Talk:man of one's word

RFM discussion: February 2015–March 2017
Why use a gender-neutral pronoun with man? Does anyone say "she was a man of her word"? It should be moved to man of his word (currently a redirect to this), and there should be a parallel entry for woman of her word. I'm not saying this should be a redlink, but there are only a few hits for man of one's word in Google Books compared to clear widespread use for man of his word, so the latter should be the lemma. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:40, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I think the "one" form was probably picked because "I'm a man of my word" and "You're a man of your word" are also pretty common. I wouldn't necessarily object to the move though. Smurrayinchester (talk) 14:45, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Lots or redirects to one or more lemmas should it. I suppose person of one's word is gender neutral and would work with a lot of redirects. For "person" would we need "boy", "girl", "lady", "lad" in addition to "man" and "woman" and plurals including "people"? DCDuring TALK 23:55, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
 * It's like we need some kind of template language to allow snowclone headwords like, which would then automagically match user searches for thing like "DJ of his word" and "woman of my word", etc and take the user to the right entry, whatever that might be. Pengo (talk) 20:59, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
 * For many of the most common constructions the invariant words are also stopwords for almost any search engine AFAIK, like articles and determiners, prepositions, and pronouns, ie, the PoSes that are virtually closed sets. In this case "a X of X's word" ("Xs of Xs' word" for the plural) gives the search engine only word to work with. We could have a construction space that had presumably fewer of these to work with, so the failed search screen would more likely yield what the search sought. If we educated users to look at derived terms and had a rigorous process for making sure that all derived terms appeared in the entries the search engine actually hit, we would have an adequate system for repeat users, if not for all users. DCDuring TALK 22:20, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I was thinking more for Wiktionary's own search engine, if someone entered "lady of her word" it could auto-redirect to "person of one's word" with an auto-redirect message saying "auto-redirect: matched this phrase pattern". Other search engines would probably be more useful though. Blue-sky stuff anyway. Pengo (talk) 00:39, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I was too, but I misremembered it as having stop words. (Apparently stop words have been an option for some Mediawiki search engines, but not so much lately). At present, searches for "woman/lady/girl/boy of her/his word" yield an empty search result page if enclosed in quotes and a long results page if not quoted, usually not including [[man of one's word]]. The simple expedient of including the single words woman, lady, girl, and boy would be an improvement. I am often surprised at the capability of Cirrus search, though the power is not displayed to those who don't know the filters and doesn't seem relevant for this matter. DCDuring TALK 01:15, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I would define it at person of one's word with redirects from man, woman, etc, as DCDuring seems to be suggesting. - -sche (discuss) 21:40, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's what I was suggesting, though I was hoping for a better idea. I suppose it doesn't really matter for most purposes what the lemma entry was, so we may as well be gender-neutral.
 * Perhaps the better idea I was awaiting is to make the lemma [[of one's word]]. Stripping gendered pronouns to the greatest extent possible approaches gender-neutrality to the greatest extent possible and leaves less uncertainty about might need to be attested. DCDuring TALK 22:20, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hmm, yes, I had thought about of one's word, too, as that would even cover rare cases like . But perhaps that's too much stripping, too much abstraction. - -sche (discuss) 22:27, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I still think we would need redirects at least from the singular personal pronoun versions. DCDuring TALK 23:21, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes (@DCDuring and @Pengo), like many highly variable idiomatic expressions, this one would need to have a lot of redirects pointing to it from common variants (and perhaps even uncommon but attested variants — redirects are cheap), including man of his word, woman of her word, gentleman of his word, lady of her word, (man?) of my word, of your word, of his word, of her word, and of their word. - -sche (discuss) 02:22, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Yep, not to mention the plural forms (men of their word, etc) Pengo (talk) 10:32, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd settle for the singular personal pronouns on the grounds that few would ever look up the others and that we could semiautomate the creation of redirects for many such MWEs so that we actually had the most common ones for many of these rather than just have a complete set for one or a few. This would seem like a reasonable item for Todo. DCDuring TALK 13:31, 13 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Moved to person of one's word with copious redirects per above. - -sche (discuss) 06:35, 28 March 2017 (UTC)