Talk:opia

RFV discussion: December 2015–February 2016

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opia

Plural of opium. I removed 3 quotations that were visually verified as scanos. One quotation does not appear to support this sense, and is mention not use anyways. The last 2 quotations, from a single source, I am unable to verify. In other words, we're practically starting from zero here. DAVilla 05:52, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

The Andrew Salter quotation, if accurate, seems like a failed protologism. The two alleged to be from China: Cultural and Political Perspectives don't appear in a Google Books search of the book, and the WK entry is the only occurrence of the phrase when Googled. If accurate, they would still represent a single author's apparent protologism, but I doubt them since 1) it doesn't make sense (more below), and 2) the word ought to occur when the book is searched.

I know that Wiktionary is supposed to be "descriptivist" in the sense that it doesn't matter whether the word makes any sense grammatically or has a valid etymology, as long as people use it. But I still think there's some value in following that line of inquiry. Since opium is a substance, and uncountable, it shouldn't have a plural. There's not more than one kind of opium. The entry for opium suggests a countable sense in the Karl Marx quotation that "religion is the opium of the people", but I don't think that's a logical inference. Merely because something is "the" opium doesn't make it countable; the fact that something else could be metaphorically described as "opium" doesn't really make opium countable. And while verbivores like myself may take malicious delight in using Latin plurals for common English words, there ought to be some real history of a plural for something normally uncountable. Even in Greek and Latin it was uncountable, although it would have had a logical plural should one have been needed. But one wasn't, and probably never has been. So it doesn't seem like there's any justification for an entry. P Aculeius (talk) 00:37, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

• I'm more used to hearing of a countable sense for opiate, but never for opium. Without any textual evidence, I'd agree and say delete. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:54, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

I think it could be countable, e.g. "the opiums of Afghanistan and of China have different effects". Compare e.g. rice. It would come down to attestation. Equinox ◑ 00:56, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

• Ah, yes, good point -- similar to water or fish or plastic, much like your rice example -- nouns that are usually uncountable, unless referring to varieties of the uncountable. But then, as you note, it would be opiums and not *opia. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 01:31, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

  But theoretically it could be opia. Our job here is to determine whether it actually is. --WikiTiki89 01:51, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

• Indeed. So far, I find no evidence of any English term opia with the given meaning. From the mere eight hits at google books:"the opia of", I only found one hit that wasn't a scanno, but the meaning is different (I can't tell quite *what* the term means in this text, but it's almost certainly not the plural of opium). Meanwhile, google books:"the opiums of" produces 301 ostensible hits, collapsing to just 40 when paging through, but still enough for citation purposes. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 02:08, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

I love a good challenge, but on this one I'm coming up dry. The best I could find was [1], which is unreadable enough to be questionable. Kiwima (talk) 17:08, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

this refers to "opia" addicts - thus using it like a synonym for opiates. And this has the phrase "Opia's can have no effect". Does that count? Kiwima (talk) 17:19, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

• Zooming in on your first link makes it clear that this is opium, not opia, so that one is out. In your third link, the apostrophe appears to be either a scanning or printing artifact for what is clearly a lower-case “t” in this same word elsewhere on the page, such as in the preceding paragraph (bolding mine, italics original):

II. That this Defect will ariſe from whatever exhauſts, waſtes, or evaporates them when produced, as Labour or Exerciſe; or from whatever abſorbs them, as a great Quantity of crude Chyle, recently and ſuddenly admitted into the Blood, in the Time of, or ſoon after, a plentiful Meal; or whatever can fetter or re-unite them with the groſſer Parts of the Blood, as much as Brandy or ſpiritous fermented Liquors and Opiats. […]

That leaves the second link. I poked around a bit, and opia appears twice (once in the main body of the text and once in the index pointing to the first appearance). Meanwhile, opium appears 94 times, opiate 18 times, and opiates 41 times. I'm inclined to view the one use of opia as a fluke, especially since the same chapter, just two pages later, uses the word opiates instead. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 08:01, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

RFV-failed. I found the same thing as P Aculeius about the two China: Cultural and Political Perspectives citations, namely that they don't seem to actually occur in that book. - -sche (discuss) 05:25, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

I can, however, cite this as a term for a kind of Taino ghost. - -sche (discuss) 05:41, 2 February 2016 (UTC)