Talk:Dog

RFD discussion: May–July 2020

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Dog

A name given to a dog. The citation refers to someone "muttering to his dog, called Dog". Not too convincing. I think you could call any animal by the term for that animal, without it being a name (compare "hey man!" and "come here, boy"). Equinox ◑ 12:28, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Delete for nominator's reason. — SGconlaw (talk) 12:31, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

This was originally made by Wonderfool as a copyright trap. --Undurbjáni (talk) 00:28, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

@Undurbjáni How do you know that? @Equinox need more cites? Alexis Jazz (talk) 07:58, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

It looks like a WF comment... DonnanZ (talk) 08:07, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

@Donnanz you presumably mean the edit comment "Hmmm, this is dodgy" for the page creation? But if for the sake of argument we assume the entry was created by WF, how did Undurbjáni determine it was intended as a copyright trap? Alexis Jazz (talk) 08:12, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

I don't know whether Undurbjáni is WF, but the comment made is typical of WF. DonnanZ (talk) 09:47, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Whoops, I got it all backwards. It's interesting that a recently registered account would reference WF. Alexis Jazz (talk) 10:43, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Well, WF is never dull. All of his previous accounts have been blocked, so his current accounts are always recently registered. Weird, but our arrangement with WF has enough benefits in balance that the community is okay with it. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:57, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

We had a dog named "Doggie" years ago. Like Dog, not very original. DonnanZ (talk) 08:07, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Keep, forgot to "vote". More cites can be found if needed. Alexis Jazz (talk) 16:42, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Delete. Ridiculous. Mihia (talk) 21:36, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

@Mihia Sorry, but I don't understand. Is Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion#Given and family names restricted to humans? Because cites are not the problem. Should we indeed not add Tiger, Tigger and Smudge as common cat names and remove that sense from Kitty? Bye bye Fido and Spot? Alexis Jazz (talk) 13:59, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Dogs can be called almost anything, like Pooch, Mutt, Hound, Woof, Boo, Thing, You, Oi, etc. etc. I support including "proper" standard dog names such as Fido or Rover, but not every single daft name that we can attest has ever been given to a dog or other pet animal. To me, this entry seems like someone's joke. Mihia (talk) 17:06, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

@Mihia: And who gets to decide which names are proper and which ones are daft? You? What will the criteria be? And will this apply only to animal names or all names? Because I think Summer is a pretty daft given name. I know there are several notable people called Summer, but it's still a daft name. And did you realize that the name Dog is given to animals that aren't dogs on various occasions? (several citations) Alexis Jazz (talk) 19:59, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

If the meaning is as diluted as "a name for anything" then it feels even less includible somehow! Equinox ◑ 20:04, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Animals are not "anything". This name can be attested, Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion includes names and I haven't heard a logical argument as to why Dog shouldn't be included. "not too convincing", "ridiculous" and the unsubstantiated vote from PUC are not logical arguments. You should be able to explain why you believe Dog fails Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion. Alexis Jazz (talk) 23:40, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

There comes a point where we have to use our common sense, rather than insisting on seeing some written policy that explains why "Dog = A name given to a dog" is a stupid entry that we should delete. Mihia (talk) 00:35, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

People do give their animals all kinds of names that are normally used for people or for various things- even random words like "moreover". These generally aren't specifically animal names, just arbitrarily pressed into use in that context. To put it another way: there are lots of names of dogs that aren't dog names.

People give names to estates/plantations/residences (Tara, Blair House, Buckingham Palace), cars (General Lee, Eleanor, Christine), ships, swords, horses (Affirmed, Seattle Slew, Secretariat), etc- even certain body parts. These aren't of lexical interest as names for any of those, though there are some that have acquired lexical meaning beyond their literal reference. CFI doesn't explicitly address those, but having "a name for x" entries when there are three unrelated x with that name is just an invitation for compulsive people to stuff our entries with random trivia. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:55, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: So.. raise the number of required cites for names until it no longer includes "Dog" but still includes "Fido"? Alexis Jazz (talk) 08:19, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Contested entries would have to be decided here, as with any other case. Mihia (talk) 20:12, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Delete. PUC – 20:01, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Delete, Fido is a name commonly associated with being a dog name as opposed to a name for anything else, while Dog is just the noun we use to classify this animal, except used as a name. I can guarantee you that there are humans out with the nickname "Dog" (comparing them to the animal, not like dawg), but that doesn't mean this should be an entry either. I can also tell you there are probably a few people who have named their dog "Cat" or their cat "Dog" (maybe because they had traits associated with the other animal, or they named it this just to give it a funny or outlandish name). Going by this example alone, you can see how the reasons behind a naming like this can be quite ambiguous and thus not lexical enough for our inclusion. PseudoSkull (talk) 03:36, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Delete. Typical of the time-wasting tomfoolery of this so-called "useful" dictionary in recent years. Newbies who don't use the brains that God gave them. -- ALGRIF talk 12:40, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

