Talk:on the air

Separated from the propositions above. My argument is:

On the air can only be figurative. The only plausible SoP use for on the air I can find is "the ozone layer is on the air", and I think in reality you'd say on top of to avoid confusion. Also, you can't replace on the with anything and still have it mean "in the act of broadcasting", so in other words, strong keep as idiomatic and figurative. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:36, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment. Re: "you can't replace on the with anything": That's not true. If nothing else, "on air" alone is quite well attested; has many relevant hits. Likewise "off (the) air", which is the opposite of "on (the) air". Nonetheless, you can probably make a case that "on the air" is the primary use of this sense of the noun "air", and that the other uses are derived from it, in which case it might make sense to include it. (Most monolingual dictionaries cover phrases inside the entry for their most salient word, e.g. defining undefined: inside the entry for air:, so they don't have to worry too much about how idiomatic it is and how rigid its phrasing is. Perhaps the proposed "collocations" header will help address this issue somewhat.) —Ruakh TALK 23:09, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That the sense of air is figurative is not relevant to whether the term meets WT:CFI. If we don't have the sense of "air" that goes with "over the air", "on the air", "off the air", that is a weakness of air. Interestingly though, I'm not sure that that sense of "air" appears as a subject, though it may be used attributively ("air time"). DCDuring TALK 02:03, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Kept as no consensus. It was never actually tagged for deletion, it just got mentioned above (now archived) as a candidate to be tagged. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:07, 14 October 2009 (UTC)