Talk:make a killing

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(For Citations:make a killing)

Nominated for a speedy delete, but seems to merit a discussion. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:08, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't know. The quotes are interesting in as much as they show the possible/probable etymology of the the idiom. Though etymologies of idioms can easily seem to be folk pseudo etymologies, it seems unwikilike to exclude idioms from etymological discussions. Such efforts seem like a good path to recruit new blood, sorely needed. A proper heading on the Citations page and a reference to it under an Etymology heading would probably be useful.

OTOH, The quotations have little to do with current usage and don't belong in usage notes. They don't attest to the current idiomatic meaning.

Keep clean up. DCDuring TALK 11:20, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Delete citations and usage notes. I find it excessively speculative, even over-the-top, to treat these quotations as illuminating an etymology. I moved one quotation from this page to a usage note in the main entry, just to retain a minimal acknowledgment of this early "buffalo hunting" usage (although I never would have added any of this "buffalo hunting" stuff myself). The remaining quotations are almost all inappropriate since they do not intend the idiom being defined and, in addition, the variant forms of the term in these quotations contain extra words (showing that this usage is not even a set phrase). I don't see either the citations page and or the usage note as contributing substantively to the entry. There's nothing to clean up here -- just remove this stuff. -- WikiPedant 17:22, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

But the actual idiom allows extra words; see google books:"made a huge killing", for example. —Ruakh_TALK 17:57, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Hello Ruakh -- Yes, there may be alternative forms of the actual idiom. But these quotations do not represent the idiom. These quotations are literal assertions, and when you've got variant forms of a literal SoP expression, you've got nothing or at least nothing (no idiom, no set phrase) that belongs in a dictionary. -- WikiPedant 05:27, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Kept, may merit an RFC but that depends on whether it has been improved since the start of this debate. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:10, 21 November 2009 (UTC)