@Algrif: I am usually the last person to call for professionalism on a wiki, but please everyone, just stop. This is embarrassing. Alexis Jazz (talk) 13:12, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

Having an entry "Dog = A name given to a dog" is certainly embarrassing. Mihia (talk) 22:13, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

I've stricken my vote. There is something in CFI that likely excludes Dog as a name:

With respect to names of persons or places from fictional universes, they shall not be included unless they are used out of context in an attributive sense.

This means that in the case of Dog the name would have to be attested in non-fictional works because nobody will use it in an attributive sense. Attestation in non-fictional works may or may not be possible, but I can't be bothered to try. I just wish someone had referenced this instead of calling names. Alexis Jazz (talk) 13:12, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, all too many editors recently pretend that CFI does not exist, and seem to think that "Ridiculous" is somehow a rationale for deletion. It is not since we surely do include all sorts of ridiculous terms that meet CFI. Another editor seems to think that "Delete." is somehow a valid rationale for RFD purposes. I cherish the hope that we can raise the level of discussion in our RFD process. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:17, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

I almost never see you challenge unmotivated "keep" votes, even when valid arguments for deletion have been brought forth. This should not come as too surprising, since you almost always cast "keep" votes yourself. Double standard?

Also, as RFD seem, over the years, to have become plain votes rather than argumented discussions, I indeed don't feel the need to try to formulate a rationale (most of the time). That's unfortunate, but I'm lazy and don't want to think. If you want to force me to do it, then fix the RFD procedure. PUC – 10:57, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

In my view, people who are lazy to think should abstain from RFD and from any other deliberative process, especially people who have not seen a paying customer in their lives. On the other hand, "delete per nom" is pretty effortless and delegates the articulation job to someone else. The RFD procedure is nowhere defined and therefore, it probably does not need so much of a fix as a rejuvenation. Part of that rejuvenation are posts like the one I made above. As for the double standard, it may be true that I more often challenge problematic posts supporting deletion than those supporting keeping; someone else can pick up the job for the keepers, and I remember some did, complaining of pro-keeping non-reasons. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:17, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

• Keep in RFD: no CFI-relevant rationale for deletion provided. But "muttering to his dog, called Dog" is a mention, not use, and would not count toward attestation. I do not remember Czech dogs being called pes, as an analogue. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:21, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Just a note to anyone who has been following, or has bothered to reach the end of this over-long discussion --- Please, please, please check out the HUGE number of red-links available on the project. You can spend the rest of the year happily whittling away at those "real" words and phrases, and still have a mountain of stuff left for the next lockdown. Not to mention the "real" words that haven't even made it to a red-link! Thanks. -- ALGRIF talk 14:53, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

I rather think that we should administer each RFD on its merit. RFDs do distract us from creating new entries, but the RFD process is worth it, preventing entries from being deleted on administrator whim or assessment, allowing keeping the likes of master's thesis or all the translation hubs that were saved in RFD before translation hub became a policy. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:46, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

• Delete. Should we also have entries for Cow, Bunny, and Antelope? [1] No, an ordinary common noun capitalized so it can be pressed into service as a proper noun is not a separate term but just a somewhat creative use of the ordinary term. In English, this can be done for any familiar animal and for many other words as well. —Granger (talk · contribs) 02:32, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Delete per Granger. Children's books are a rich source of examples. One can do this with any animal name: "Come here, Giraffe, said Hippo and Gazelle, urgently." "All on his own, Aardvark looekd very sad." - -sche (discuss) 20:48, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

RFD failed - Overwhelming consensus for deletion. PseudoSkull (talk) 06:41, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

RFD discussion: May 2020–October 2021

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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Dog (2)

RFD sense:

A nickname for a person, especially a tough man

1994, Larry Woody, A Dixie Farewell: The Life and Death of Chucky Mullins

Brewer, whose coaching nickname is "Dog," recognized that same stubborn, dogged determination in Mullins.

