Talk:inspiration

Point 3. I think we can do without the divine intervention surely? inspiration will have the same definition regardless of the cause.


 * Erm, no, it is archaic perhaps, but certainly a valid definition. --Connel MacKenzie 00:01, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Discussion archive
Rfv-sense: "Breath"

When I saw this, it took my inspiration away. I had to catch my inspiration. Its simplicity was an inspiration of fresh air. DCDuring TALK 13:01, 3 September 2013 (UTC)


 * DCDuring's turns-of-phrase are downright inspirationtaking! This sense is not in the OED, The Unabridged Random-House Webster's, or any dictionary at onelook.com. · (talk) 19:29, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Could it be an error for the first sense (breathing in). I just replaced the French sense 'breath' with 'inspiration' (i.e. breathing in). Mglovesfun (talk) 20:29, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I had a hand in the challenged sense, I just discovered. It was originally buried in the middle of a long definition copied from Webster 1913 in 2004 (which can be found at OneLook).  I split that into three parts in 2009.  Maybe there is or was some usage not as silly-sounding as the above casual examples.  We might have to look to pre-1913 writings to find it. DCDuring TALK  23:13, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * All the examples relating to breathing that I've found thus far are in a technical sense (and in technical works): inspiration + expiration = respiration. And then it's usually in terms of signs and symptoms: "weak inspiration", "laboured inspiration", "shallow inspiration", &c. –Catsidhe (verba, facta) 23:56, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Maybe we can interpret sense 1 as an uncountable sense and sense 2 as the corresponding countable sense, which is probably technical. I wonder if the countable sense is also contemporary. DCDuring TALK  00:33, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Not too easy to cite either sense, but sense 2 is cited and sense 1 has two cites. If nobody disagrees with the notion of one sense being uncountable and the other countable, this could be closed. DCDuring TALK  00:59, 4 September 2013 (UTC)