Talk:smail

RFV

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification.

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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--Yair rand 01:28, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Verb cited, IMHO. DCDuring TALK 02:42, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Doesn't seem like dated is an appropriate tag to me. DAVilla 07:00, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

I thought that would get a reaction. What amazed me is that it was almost impossible to find a valid citation at usenet in the last five years. I may have missed something among all the uses there of "smail" to mean "smile".

Noun cited, IMHO. Wording adjusted, context provided. DCDuring TALK 02:58, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Seems to only appear in the phrase "by smail". DAVilla 07:00, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

That was how I searched because of all the false hits due to the "smail" program included with Debian. DCDuring TALK 11:30, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

I tried to find use outside of that phrase and came up empty-handed. DAVilla 06:23, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

The trick is to try other likely phrases that filter out enough bad hits while leaving in enough good ones. (Oh, and the other trick is to quickly skim a page of ten hits to quickly rule out the eight or nine bad ones. Even the best/luckiest searches are likely to require a lot of that.) After a few false starts (such as "my smail" — too many bad hits — and "email or smail" — no good ones), I hit upon three good ones in a row: "smail address", "junk smail", and "smail order". I've added one cite from each. "Smail box" also has good hits, but I think we have enough variety even without it. :-)   Interestingly, "in the smail" (cf. "the check is in the mail") does not get any relevant hits, whereas I did find some hits where "smail" meant "snail-mail address" (cf. "I don't have his e-mail", *"I don't have his mail"), which I think means that "smail" takes its range of senses/grammatical frames from "e-mail" rather than directly from "mail". But of course, "e-mail" obviously managed to develop its range of senses/grammatical frames without a previous non-"mail" analogue, so who knows? —Ruakh_TALK 02:45, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Should we add the definition of the unix program? DAVilla 07:00, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

IMO no because that's not a "word" with a definition, but the arbitrary name of a product — commercial or not. Equinox ◑ 22:03, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Since it's been cited, there is no need to keep this open. Closed as cited. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 03:53, 19 September 2011 (UTC)