Talk:craft

RFV discussion
RfV for the historical–nautical sense; it may also need sense-spliting. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 23:47, 6 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I can verify these uses, but the only sources I have for the net/lines/hooks is Smyth's The Sailor's Word Book (1867). Will split and clean up senses. - Amgine/talk 04:04, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * clocked out without attestation. DCDuring TALK 16:24, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Cited. This was hard! Or at least, hard to do as well as I'd have liked. I tried to find some cites that weren't whaling-specific, but mostly failed. One problem is that this sense seems to have had some interaction with the "boats" sense; for example, early Connecticut laws that speak of "Seins and other Fiſh-Craft", where "craft" clearly can't mean "boat", have later Virginia analogues that speak of "any purse net, seine, vessel, steamer or other craft", where "craft" really seems to mean "boat". I'm not sure about this, but my interpretation is that later writers misanalyzed earlier uses of "craft", which affected some expressions. For example, I have the impression that "gear and craft" originally did not include boats, but I couldn't find any clear-cut cases to demonstrate that, whereas quite a number of recent uses clearly do include boats. Regardless, there are a huge number of cites that are plausibly or probably in this sense, but that are just too debatable to be useful. —Ruakh TALK 03:38, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Ruakh! For the record, per Connel's request at [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2007-12/Attestation criteria]], the five cites for this sense that Ruakh's added to the entry score respectively 5 (Green), 5 (Scammon), 4 (Hawes), 4 (Reports), and 3 (Druett), for a total of 21. Passed (under current criteria, natch). &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 20:08, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

unchanged plural
What does "unchanged plural" exactly mean? that's not the general terminology used in Wkt, is it? --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:37, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Espionage?
"The craft" may sometimes informally refer to espionage. See e.g. The Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms (a document leaked through WikiLeaks), and compare. It's hard to cite this in a way that couldn't also be covered by the general sense of "any trade", e.g. here:


 * 2016, Jai Galliott, ‎Warren Reed, Ethics and the Future of Spying (page 246)
 * Trust is, in various ways, crucial to all intelligence work and underpins the morality of each and every task that a spy undertakes. The gathering of human intelligence, or HUMINT in the jargon of the craft, is an intensely human affair.

Equinox ◑ 14:03, 17 April 2020 (UTC)