Talk:stick of furniture

stick of furniture
I stubbornly persist in holding that one can have a stick of [X] where X anything possibly made of wood with a negative, meaning something like "the slightest bit". If this is so, this is SoP. See WT:RFV for attestable examples of X. DCDuring TALK 22:03, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
 * As a set phrase, I think this should have an entry. Spinning Spark  01:20, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * See stick. (I didn't add that. If I had, I would have generalized it to make clear that the term applied to more than furniture.)
 * It is a set phrase only if set phrase does not mean a "phrase" that is "set". If it were a set phrase, then I couldn't substitute terms. Of course there is a need to respect the semantics, so the substitutions are restricted in range. Consider: for stick: single piece or bit; For furniture: wood/furniture/firewood/fuel/lumber/timber/spruce/pine etc. DCDuring TALK 02:04, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Was going to disagree (the examples you give are all specifically types of wood, while "furniture" is more generalised, and wouldn't usually be thought of as a type of wood - and the fact the phrase continues in the modern era suggests that not all the furniture involved is made of wood anyway), but there are a handful of Google Books hits for and one relevant hit for "stick of a chair".  and  found nothing. For mass nouns,  finds 16 hits. Still not convinced how valid this extended sense is:  finds ~39,000 hits - compared to the sparse-to-non-existent hits for the other terms, there's clearly some sort of setness about this. Still, we could do what Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary does, and move this to a sense at stick (I think it's unlikely anyone would look up stick of furniture first anyway). Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:04, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * (I think you mean ). Mglovesfun (talk) 09:10, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Whoops, thanks. Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:07, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * finds no lemmings. finds some dictionaries with stick of furniture as a usage example for a specific (usually overspecific IMO) definition. Obviously, as a common collocation, "stick of furniture" would be a lovely addition to a comprehensive, high-quality phrasebook, if only there were one. DCDuring TALK  12:14, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I've seen both stick of and lick of used to indicate (usually in the negative) a complete lack of something, as in not a stick of furniture in the place or she didn't have a lick of sense. But it can be used without furniture, as in not a stick of kindling or firewood, so I would have to vote for deletion.--Jacecar (talk) 10:16, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 12:44, 8 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:28, 27 May 2013 (UTC)