (or at least no one to my knowledge has shown an earlier example, even among GWB's recorded utterances; thanks to User:Eean for correcting my initial etymology). It has been use prominently and repeatedly since then, for example in a newspaper column, a published book and an interview with Condoleeza Rice. It was introduced without definition for a particular purpose and has been meaningful — neither nonsense nor gibberish — from the outset.

Except for the unusually broad and quick distribution, this appears to be the typical pattern. In typical cases there would appear to be little room for doubt as to whether a coinage has a definite meaning. The question of attestation has more to do with whether a person encountering the new term might need a general dictionary such as ours to find out that meaning. -dmh 03:09, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The "one year" criterion on CFI is aimed at whether a usage has actually persisted. We don't look for random noise at time T and emerging meaning or somesuch at time T+one year. We look for consistent usages at least a year apart.

Frankly, I don't see a lot of benefit to trying to classify words as "neologism", "real word", "marketing bullshit" or whatever. We can say with reasonable confidence that people are using a word and surprisingly often work out a coherent definition. That seems good. Going beyond that generally seems to increase the heat/light ratio significantly.

Maybe it would help if I were a bit more explicit that I consider these issues pragmatic. I, too, have opinions about good and bad usage and which words I like and don't like. Many of them may coincide with yours. I have no problem with value judgements in language. I just find that trying to take them into account when deciding whether to delete words or attach disclaimers to them generally does not work well. -dmh 16:51, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

My point back there was that I probably wouldn't have even considered nomionating it for deletion if people were not in the practice of removing neologism and protologism tags. Hmmm. Maybe I would have tried anyway. But if it were standard practice to just flag it as unattested or protologism or neologism it would be a lot easier to just move on. Having a ten-year margin of error for neologisms covers people who don't use the internet, as well as those (such as myself) who say that new words are by nature of being new, unworthy of having an official-looking entry that does not indicate it's freshness. --Connel MacKenzie 04:45, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

<Jun-Dai 03:12, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)> How long has google been a verb? It would be (somewhat) hard to argue that at this point it's not a word deserving an entry. </Jun-Dai>

I would most certainly call the verb google a neologism (now that the meaning of protologism has been clarified for me.) Does that make it not a word? Of course not. It classifies it as a new word. --Connel MacKenzie 04:45, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I have no problem at all with tagging entries with some indication of how and when a term has been used. In fact, I'd like to see more of it. What I don't like is 1) Tagging an entry RFD instead of adding a note to the effect that "this term appears to be recent and has not yet been sighted in widely-published printed sources" or similar. 2) The use of clearly POV terms like "nonsense", "illiterate" or conversely "respectable" in discussions of whether to record a usage. 3) The use of designations like "verifiable" and "published source" without any specific criteria behind them.

If you'd like to help hammer out some new designations to fit into the existing category system, I would be all for it. Note that we currently have an "internet" designation for terms like IRC, email and so forth. Similarly, IRC is its own designation (I believe). These don't really need to be tagged as new, since their whole context is new. OTOH, dated quotes never hurt. On the other hand, something like aretegenic is a new term in an old and specialized field, probably not in general use even within that field (despite some friendly mentions by authors other than its inventor). It should probably be tagged as "neologism". I would tend to think that neologism is more a matter of degree of adoption than chronological age, but we can talk about that.

I'd much rather talk about any of this than some of the other topics we've covered. -dmh 05:32, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

May I remind everybody that this discussion is about E-Dictionary/E-dictionary and that the above wide-rangeing discussion will be removed when the dust has cleared. If anyone feels that some of this should be saved elsewhere please copy the discussion to that page before it disappears. Eclecticology 20:39, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)

Saving this page does not mean that every "e-" page will be saved. At some point limits about which of these we keep need to be established. Eclecticology 17:29, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)