Talk:go wenching

go wenching
Hmm, isn't this just like go bowling, go swimming etc.? < class="latinx" >Ƿidsiþ 06:38, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * go+gerund forms that you mention are used for (regular, occasional) recreational activities and IMHO these too are idiomatic and are usually translated idiomatically in most languages, and should be added just for that.
 * go wenching is interesting because of its extended meaning "engage in sexually promiscuous behavior" which you cannot easily deduce from go+wench. --Ivan Štambuk 07:05, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete. Standard use of go:, standard use of wenching:, by far the most common form of wench:. I don't see the point of lexicalizing each of these for the benefit of those who don't want to learn the grammar of common English constructions. "Go philosophizing" would be attestable, too, though it lacks the hormonal interest of "go wenching". Perhaps, as a pedagogical device, we should include all English grammatical constructions in instances involving drinking, defecating, urinating, and the various flavors of sexual behavior. DCDuring TALK 11:21, 25 June 2011 (UTC)


 * The verb go has too many meanings, either alone or in idiomatic bindings, to have any kind of "standard use". It's far from clear whether go wenching would mean any combination of individual meanings of go with the standard verbal meaning of wench. In particular, it does not mean the same type of periodic recreational activity as is usually denoted in go+gerund constructions such as go bowling, go swimming etc. as it was suggested. If it was enough to fool a literate but native English speaker such as Widsith, it will fool many more ESLs.
 * Lexicalizing (and I conjecture that by that you mean choosing the word to be a dictionary-worthy material; usually that verb denotes a spontaneous process by which words emerge in the real language) should in particular be focused on ambiguous but common English constructions, regardless whether their meaning is a simple composition of the constituents or not, moreso in cases where the compounded phrase features more prominently in the corpus than their components. If it is the case as you suggest, that the verb wench is considerably more attested in form of go wenching, it is through go wenching that the verbal meaning of wench is most likely to be looked up. Language learners lack the intuitional capacity that is hard-wired in the brain of the native speaker, and even the apparently "obvious" phrases and compounds can be ambiguous. The purpose of a dictionary is not only to enumerate all the meanings of all words at the lowest lexical level, leaving it up to the reader to infer the meanings of all higher-level combinations thereof - its purpose is also to facilitate language learning, if necessary by providing superfluous semantic shortcuts of fairly common constructs, by listing them as headwords of their own.
 * Furthermore, there is the extended meaning "to engage in promiscuous behavior" which cannot be deduced from go+wench at all. That meanings with a corresponding citation is the reason why I added the term in the first place, because I had to look it up to understand it. It is obvious from the citation that it does not refer to the action or activity of frequenting prostitutes, but to the moral looseness and impropriety of sexually-related behavior in certain situations. --Ivan Štambuk 14:46, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete. Ivan, go bowling does not imply "periodic recreational activity". You can go bowling just once. Equinox ◑ 14:49, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well technically speaking, something occurring only once is still periodic with T=∞ (e.g. in DSP where you FT aperiodic signals into infinite sums). But now that you mention it - you can't really "go bowling" without knowing how to bowl, except for the first time when you learn about it. "go bowling" implies that you've done it already in the past. Nobody executes fishing/bowling/swimming or other types of recreational activities usually described with go+gerund constructs for a singular occasion - these are periodic ipso facto. --Ivan Štambuk 17:15, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete. Ƿidsiþ, DCDuring and Equinox said it all. Salmoneus Aiolides χαῖρε 06:42, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't really see anybody describing how the second and cited sense can be deduced from the SoP meaning "to frequent prostitutes", despite several of my inquiries to do so. It appears that the motivation to delete this entry is largely based on an instinctual desire to keep Wiktionary "pure" of lexemes which do not specifically have a rigidly confined and preferably unique meaning. Instead of collecting various semantic gradations and figurative usages which are the essence of using the language for anything other but basic communication, we focus on the existence of semantic reductionism, even if it means excluding common but non-obvious patterns. --Ivan Štambuk 17:15, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
 * The second sense, it seems to me, is an implication of the first. To have it would suggest we should have buy a Porsche:. I don't know how exactly we draw any line about such terms. In any event, wench: should be the entry that contains the meanings under discussion, IMHO. DCDuring TALK 19:54, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
 * This really shouldn't be deleted until that change is made. DAVilla 20:07, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Our sole sense for "wench" is: "To frequent prostitutes; to womanize." DCDuring TALK 22:22, 5 July 2011 (UTC)