Initially I listed this at RFV, but I have now moved it here as I can't think of a verification that would persuade me that this is a dictionary-worthy item. Nicknames for people are a totally open-ended class, where practically anything might be citable somewhere as a nickname given to someone due to some association. Mihia (talk) 00:09, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Verbs, nouns, adjectives, and manner adverbs are also open sets. You have not provided a rationale for deletion per CFI. DCDuring (talk) 00:20, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

I am not concerned at this stage about whether a relevant rationale for deletion presently exists in the CFI. If people think that we should exclude these kinds of entries, we can try to formulate something for the CFI in due course. Mihia (talk) 17:40, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Is this an attempt at CFI override for this term? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:07, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

As for RFV, 'whose coaching nickname is "Dog,"' is a mention and does not contribute toward attestation. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:17, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

I think "override" is a misnomer. If there is no provision for such cases in the CFI, then there's nothing to override, is there? PUC – 08:51, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

This case is covered by CFI's general rule "This in turn leads to the somewhat more formal guideline of including a term if it is attested and, when that is met, if it is a single word or it is idiomatic". CFI further contains more specific rules that add exclusion beyond the general rule, but none seem to apply. Going by CFI alone (which does have a general rule covering basically everything), the nominated sense would be kept. A proposal to delete the sense anyway is therefore a CFI override. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:09, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Yes, ok. Tells you how much I know about the CFI. PUC – 10:58, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

The most recent keeper for a human nickname that I know of is at Talk:Zizou; Talk:J-Lo passed in 2016. A generic nickname is e.g. in entry Crouchy, "A nickname for somebody with the surname Crouch." We may delete some nicknames (contrary to CFI), but we need to get at least a vague idea by which criteria we pick them; maybe nicknames that are just capitalizations of common nouns would be more liable to deletion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:32, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

And even if we disregard CFI, how can "are a totally open-ended class" be anything like a rationale for deletion? Like DCDuring said, there are all manners of attested open-ended sets of terms. Like, any adjective can have -ness attached in principle, so the set of -ness nouns is open-ended, so let's drop -ness nouns? Any person surname can have -ian attached in principle, so let's drop -ian nouns? What kind of sense does that argument, so often repeated recently, make? --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:48, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

In this particular case, I believe that "open-ended" certainly IS a good rationale. No doubt some people are nicknamed "Peanut" or "Spanner", or "Big Bo" or "Bog Roll" or almost anything you can think of. In my view it is not the job of a dictionary to list every possible example of a nickname that can be found attested. "Standard" nicknames, yes, I would support. For example, I would support keeping Lofty. Personally I think that Dog is insufficiently "standard", but I am not absolutely adamant about this point, and if the consensus is otherwise then I would accept that as a reason to keep. Mihia (talk) 19:44, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

A rationale cannot be good in a particular case; to the contrary, the validity or viability of a rationale as a working principle is tested by trying to apply it to as broad range of cases as possible and see where it breaks down. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:50, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't agree at all. A rationale can be valid in one case but not apply to another. Mihia (talk) 14:01, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

A rationale for a particular case C is a statement of principle P such that P applies to C. P may apply to case C but not apply to case D; so far we agree. But my point is that principle P can only be accepted as part of a valid rationale if its application to a large range of cases fails to produce problems, or falsifiers of principle P. The general validity of principle P cannot be tested on a single case; it has to be tested on the whole universe of cases to which it could be applied. The principle implied--and please provide a different principle that you have in mind--is that "Any term that is part of an open-ended set of terms should be excluded". That is an obviously untenable principle. Maybe you have a different principle in mind, but I do not know what that principle says. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:53, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

