Talk:cut a deal

RFD discussion: June–July 2023

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

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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cut a deal

A collocation, but not a lexicalized one: see "cut a raw deal", "cut several deals", "cut a few deals", "cut a fantastic deal", etc. PUC – 18:13, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Keep - unusual and not obvious use of cut and specific use of deal. Facts707 (talk) 13:54, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

You're not paying attention: should we create entries for cut a few deals, cut several deals? PUC – 14:17, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

The plural would be cut deals. This is no different than having jump a claim or turn a phrase, even though it is linguistically possible to jump a few claims or turn several phrases. bd2412 T 05:23, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

• Keep per the comparable existence of jump a claim and turn a phrase. bd2412 T 05:24, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

  This is not an argument in favour of keeping this entry. jump a claim is now nominated as well, for the same reason. PUC – 15:31, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

  Then why haven't you nominated turn a phrase? How about cut in line? Or walk the dog? bd2412 T 20:44, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  Aside from the fact that I don't see any parallel between cut a deal, cut in line and walk the dog, the latter has several idiomatic meanings, so I see no reason for nominating it. I'm undecided about turn a phrase, but have a feeling it's slightly more entryworthy than this, so I don't wish to nominate it right now.

  More to the point, should I go through Category:English multiword terms every time I'm nominating something for deletion now? Is there a rule that says we should only discuss things in batch? PUC – 10:56, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

  What you should do is use some common sense before assuming that it is helpful to the reader to direct them to figure out which of a dozen senses of term "A" combine with which of a dozen senses of term "B" to yield the term as they come across it. The dictionary is not a place where people go to look at things they know the meaning of and nod at their correctness. It's a place for people who don't know the meaning of a phrase. Gaming the deletion of entries with these constraints merely punishes people for being less privileged than yourself in that regard. bd2412 T 13:16, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

  I don't see how I am "privileged"; I'm an English learner like any other. What I need is a dictionary that helps me understand what words mean. What I don't need is a dictionary giving me the false impression of discovering a new idiom when in reality I'm simply dealing with a collocation, something that admits more variation than an idiom does. (Creating entries for all the possible variants is, by the way, highly uneconomical.)

  What I also don't need is a dictionary dumbing it down to me or to others. Adding cut a deal as a collocation at deal and at cut under the appropriate senses does the job perfectly (CTRL+F isn't harder than entering something in the search bar, I think), and has the added benefit of letting people see how the collocation is built, instead of just giving it to them as an unparsable block.

  Also, I would appreciate if you'd stop insulting my intelligence by presenting a mere opinion as "common sense"; I recall making that request to you before. Yes, there is justification for creating entries for collocations; there's justification for not doing so as well. PUC – 15:10, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

  Look, if you tell the reader, "just go look up 'cut' and 'deal', and you're not getting any more help than that", you are effectively telling them that the phrase means "To perform an incision on a division, portion, share, part, or piece", because that is what they are going to see when they look up those constituent parts. We have twenty verb senses of "cut" alone, and twenty-two verb-modifiable senses of deal, meaning that there are 440 possible meanings of the phrase by combination of terms alone. None of those captures the informal and vernacular nature of the phrase. The reason you think the meaning is obvious is solely because you have already been taught which senses apply, in a way a dictionary user by definition would not, or they would not be looking up the term. bd2412 T 21:39, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

• "The reason you think the meaning is obvious": nowhere have I said or implied I consider the meaning obvious.
• "there are 440 possible meanings of the phrase by combination of terms alone. None of those captures the informal and vernacular nature of the phrase": this is false. We have relevant senses (which I did not add myself) both at cut (sense 14) and deal (sense 5).
• I'm relieved to see you're not condescending only towards me, but towards learners in general. Ah, learners... Those automata, who go about randomly combining all possible meanings of component parts and cannot make sense of anything on their own. Those idiots, who are quite incapable of reading and using a normal dictionary entry with more than one sense. And it's not like we have a technical solution at hand to make that insurmountable task a bit easier, right? PUC – 23:22, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

• The "deal (sense 5)" to which you have pointed is defined as: "(baseball) To pitch". bd2412 T 00:23, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
  • What better way to end a discussion than with a bit of bad faith? PUC – 02:37, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
    • Click the link. You pointed it to the section to which you pointed it. No one made you do that, but it frankly illustrates how much easier it is for the reader to have a separate distinct definition provided then to have to parse through the wall of text that a word with dozens of senses presents. Whether the reader can figure it out on their own given time, surely you can see that it is more convenient to the reader (and the editor collecting citations) to have everything in one compact place. bd2412 T 05:30, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
      • I pointed to deal#English, nothing more, nothing less. I didn't point to any particular section.
      • "it frankly illustrates how much easier it is for the reader to have a separate distinct definition provided then to have to parse through the wall of text": Yes, you've already made that point. The question in our latest exchange was whether there is an appropriate sense somewhere. You stated that there isn't, which is false. I will dispel that statement again: see etymology 2, noun section, sense 5: "an agreement between parties; an arrangement." I'm getting tired of all this sophistry. PUC – 08:57, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
        • My statement, which you even quoted, was that None of those captures the informal and vernacular nature of the phrase, which is correct because the definition at "deal" does not indicate such (and cannot, because the individual term is not informal and vernacular, while the phrase as a whole is. bd2412 T 18:07, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
          • The relevant sense at cut is labelled as "slang", which, by corollary, makes the entire phrase "slang" as well. I don't know whether "slang" is a more appropriate qualifier than "informal", maybe that should be changed. But regardless of the label, the point stays the same: the vernacular aspect can still be explained at the level of the component parts. PUC – 19:34, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
            • I would question whether the component parts can ever properly capture the vernacular nature of the combination. Is every use of the components going to be equally vernacular? bd2412 T 04:34, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Just because a phrase is VERB a PHRASE doesn't mean they are all equivalent to each other - each such construction must be analyzed on it's own terms and being of such a nature doesn't inherently mean that a term is worthy of inclusion or exclusion; it's construction doesn't determine it's entry~-worthiness. Vininn126 (talk) 10:54, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

• Keep per references added under "Further reading". DonnanZ (talk) 08:05, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Keep per WT:LEMMING. Binarystep (talk) 05:24, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

Keep seems to be the template, the other mentioned phrases ("cut a raw deal" etc) are derivatives. – Jberkel 08:19, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

• Keep. Young children and language learners might not all see what looks so obvious to those of us who've achieved fluency, and they are the ones who need the dictionary. —Soap— 11:47, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Kept per consensus. PUC – 19:23, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Do we know the etymology of this, btw? In checking whether other words could be substituted in place of deal, I noticed that cut a treaty and cut an agreement, although they technically exist, seem to exist only in the context of being direct translations of a Hebrew idiom (itself based on physically cutting up an animal to mark a treaty); is this a calque of the Hebrew/Biblical phrase, or unrelated? - -sche (discuss) 07:18, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Here's a stack exchange discussing the question. I've also found this. Could someone with access to the OED check if it says something? PUC – 07:33, 2 July 2023 (UTC)