Talk:person of one's word

RFV discussion: December 2019–January 2020
Is this the idiom or is the idiomatic part rather ? At least the collocations 'man of his word', 'woman of her word', 'leader of his word' and 'boy of his word' would seem to be attestable. --Hekaheka (talk) 12:41, 31 December 2019 (UTC)


 * I believe “person” is meant to be a placeholder here. Usually we use “someone” for that purpose, as in . This idiom is somewhat different in that here only common nouns can be used as the designated possessor(s) of their word (no *we of our word). Some noun is obligatory, though, as the head of a longer noun phrase (*he was not of his word). I also think the noun cannot have a definite determiner (*this man of his word). --Lambiam 15:13, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I'd prefer to move this to, and describe those restrictions you've listed in a usage note. Canonicalization (talk) 16:22, 31 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, "person" is a placeholder here, but also, it is attested. This would not seem to be an RFV matter...? A prior RFM discussion is at Talk:man of one's word. I don't have any strong objection to making the various phrases with nouns (man of one's word, person of one's word) into hard redirects to of one's word, though non-person referents seem uncommon and lemmatizing only of one's word would require modifying or -ing all the translations (if other languages have no nounless analogue of "of one's word"). - -sche (discuss) 01:26, 4 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Perhaps compare, generally seen as man/woman/person of color but possible in other constructions. Equinox ◑ 21:58, 31 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Anyway, even this specific form (with the weird combination of "person" and "one's") is trivially citable, so...move to RFM? - -sche (discuss) 22:35, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

RFV-resolved I have moved this to with a redirect left behind (and fixed up the redirects from "man of his word" and "woman of her word"). Kiwima (talk) 20:18, 12 January 2020 (UTC)