Talk:environome

From RfD
I entered this today after running across it in a recent issue of Popular Science, in quotes. I'm nominating it here as a test case &mdash; I won't be upset if the entry is kept. The interesting point here is that the term is quite well documented. I'm sure we could dig up the appearance in PS, and the links I pulled in look eminently respectable.

However, none of them really shows the term in use. They all show it sort of "proposed for use." Further, there are two main proposed meanings, and in once case, a host of other proposed terms. Strictly speaking, "environome" and similar terms are protologisms. More to the point, they appear to fail the basic test of "would someone run across them and want to know that they meant?" as, as far as I can tell, they are defined wherever they appear.

So the question is whether to keep the term as a main entry, or move it to LOP and delete the main entry. Certainly it would be good to keep the links around, in case the term is later found to be in independent use, as they shed light on the origins of the term. While our CFI (particularly the one-year guideline) discourage us from rushing to be the first to define a new term, recording first instances is an entirely different matter.

Here are some alternatives


 * Keep as main entry: The entry is already formatted as a main entry, together with some quotations (though independent quotations are still needed). LOP is not really set up for this kind of entry.
 * Keep the entry but disclaim it as weakly attested.
 * Put the entry into another namespace but keep it as fully formatted. I believe this has been considered and rejected for protologisms in general.
 * Put the entry on LOP and keep a record of the citations somewhere.

I don't have a strong favorit among these. I would, however, like to see whatever we come up with applied uniformly to such weakly attested terms, whether they appear in respected journals or on someone's blog. -dmh 15:13, 26 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I would keep this on its own merits, since it's appropriately referenced with strong attestations from credible sources. This should in no way be taken as a back-door rationale for accepting the evidence of blogs.  An additional reference on Google Print itself contains references which suggest pushing back the history of the term to 1990, but I don't have easy access to those publications to allow me to check that out.  It is thus apparently not a protologism.  I would, however, remove the definition that purports to be from psychology; the titles of the referenced publication do not automatically imply that the term is about psychology. Eclecticology 04:53, 2 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Why would referencing blogs require back-door justification? As documents of actual usage, blogs are generally unimpeachable, and given durable archiving, they are easily referenceable.  As far as I can tell, your real objection stems from the cumulative effect of three very arguable assumptions
 * Blogs don't document carefully proofread "proper" usage.
 * Proper usage can be defined without resorting to arbitrarily enforced subjective criteria.
 * Wiktionary should only document "proper" usage.
 * Given these assumptions, it's not surprising that a printed source would be considered "verifiable". If you're trying to verify that "environome" is "proper English" and you assume that academic journals are exemplars of proper usage, then of course this is a very verifiable and credible entry.
 * As to the psyochological sense, I am relying on a bit more than the title of the referenced publication. If you read one more sentence from the quote about DNA triplets, you'll see "Another important factor in the slow progress towards understanding the environment has been the traditional tendency of psychology to ignore genetics or to consider environmental influence as in opposition to genetics."  The article is quite clearly talking about the "environome" in the context of psychology.
 * The only usage I turn up in print is in "Cross-Cultural Differences in Perspectives on the Self" (ISBN 0803213336): "Evolutionary psychologists have repeatedly pointed out that enduring human psychological mechanisms and behavioral strategies for solving recurrent adaptative problems are produced or incarnated as the result of interactions between genes and the environment (physical and sociocultural), or genome and environome." (any typos are mine). Again, the term is glossed and, as far as I can tell, never used elsewhere in the book.  If the sentence had instead read "Evolutionary psychologists have repeatedly pointed out that enduring human psychological mechanisms and behavioral strategies for solving recurrent adaptative problems are produced or incarnated as the result of interactions between the genome and the environome." with no further explanation of "environome", I would be much more convinced that the term has entered current use on its own (albeit within a small and specialized community, but that's another discussion). -dmh 05:52, 6 October 2005 (UTC)