Talk:dearth

RFC discussion: April 2011

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dearth

Sense: A period or condition when food is rare and hence expensive; famine.

I no longer understand which forum is appropriate to challenge what seem to me to be erroneously worded senses, especially in cases where evidence might be produced contradicting my claim of error. So, I try this one.

I don't think that "period or" belongs in the definition. Others may differ. Authority or citations would help settle the matter. DCDuring TALK 01:57, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

google books:"during a dearth" has quite a few hits that use "dearth" where I would have used "period of dearth". See e.g. this one. —Ruakh_TALK 15:07, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

By the way, regarding which forum to use: one approach would be to split it into two senses, one for "period" and one for "condition", and then list the former at RFV to see if periods of famine are ever referred to as "dearths". (I think the "period" sense would easily pass; and surprisingly, based on the cites I've seen, the "period" and "condition" really seem to be a single sense that spans both viewpoints — not what I had initially expected — so after it passed RFV I would probably re-merge them and add some more "condition"-y cites so as not to give the wrong impression.) —Ruakh_TALK 21:54, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Based on earlier discussion, should I try to get empirical work done on RfC and RfD? Based on observation I had concluded that RfV caused some actual empirical effort, whereas RfD caused occasional resort to authority, but mostly chin-flapping and voting; RfC caused formating, sometimes sense revision that mysteriously bypassed RfD and RfV, and sometimes RfD and RfV. RfT leads to no specific action, and so seems best for matters that are unlikely to lead to one of the others.

So, would flood#Noun, war#Noun, mining#Noun and all such non-point-event (durative?) nouns (and -ing forms?) need a similar rewording? DCDuring TALK 22:58, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree with your observations about forums other than RFV. RFV is the only forum that consistently combines attention-to-reality with actually-accomplishing-things. Where we differ is in the conclusion we draw: you conclude that when reality is relevant, we should use RFV; but I conclude that, since reality is always relevant, the other forums simply fail at life, and we need to be better at them. It would be nice if more people would chime in with their thoughts on the subject(s) . . . anyone? Anyone at all? —Ruakh_TALK 23:47, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

I think RFV and RFD both have quite specific jobs to do, which they do more or less well depending on who's involved. For general wording issues and definition tweaking I would use the Tea Room, personally, though in cases like this it could be seen as an RFV issue. Ƿidsiþ 07:12, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

I would have sent the entire sense to RFV, expecting proof of the "condition" part to be found. If proof of the meaning "period" hadn't also been found, I would have rewritten the definition to remove that part. - -sche (discuss) 00:06, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

I didn't want to waste time on citing the whole sense, when only the one element seemed questionable to me (and to other dictionaries, I might add). To me that seems to be an RfV matter. Whether one is going after a headword's language section, a PoS, a sense, or a portion of a sense, RfV seems appropriate. OTOH, generalizing senses, rewording for substitutability, cleaning up countability/comparability/inflection, rewording as the correct PoS, reducing wordiness/encyclopedicness (?), and similar more "technical" matters don't seem to warrant RfV. If I see my way clear to how to make and defend such changes, I often do them myself, otherwise I RfC them.

But I got my knuckles rapped for abusing RfV on matters of challenging proper noun definitions that seemed OTT encyclopedic, hence my questions about venue. Is it only proper nouns that are immune to RfV challenge at below the sense level? DCDuring TALK 00:48, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

RFC discussion: April 2013–August 2017

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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dearth

Marked, not listed. Quotations need sorting out. H. (talk) 19:52, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

• Looks good now --New WT User Girl (talk) 10:25, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Scarcity?

I question the inclusion of scarcity on this page.  Scarce, as an economic term, merely means limited in quantity.  Every physical thing on Earth, including water, is scarce; even in the oceans, there is a limit to the supply of water.  (Technically, every physical thing in the universe is scarce.  Even if the universe if infinite, and, thus, has an infinite amount of matter therein, every physical thing is still scarce, as there is a finite limit to the amount of matter that humans can bring into productive use (or even reach) within any given finite length of time.  But I digress.)

The most direct synonym to dearth is lack.  One can say that there is both a dearth and a scarcity of water in the desert, but one would not say the same about water in the ocean; while there is a scarcity of water even in the ocean, there is no dearth (subjectively speaking) of water there.

(If one really wishes synonymise an economic term to dearth, a closer economic term than scarcity would be shortage—although I don't think that term is quite perfect, either.  Shortage, as an economic term, refers to a specific type of dearth, wherein the availability of a given good or service is below the market level (the market level being defined as the level of availability of the good or service in the absence of government intervention into the economy).  A dearth, by contrast, is a dearth regardless of cause, and its applicability to a given thing is less specific, less objective.  I would further caution against synonymising either of these economic terms to dearth; whereas scarcity only refers to physical things, and shortage only to goods and services, one can have a dearth of these things as well as of abstracta, such as a dearth of love or of justice or of patience.  But, still, if one is looking for an economic term to synonymise to dearth, shortage is much closer scarcity.)

allixpeeke (talk) 08:27, 24 February 2019 (UTC)