Talk:piece of clothing

piece of clothing
This sure looks SOP to me. -- Ghost of WikiPedant 04:48, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Indeed, see also Special:PrefixIndex/piece of. Mglovesfun (talk) 08:31, 27 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment. To a non-native, a piece of clothing could be a fragment of an item of clothing. Natives are familiar with the "piece of" construction as a way of creating countable terms for mass terms, I guess. The sense of "piece" with regards to which this would be a sum-of-parts: "A single item belonging to a class of similar items: as, for example, a piece of machinery, a piece of software".
 * Constrast this to "piece of cake" which seems to refer to a particular slice of a cake rather than to one cake. So "piece of cake" and "piece of furniture" are disanalogous. A chair is a piece of furniture, but a leg of chair is not a piece of furniture, I guess.
 * If this gets deleted, it would be nice to add a usage note to "clothing" that says that a countable item of clothing is usually a "piece of clothing" rather than an "item of clothing", given this is really the case. --Dan Polansky 09:49, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually item of clothing is common, an article of clothing somewhat common (but less so). Even so, I take your point. On a related note, there are a lot of non-English translations we could have here, like French vêtement which currently displays piece of clothing. But I never like that to be a factor. I'll take a closer look at piece. Piece of furniture seems to be the same principle. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:19, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * A usage note in [[clothing]] to the effect of 'Countable items of clothing are referred to as "piece of clothing", "item of clothing", and, less commonly, "article of clothing"' would be in order. When similar usage notes are added to "furniture" and other relevant cases of mass terms, the "piece of ..." entries could be deleted or entered only as a redirect. This would avoid piece of software, bottle of milk, etc. Another alternative would be entering the terms using a template as "countable form of ...", but this would be rather untraditional and unusual I think. --Dan Polansky 10:32, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * We have adequate-to-good ways of handling only a few types of "constructions" as entries. In this class of cases, the choice of "discretizer" probably can be looked at as falling into a few classes, like: "containerizers", "unitizers", and others. We could try to create an Appendix for the construction.
 * Neither Appendix:English nouns nor Appendix:English uncountable nouns addresses this issue with a table and an in-depth discussion. Nor is Mass noun sufficient. There is not even a good set of illustrations in CGEL AFAICT. But I find it hard to believe that in all wikidom we couldn't find a table that is at least a start on what we would need to illustrate the issue.
 * Until we create an adequate explanation of the phenomenon, I don't think we can systematically create all the redirects, usage examples, or tables that would be the most helpful for users.
 * Many of our veteran contributors could do the research to get a good start on Appendix:English uncountable nouns. Similarly for a "construction" appendix. (See also snowclone) The "construction" appendix approach seems to me to be useful both as a supplement and as a possible exemplar for more such "construction" appendices.
 * -- DCDuring TALK 12:40, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * IMHO, all of the simple solutions: "keep", "delete", "only in", or "redirect" are either inadequate long-term solutions or unavailable at present. Further, I don't think that improvements to the entry alone, such as usage examples or notes suffice. "Only in" requires a target. "Delete" might be the worst of all, leaving us without the grain of sand that might lead to the pearl of a good solution. "Redirect" doesn't allow categorization, which might help us collect instances of constructions/snowclones.
 * Keep pending a long-term solution, such as "only in" Appendix:English quantizing constructions. DCDuring TALK 14:36, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

I think we should keep this. I remember an earlier discussion about piece of furniture and item of furniture, which ended in keeping the first and deleting the second as far less common/redundant/SoP. --Hekaheka 17:30, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

kept -- Prince Kassad 07:21, 4 February 2011 (UTC)