Talk:selaphobia

RFV discussion: January–August 2015
Fear of flashes of light. Only in word lists. Equinox ◑ 21:10, 7 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I've found two meanings, which I suspect may be the case for a few -phobias: there's the "fear of..." sense, which is what you'll find in the word lists, and there's also a biological "intolerance of..." sense. So selaphobia might be the fear of flashes, or, in ophthalmology, an intolerance to them. chlorophobia might be a fear of Chlorine (or of Chloroform, or simply of the colour green), or a botanic intolerance to Chlorine compounds.
 * More to the point, there is an issue which came up on my talk page in conversation with Equinox on this matter, and that's what would count for an attestation. I submit that these phobias come as a packet of concepts: the condition, the condition as an adjective, and the thing suffering the condition (-phobia, -phobic, -phobe). (And adverb -phobically?) Many of these terms are very specialised, and may turn up in scientific papers relatively rarely, such that we might have an insufficient number of attestations for any given form, and thus be forced to delete all three forms and with them the entire concept.
 * It's not quite the same as using examples of the genitive or plural to attest the lemma, but I don't think it's that far off. So I submit that for this sort of "package" of forms, it should be possible to use, eg., "selaphobic" and "selaphobe" to attest "selaphobia", and vice-versa. That is, any of the forms of the package work as attestation of the package. This could be the basis of a "See also" template for such things listing the various forms (so: autism/autistic/autist/autistically, or schizophrenia/schizophrenic/schizophrenic/schizophrenically, although that would be for cross-reference more than the need to aggregate attestations to make critical mass.)
 * Thoughts?
 * --Catsidhe (verba, facta) 05:29, 8 January 2015 (UTC)


 * This does seem close to what we do with verbs (where I've noted a strong consensus to create the -s, -ing, -ed forms even if not all of them are attestable). I don't like the idea, though, since I prefer to treat each word/spelling as a separate item. Equinox ◑ 17:32, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't really consider inflections (plural forms and verb tenses) to be individual words, and thus I don't think they need to be independently cited, unless they're irregular in some way. But nouns, verbs, adjectives, or any other POS should be considered separate words, and thus I think they need to be independently cited. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 23:55, 9 January 2015 (UTC)


 * My position is that "selaphobic" does not attest "selaphobia"; even if "selaphobic" is attested, "selaphobia" can fail RFV and be deleted. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:28, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * My fear is that neither form will make critical mass on its own (I've moved the cites you deleted to selaphobic, by the way), both will independently fail CFI, and thus the term in its entirety will be deleted. Even if they are aggregated it will be close, unless someone else has better luck finding another cite for each sense. But still, I see a situation where a word can clearly exist, if rarely, but be deleted through the technicality that one citation used person-first language or some such perfectly regular and predictable variation. --Catsidhe (verba, facta) 12:31, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Not sure what you mean by "person-first language"; one of the forms is a noun, the other is an adjective. They are different words, not just different inflected forms. Three quotations is already a very low threshold; I find it unwise to lower it by pooling morphologically related forms (like "carry", "carrier", and "carriage" or those mentioned by you above: autism/autistic/autist/autistically, schizophrenia/schizophrenic/schizophrenic/schizophrenically). In similar way, each -ness form should be attested on its own, rather than entered when the adjective from which the -ness form is formed is attested. Ditto for agent nouns: they should be attested on their own rather than created automatically when the verb is attested. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:41, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Person-first language is a fashion in disability circles to avoid using the word meaning "person-with-condition" ("autist", "paraplegic"), but instead explicitly saying "person with autism", "person with paraplegia", etc. (The idea is to explicitly state the person as most semantically important, not defining them by the condition.) Many autists, for example, find this ridiculous and faintly patronising, and see person-first language, for our condition at least, akin to saying "person with maleness". In this case you might find that a rare but real condition, with a real, if rare, word would fail attestation because the votes were split between the condition and the person-with-condition, even though they're all referring to the same thing. Which is why I split off the cites for selaphobic, rather than let them vanish completely. Surely someone has better access to ophthalmology papers? Or Epilepsy studies? --Catsidhe (verba, facta) 21:52, 10 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I agree that citations of selaphobic (adjective) don't help selaphobia (noun) meet CFI. The only citations I can find of selaphobic are the two on the citations page; I've added one more (very mentiony) citation to selaphobia. If it is adequate, I suggest combining the senses to "fear of or intolerance to flashes of light". - -sche (discuss) 09:50, 18 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Meh, kept. - -sche (discuss) 02:01, 6 August 2015 (UTC)