Talk:midwinter

midwinter
X 2: Adjective and Adverb
 * 1) Adjective: Happening in the middle of winter.
 * 2) Adverb: In the middle of winter.

Almost all time nouns can be used in each of these ways. For whom does this add value? It certainly subtracts from the utility of the entry for someone who wants a good English monolingual dictionary. OTOH, all such time nouns could use good usage examples and possibly a usage note. DCDuring TALK 04:15, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I disagree, if the word has several meanings, including all of them won't "subtract from the utility of the entry". Clear widespread use for both, keep. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:50, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Those aren't meanings, they are PoSes for the same meaning.
 * This is about the difference between what it is in the lexicon and what is part of grammar. It is a grammatical feature of all nouns that they can be used attributively without necessarily behaving in any other way as an adjective.
 * It is a grammatical feature of time nouns that can serve as an adjunct. How would you characterize "Wednesdays" in: "He races Wednesdays."? or "June 23, 1988" in "He last raced June 23, 1988"?
 * We usually don't subject our definitions to the rigors of "substitutability". That we happen to do so here is possibly part of a desire to inflate some counts of lemmas. DCDuring TALK 21:07, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete the adjective as an attributive use of the noun as in "midwinter night", unless someone convincingly argues otherwise. Delete the adverb per DCD and his "He races Wednesdays" and "He last raced June 23, 1988". As regards the speculation on the motives, the senses were added in on 17 November 2004 by Paul G, and I doubt he had an ulterior motive to inflate anything; it just looked like a good idea to him back then. The rigor of substitutability is what I try to apply, though, finding definitions of adjectives that start with "Describing" worth rephrasing. --Dan Polansky 08:53, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

deleted -- Liliana • 11:53, 15 May 2012 (UTC)