Talk:child pornography

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child pornography

SOP.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:08, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

• Delete. NISoP. Replace with {{only in}} to suitable WP target. DCDuring TALK 17:42, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Not sure, child pornography (as the entry says) can refer to pornography with minors in it. A 17 year old isn't a child, not usually anyway. If it were attestable with that sense (minors instead of children) I'd keep it. Otherwise yes, delete. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:06, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

• keep. Ƿidsiþ 14:21, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

pornography is as good an example as any of how some noun-noun compounds are formed. It occupies the second position and is the head. The attributive noun in this case simple differentiates by subject matter. What kind of presentation would obviate the need for separate entries for each of the numerous and tediously repetitious and uninformative entries for each individual attestable compound noun? We don't have a good entry format for constructions of the form "X pornography". A presentation of collocations of pornography might work. I think that a usage note or a sense on each class of compound construction would illustrate the general principles of how compounds are constructed using "pornography" as head. Those principles carry over to all the other nouns that form compounds the same way. Over time we could probably have a good number of patterns for forming compounds that might serve users better than entries that seemed to imply that there was something idiomatic about such normal constructions. DCDuring TALK 14:59, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Any compound which is noun-noun rather than adjective-noun should make us stop and think about how predictable it really is. A lot of what is in a dictionary is probably tedious and repetitious – but that's the job. How are non-native speakers to know whether we use this phrase or not? There are any number of possible alternatives (juvenile pornography etc) which almost no one uses. Good dictionaries record the existence of such terms even when their definition is fairly obvious (the OED has this, for what it's worth). For that matter, how are native speakers supposed to know how to translate it into other languages? Ƿidsiþ 15:17, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I could see your point about relative frequency if only we now did so for any synonymous entries, even those for individual words.

Juvenile pornography and kiddie porn look easily attestable. In our current practice, how do we help someone learn which synonyms are more common? I see no groundswell of contributor interest in substituting corpus-based facts for opinions based on the accident of their own experience. Including SoP terms simply multiplies the number of entries for which we do not provide such information. DCDuring TALK 15:35, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

You're right, they are both attestable and as such we should probably have them (I didn't think ‘juvenile porn’ would get many results, but maybe it gets enough). My point is not really about relative frequency – just enough frequency that we can conclude that a term is definitely in use with a specific meaning. Another point is that despite what you say earlier, not all "X pornography" compounds work like this, for instance the OED also has an entry for computer pornography, which of course doesn't feature computers stripped down to their circuit boards. Ƿidsiþ 15:50, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Looking at COCA, child pornography is by far the most common collocation of pornography. What I find telling is that coordinate terms for it include the contrasting terms adult pornography (pornography featuring adults) and youthful-adult pornography (pornography featuring adults of childlike appearance). This suggests that the term may often be legal in its most common usage in a general context. Relatively little usage at COCA is of other subject matter ("rape pornography" and "business pornography" (really!)). Three collocations (internet, video, and magazine) involved the format, presumably where "computer" and "web" would fit (but they were not found there with multiple occurrences). "Porn" has more subject-matter compounds, "child", "kiddie", "s/m", "kid"; but also "reality", "bike", "death", "disaster", and "food". Of these last five, only "reality porn" involves human sexuality in any but the most extended Freudian sense.

My conclusion is that child pornography and its synonyms and possibly the terms involving contrasting actor types would merit inclusion, but that the rationale would have to be the legal one, as MG had suggested. The other occurrences at COCA fall into the genre/subject matter and format compound categories don't seem to belong in a dictionary that requires effort to maintain it. Keep DCDuring TALK 17:45, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Kept. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)