I am not talking about a "general principle". I am talking about why we should not include every nickname that we can find attested, because it would get ridiculous. I am talking about the need to somehow narrow down the inclusions so that we can include only "standard" nicknames, however this can be best arranged. I honestly do not understand why this concept is so hard to grasp, even if someone should happen to disagree with it. Mihia (talk) 17:35, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Tentatively, perhaps what we are grasping at is the idea that if a potential sense of an entry could apply to a very large number, if not all, entries, then that may not be worth including. One example is "a mention of the word the" in the entry the, which we have discussed before (e.g., "There is one the in this sentence"). Another might be the matter under discussion now, as senses like "a name given to a pet" or "a nickname for a person" could apply to many, many nouns or adjectives, and perhaps are to be distinguished from more "name-like" names like Fido or Monty. Perhaps for this reason names need to be given special treatment. Just off the top of my head; please help to refine the thought. — SGconlaw (talk) 15:41, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

So if sense line "first name" applies to a very large number of terms, these terms should be excluded? Or if sense line "English surname" applies to a very large number of terms, these terms should be excluded? (The mention thing above does not seem to work anyway: a mention of a term does not invoke the semantics of the term, and therefore, e.g. the word "the" does not have any sense "the word 'the'".) --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:19, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Initially, I thought the comparison above (to defining any X as "an occurrence of the word X") was suspect because this seems like a much smaller class, but I concede that I can see how it's fairly open-ended; one could nickname a person who habitually wheezes Wheeze, nickname a (former) car mechanic Motor Oil, nickname someone with glasses Four-Eyes, nickname a proponent of hydroxychloroquine Hydroxychloroquine or Mr. Hydroxychloroquine, etc, etc, and at least in non-durable media I can find nearly all of these. And in cases (unlike Fido, but like wheeze, four-eyes, etc) where the lowercase term exists to explain the basic semantic meaning, it does not strike me as worthwhile or valuable for a dictionary to treat the capitalized form as a lexical item meaning "A nickname." in all cases. So I am weakly inclined to delete. But I would prefer if we could come up with a rule, about what nicknames we want to include and what we don't. - -sche (discuss) 20:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

@-sche: would it be too broad to say that in general an ordinary adverb, adjective, common noun, or verb should not be defined as a nickname? If so, what exceptions (if any) to this rule are desirable? — SGconlaw (talk) 20:54, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Grace is a given name based on noun grace; there is Faith, Hope and Charity. Should given names be given a license different from nicknames? And, assuming for the sake of analysis that the dubious argument via open-endedness is accepted, how open-ended really are the WT:ATTEST-compliant nicknames created by capitalizing a noun? What are some ten attested examples of such nicknames, attested in sources that meet the WT:ATTEST requirements? And isn't there a generic rule creating open-ended set of nicknames like J-Lo, K-Stew, Scar-Jo, Sam-Cam, Li-Lo, Le-Le, Ri-Ri, Su-Bo, A-Rod, K-Rod, and R-Pattz? --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:16, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

I think nicknames like J-Lo, etc., are not problematic because they are not ordinary adverbs, adjectives, common nouns, or verbs. But it's true that names like Grace create an issue. Your preference would be to allow any nickname that passes our general WT:ATTEST rule? — SGconlaw (talk) 13:37, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

I guess that would be my preference unless someone presents a good rationale for doing otherwise and thus for overriding CFI. How large is the set of capitalized-noun nicknames meeting WT:ATTEST, approximately, and what are some ten examples, or at least five examples? --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:41, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Delete. Literally anything can be a nickname for someone. Ƿidsiþ 10:55, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Delete. My son's basketball coach's nickname is "Big Dog". Big whoop. Facts707 (talk) 02:16, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

As for the quote, it explains the meaning with "dogged determination". I think any use of Crouchy would probably explain why a given person would have such a nickname, "because he's a baseball catcher on summer weekends" or "because his last name is Crouch". The first three quotes at Crouchy explicitly mention the subject's last name. Facts707 (talk) 00:44, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I think a better comparison than the one by SGconlaw of words being used with the senses "an instance of <word>" is attributive nouns. Just like any noun can be transformed into a nickname, any noun can be used attributively, such as in paper cutter. Attributive nouns are an example of an open ended class that have been considered to not meet the criteria for inclusion and, as far as I can tell, are just considered a part of English grammar. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 17:46, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

• Leaning delete. I think that there may be a limited class of people for whom "Dog" is treated as a de facto "real" name (e.g., Dog the Bounty Hunter), but I can't find other instances on Wikipedia. bd2412 T 16:42, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Deleted. bd2412 T 01:55, 13 October 2021 (UTC)