Talk:asking for trouble

RFD discussion: October–December 2018
This just seems like a normal verbal inflection to me. DTLHS (talk) 20:46, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete. Per utramque cavernam 20:54, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete the noun. An "asking for trouble"? Nah. DonnanZ (talk) 09:50, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete: not seeing how this is a noun. — SGconlaw (talk) 13:44, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete - TheDaveRoss  14:00, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment. In the example sentence “Sharing a single account among multiple people is asking for trouble”, the head of the clause “asking for trouble” is a gerund. As stated on Wikipedia (see ), such a clause can function as a noun. In this example it is a ; in a sentence like “Asking for trouble was his favorite occupation” it is the subject. Given the limited set of options for indicating a part of speech, classifying the clause as a noun here seems the best fit to me. Yes, you can’t say “an asking for trouble“. You can also not say “an alcohol by volume” or “an astrobabble”. For uncountable nouns, the indefinite-article test is not a good one. --Lambiam 19:51, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
 * What's the point of documenting the gerund use in a dictionary, though? That's a regular feature of English verbs. Per utramque cavernam 19:54, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
 * On the page for the word waters we give, next to an idiomatic sense (amniotic fluid), definitions as the plural form of a noun and the third-person singular simple present indicative form of a verb. The latter two are both regular features of English lemmas. I thought it is good practice, if a given word or collocation has several POS interpretations, to list all. --Lambiam 07:27, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
 * In practice we don't list English gerunds as nouns unless they can be pluralized. DTLHS (talk) 06:21, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: this is a rfd-sense. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:35, 4 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Noun sense RFD failed. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 22:18, 17 December 2018 (UTC)