Talk:neuropathy

Help thread (2008)

i need information on neuropathy but new at this and can't find a full description. — This unsigned comment was added by Katie32~enwiktionary (talk • contribs) at 21:51, 28 September 2008 (UTC).

Try clicking on the Wikipedia link at the top right corner of the neuropathy page. That takes you to the encyclopedic entry. —Stephen 22:03, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Usage notes

@Quercus solaris I'm really sceptical that almost any dictionary user would see these rather opaque notes and think, "oh that was helpful". Brevity is a virtue. Equinox ◑ 21:48, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox: I can see what you mean, regarding general audiences. My interest in such analyses comes from environments where people edit technical documents and end up encountering the limits of word-sense disambiguation and usage differentiation, idiomatic versus etymonic parsing, polysemy, rampant synonymy and latent hyponymy and hypernymy, acronymic homonymy, false friends, false cognates, translation, and related aspects of semantic relations. The interesting thing is that the opacity (which you mentioned) is relative: once past it, one can see a simple clarity that is very much germane to the theme of "which words do people use to mean which concepts, and why?" The example today: How did the word neuropathy end up not having senses related to such neuro (neurology) topics as neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry? Why are two words that "logically should be synonymous" not so? What happens when people start prescribing changes to word choice and usage that (metaphorically) run aground on the aforementioned shoals that they didn't realize were there, but that quite concretely wreck their prescriptive intent? It is interesting to consider how Wiktionary can serve both audiences (the general and the technical) without offending the former. I will keep thinking about it. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:16, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

This response reinforces my point. Equinox ◑ 01:26, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Here's a sturdier reinforcement yet; I lacked time to make it shorter. It's OK if no one reads the rest of this line of thought; it's mainly for me. Yeah, "words are hard", like "math is hard" too, and anything more than one short thought is inscrutable; rest assured, I'm quite familiar with the theme. But by itself it fails to solve some of the problems in various places where I've been paid to solve such problems for people who couldn't solve them for themselves. 'Well OK have a ball then, but take it somewhere else than Wiktionary', perhaps; well OK, I do take that point. TL;DR, words are hard and what do they mean anyway, amirite? As for 'take it elsewhere,' sigh, sure, I may end up doing so. Contributing to Wiktionary and Wikipedia has been one way to dream of reducing the background level of obtuseness, to put some dents in it. But it may not do so very much anyway. They make some great free dictionaries and most people refuse to use them anyway. (For what it's worth, I love that one, and quite a few of its usage notes are longer than any I've ever edited at Wiktionary. But nonetheless, 'most people refuse to use them anyway', to the point about 'almost any dictionary user'.) Some of the questions I've been asked in consequence, or the backbiting that gets back, along the lines that words are hard and so can't we just avoid using them (from people paid for supposedly being good at using them, no less), have sometimes been downright laughably obtuse over the years, but one gets paid to answer them as if they weren't. Also, I provide fifty short pithy helps and improvements for every one overlongish help that I provide (both in this context and in those others), but nobody notices or counts those (although they end up benefitting from their existence), whereas the exceptions stick out. As for the longish ones, such analyses need to be worked out first, before one can sink more time into making them shorter and also completely self-censoring the ones that turn out in retrospect to be non-pathway-critical and thus suppressible for the sake of TL;DR. Perhaps then save them for people and contexts that need the help, and even can pay for it too. But I just enjoy the free work at Wiktionary because it's self-directed, deadlineless, and relaxing. And the fifty short pithy increments are so easy and so satisfying to pick off. Which of course reflects poorly on the size of the wilderness of need for them (their scarcity so far) and what it implies about most humans generally (why hasn't anyone else already done any of them, out of so many anyone elses out there?). But perhaps the next stage of the evolution is to capture them elsewhere first and (over)refine them before sharing. It's more work and less fun, less spontaneous, but it could avoid any complaints. Difficult to say, though, because they were already only 2 sentences long, and any of the 'hard' (?) words were linked for help as needed. So how hopelessly low is the bar then? One sentence and pre-K? Me talk pretty one day. Well, anyway, good night, self, and thanks for listening. Quercus solaris (talk) 05:59, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm seconding the message that your usage notes are needlessly wordy and don't add anything useful. Also, deleting a discussion is not "archiving" it. Ultimateria (talk) 23:05, 1 May 2022 (UTC)