Talk:fake

RFV discussion: September–October 2017
Rfv-sense "Deliberately fabricated in order to deceive". Can you say "I wrote a fake book" or "She told me a story of her youth, but it was definitely fake"? If not, the only rationale for deleting 🇨🇬 collapses (not that it necessarily matters, but the latter has been borrowed into at least German and Danish and, according to fr.wikt, French).__Gamren (talk) 07:53, 6 September 2017 (UTC)


 * How is this different from the other adjective sense? At first glance, it seems to me that they could be combined into one. —Granger (talk · contribs) 09:13, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Agree, seems exactly the same as the first definition. The "deliberately" part is irrelevant. BigDom 09:33, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Something that is "not real" is not necessarily "fraudulent" (intended to deceive"), so definition 1 seems to combine two distinguishable definitions. Real is also ambiguous as a definiens: in one sense fake ("counterfeit") money is "real" enough. Most dictionaries have a single dictionary that includes "intent", or "deception". I would have thought the harder definition to support would be one that did not have intentional deception (an oxymoron, I think). DCDuring (talk) 12:17, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Most immediately (as an L2 speaker), I would think of "a fake X" as "a thing that looks like or is claimed to be an X, but which is not an X". So "fake money" is bits of metal or paper that look like money. A "fake book" might be hollowed out (to hide something), or a painted chunk of wood (e.g. as a stage prop). In both cases, the deception pertains to whether or not X is an X. Can a "fake book" be a "book written to intentionally mislead"? "Fake news" does not use the sense I described, as the fraudulence lies not in the newsness, but in the truthness.__Gamren (talk) 16:07, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
 * a fake diamond is a gem made to look like or be pawned off as a diamond Leasnam (talk) 16:17, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
 * A fake book is something that is made to look like a book but isn't, a fake diamond is something that is made to look like a diamond but isn't, a fake ID is something that is made to look like a valid ID but isn't, and fake news is something that is made to look like news but isn't. It seems to me that the use of "fake" in the all of these phrases is the same sense. Is there any reason to think that there are multiple senses here? I don't really understand the relevance of the "truthness" vs "newsness" distinction—if a piece of news is fake then it isn't really news. Anyway, even if that distinction is somehow relevant, it isn't specific to news—you can also have fake science, fake answers, fake explanations... (As a side note, I agree with DCDuring that sense 1 deserves some careful thought and possibly rewording.) —Granger (talk · contribs) 16:43, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
 * re: fake book. There are lots of musicians who might disagree with you... In that case, though, the idea is of a book that gives you what you need to "fake it" if someone asks you to play a tune you don't know. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:44, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
 * My personal reading of that sense of fake book would be as fake ("something which is not genuine") + book. The stress pattern is different, isn't it? The adjective sense of fake applied to book might mean a book that didn't turn out to be a book, instead being a place for concealing valuables, a flask, etc. or a book that didn't turn out to be what the front papers, sales documents, salesman, or owner represented it to be. DCDuring (talk) 04:00, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

RFV-failed Kiwima (talk) 03:21, 28 October 2017 (UTC)