Talk:sweaty

RFV discussion: February 2021

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sweaty

Noun: "One who is sweaty." Not the Internet slang sense that is a misspelling of "sweetie". Equinox ◑ 18:59, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

cited Kiwima (talk) 21:09, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

But it's a standard substantivisation of an adjective. It is not lexicalised. You can do this for any adjective other than past participles or set forms (the blind). Do we keep substantivisations? 2001:8000:1588:B800:285A:B9EE:A50F:8970 09:02, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

At Talk:sick#RFD_discussion:_September–December_2020 it was "agreed" generally that we should not list noun senses formed with the definite article that refer to people of a certain type generally as a group (e.g. "the sick", "the poor" etc.), as this is a totally open-ended set. I don't think this decision was intended to extend to countable cases such as "a sweaty = One who is sweaty", which to me seems less obviously universally applicable. Mihia (talk) 11:02, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't know if "a sweaty" alone would prove noun-ness, but I agree with that was said in the section above this (misandric), if a term is inflected as a noun, then the way things are currently set up / handled it needs a noun section, even if we want to reduce the definitions to some templatized pointer to the "normal" POS like with German gerunds (etc), which we might want to discuss doing. I am reminded of the RFD discussions of whether baby was an adjective (Talk:baby, Talk:baby dyke) : if it inflected, as in "she's a babier (more newly out) lesbian than Ijeoma" or "Kim is the babyest gay of all, having only come out just now!", we'd have to view it as an adjective. On which note, "babier" and google books:"babyest" do seem to exist... I've added two adjective senses to baby, presuming that the existence of citations proving adjectivalness moots the prior RFD. - -sche (discuss) 18:04, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

I feel like this speaks to a larger issue of ad hoc language, which I'm surprised CFI doesn't address in any way. That a term is attested in 3 independent sources could be because it's a word that spread naturally from speaker to speaker and became a bona fide part of the lexicon. But it could also just be the case that 3 people independently came up with the word using a mechanical process to fill some need on the spot. For example, I can easily find 3+ citations for cheeselover, gold-lover, and trainlover. Should we really have entries for these? What about puddingesque, or brotherish, or... good lord, we actually do have an entry for asparagus-like. And those are all attestable in books. If we turn to the wilds of social media, it gets even scarier. I've been doing some experiments recently looking at offensive compounds on Reddit. Here's a random selection of compounds which occur in at least 10 Reddit comments: jizzbro, jerkmonkey, crapcunt, wankwagon, slutburger, whorecake. In total, my dataset has >2000 compounds appearing in at least 10 comments, and only about 350 of them have Wiktionary entries. (These examples all relate to morphological derivation, but the same idea extends to the "verbing weirds language" phenomenon of putting a word to work as a different part of speech on an ad hoc basis, as with sweaty.) I don't have a suggestion for how this could be addressed via policy, it's just something that's been floating around in my head for a while. Colin M (talk) 10:46, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

I have previously pontificated at length about e.g. "cheeselover" and similar. asparagus-like can be deleted as hyphenated SoP, but then people like to find "asparaguslike" and invoke "COALMINE". It is ridiculous. We need a better way to deal with blatantly universal combining elements, such as "like" and "lover". Mihia (talk) 00:32, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure why this is such a problem. It does not hurt to have these words. They are not incorrect. Kiwima (talk) 01:10, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

"Does not hurt" and "not incorrect" are not criteria for inclusion, and indeed could be claimed for many of the sum-of-parts terms that we routinely delete. Hyphenated "-like" and "-lover" compounds are usually blatant and transparent SoP that can indeed be deleted under present rules. The fact that these are sometimes written closed is an awkward complication but does not fundamentally alter their SoP-ness. Mihia (talk) 22:13, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

I think I agree with your wanting to get rid of adjectives used as nouns when there is just the form of "the unwashed", "the poor", "the elite", etc. But when there are plurals as well, as we have in these two examples, then I think you are genuinely moving into noun territory. And yes, "does not hurt" is not a criterion for inclusion - it is an argument against exclusion. As I said under "misandric" above, you can bring these words up under requests for deletion, but these two do pass verification. Kiwima (talk) 22:18, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, we are talking at cross-purposes here. My recent posts were off-topic, unrelated to "sweaty", "misandric" and the like, but addressing another point that Colin M made. Mihia (talk) 22:29, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 19:43, 14 February 2021 (UTC)