Talk:smail

RFV
--Yair rand 01:28, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Verb cited, IMHO. DCDuring TALK 02:42, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Doesn't seem like dated is an appropriate tag to me. DAVilla 07:00, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I thought that would get a reaction. What amazed me is that it was almost impossible to find a valid citation at usenet in the last five years. I may have missed something among all the uses there of "smail" to mean "smile".
 * Noun cited, IMHO. Wording adjusted, context provided. DCDuring TALK 02:58, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Seems to only appear in the phrase "by smail". DAVilla 07:00, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * That was how I searched because of all the false hits due to the "smail" program included with Debian. DCDuring TALK 11:30, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I tried to find use outside of that phrase and came up empty-handed. DAVilla 06:23, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
 * The trick is to try other likely phrases that filter out enough bad hits while leaving in enough good ones. (Oh, and the other trick is to quickly skim a page of ten hits to quickly rule out the eight or nine bad ones. Even the best/luckiest searches are likely to require a lot of that.) After a few false starts (such as "my smail" — too many bad hits — and "email or smail" — no good ones), I hit upon three good ones in a row: "smail address", "junk smail", and "smail order". I've added one cite from each. "Smail box" also has good hits, but I think we have enough variety even without it. :-)  Interestingly, "in the smail" (cf. "the check is in the mail") does not get any relevant hits, whereas I did find some hits where "smail" meant "snail-mail address" (cf. "I don't have his e-mail", *"I don't have his mail"), which I think means that "smail" takes its range of senses/grammatical frames from "e-mail" rather than directly from "mail". But of course, "e-mail" obviously managed to develop its range of senses/grammatical frames without a previous non-"mail" analogue, so who knows? —Ruakh TALK 02:45, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Should we add the definition of the unix program? DAVilla 07:00, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * IMO no because that's not a "word" with a definition, but the arbitrary name of a product &mdash; commercial or not. Equinox ◑ 22:03, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Since it's been cited, there is no need to keep this open. Closed as cited. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C 03:53, 19 September 2011 (UTC)