Talk:delayed puberty

RFD discussion: April–June 2015

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delayed puberty

Sum of parts. Crap formatting. SemperBlotto (talk) 07:56, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

• The Wikipedia entry at W:Delayed puberty would suggest that this is a set phrase in medicine. bd2412 T 13:35, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Delete. Once you strip away the reasons for the delay, which aren't part of the definition, you end up with puberty that's delayed. What else could the words delayed + puberty mean? Renard Migrant (talk) 15:23, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

• Keep (tentative). Inspecting “delayed puberty”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. shows that, although all but two of the apparent hits are redirects to entries for puberty, two medical dictionaries offer explicit definitions, which attempt to give (different) quantitative criteria for what constitutes a sufficient delay to warrant the term. DCDuring TALK 20:09, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

  Delete, and @DCDuring, medical dictionaries are trying to be a useful resource, but we are trying to be faithful to how words are actually used. A physician might want some cutoff so that (s)he can declare a case of delayed puberty, but if the cutoff is inherently arbitrary in overall usage, then we're really just dealing with puberty that's delayed. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:29, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

  • We have context labels specifically because some terms have a specific meaning only in special contexts. Inevitably some terms will have an idiomatic meaning only in a specific context, whereas in general usage they are SoP. This looks like one of them. If we didn't conflate register and topic it would be a trivial matter to point to a category which would be populated solely by terms that had a meaning that only existed for users of the technical vocabulary of the field. And within such a category one could find terms that had only an SoP meaning for users not using the term in its technical sense. DCDuring TALK 22:14, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

• Keep per DCDuring. bd2412 T 02:08, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
• Keep It describes a real medical problem, even it combines two words that make what the combination would mean obvious, as Renard Migrant said. Deleting it would be like deleting other medical problems from wiktionary. --PaulBustion88 (talk) 05:22, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

That was BD2412, not me. Not that it matters. Renard Migrant (talk) 10:50, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

There are three overlapping definitions and the RFD is only on one of them:

1. (Should we delete⁽⁺⁾ this sense?) Puberty beginning at an unusually late age.
2. (medicine) Absence of any signs of puberty by age 14 years in either sex.
3. (medicine) The lack of development of sexual maturation in boys and girls at a chronological age that is 2.5 standard deviations above the mean age at onset of puberty in a population. Delayed puberty can be classified by defects in the hypothalamic LHRH pulse generator, the pituitary gland, or the gonads. These patients will undergo spontaneous but delayed puberty whereas patients with sexual infantilism will not.

If we keep the challenged sense, we should delete the two subsequent ones - right?. --Hekaheka (talk) 23:13, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

It was tagged with {{rfd}} when there was only one definition. DCDuring added two more and (justifiably) did not tag them with rfd. Though I think we should. In fact I'm going to, we're already discussing them so tagging them is more of a formality. Renard Migrant (talk) 10:52, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

• If it really is more than just puberty that is delayed then the medical definitions should be merged/simplified - and the plural corrected. SemperBlotto (talk) 05:46, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
• Delete the challenged sense which can legitimately be regarded as SOP or as superseded by the more precise medical definitions. It also bothers me that the two medical senses are inconsistent and unsupported, but I suppose they should be left and rfv'd. (But remove the encyclopedic material from the 2nd medical sense). -- · (talk) 06:03, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
• @Talking Point:
  1. Inconsistency is not a problem: in a lexicographic context it's also called polysemy.
  2. It isn't a matter of superseding an imprecise definition as identifying and eventually attesting usage of a distinct definition, apparently only in use in a narrow usage community.

@Renard Migrant: Why bother RfD-sense-ing the literal definition. Are you worried that, even if we delete all other definitions, we will retain the entry as a translation target? DCDuring TALK 11:45, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Why add it at all? It's overtly the same as the first definition (by which I mean the initial one, now definition #2) which is 'puberty that is delayed'. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:51, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

@Renard Migrant: I added it as an alternative to the originally challenged definition, because it should be part of a complete entry, provided we can attest to some non-SoP, probably medical definition. Most MWEs benefit from {{&lit}}, if only to remind potential contributors to the entry that we don't add definitions that are SoP. DCDuring TALK 12:18, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't know, maybe it should be deleted. Some of the entries I created were not very good. --PaulBustion88 (talk) 23:55, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Strong delete. Its just the sum of its parts. --PaulBustion88 (talk) 18:04, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

• Merge/keep medical defs. Ƿidsiþ 09:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Senses deleted, except for the merged medical sense, for which there is no consensus to delete. bd2412 T 21:39, 3 June 2015 (UTC)