Talk:wage war

RFV discussion
Rfv-sense: wage (only non-obsolete sense) + its most common collocation. What could be more clearly non-idiomatic? If this is deemed a keeper, we may not have yet reached rock bottom, but it is clearly discernible. DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 23:22, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure. It obviously used to be unidiomatic, but nowadays ‘war’ is about the only thing ever waged, so the phrase seems to be a single item in some way. < class="latinx">Ƿidsiþ 23:27, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
 * On COCA about 72% of the usage of "wage(as verb) [noun]" has "war" as the noun. Leading other nouns are attributive nouns modifying "war" (eg, guerrilla), meronyms and hyponyms for war (jihad, battle, campaign), metaphorical use of such words words (ad campaigns), and "peace". Does this make "wage ware" an idiom? It is clearly not a "set phrase" in any useful sense. There seems to be a semantic justification for calling it an idiom. I think it needs a usage note to show how it generalizes to the kinds of words I mention above. DCDuring TALK 00:02, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Moved to RFD. This is in clearly widespread use. The question seems to be whether the currently claimed sense is an idiom, which I think is really outside the domain of RFV. Citations help clarify a sense, and can therefore support a non-SOP sense, but they can't really decide for us whether a sense is SOP. —Ruakh TALK 23:26, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

wage war
Verb sense. Was listed at RFV, with the question, "What could be more clearly non-idiomatic?". —Ruakh TALK 23:27, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Not sure how the rules are, can't it be kept for the sake of the translations? --BiT 00:13, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Can anything other than a war be waged? ---&gt; Tooironic 02:10, 12 July 2010 (UTC)


 * For each form of the verb, I searched nytimes.com for uses today. I found two:
 * 2010, Ben Downing, “Love’s Pestilence”, in The New York Times Book Review, 2010 July 11, page BR8:
 * She also more briefly considers the aftermath of that tragedy; Byron’s death in Greece in 1824; the later lives of the remaining figures; and, finally, the struggle over the legacies of Shelley and Byron waged by Hunt and other memoirists.
 * 2010, Robert F. Worth, “Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?”, in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 2010 July 11, page MM30:
 * Saudi Arabia is Yemen's most important ally and had waged bloody battles to rid itself of homegrown jihadi fighters.
 * (Actually, that latter one is ambiguous — are they battles to rid Saudi Arabia of fighters, or is it waging them to do so? — but either way amounts to the same thing.) That's a very small sample, obviously, but it's also completely unbiased: I decided exactly what I would search for, and those are the results. As you can see, neither is waging "war", but both are in the same general vein.
 * —Ruakh TALK 03:06, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * "wage a campaign" gets thousands of Google Books hits. bd2412 T 04:14, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I've always considered this idiomatic, as I've never heard this sense of wage outside of "wage war". Mglovesfun (talk) 09:35, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * That's why it is better to rely on corpora. This, the only current sense of "wage", can take any of a score or so of NP-heading nouns, based on a quick look at COCA. Even the construction limited to "war" allows any modifier of "war", such as "guerrilla", "ad", "total", "proxy", "nuclear", "more", "many", "any", "some", "a", "the". This is a construction that allows all kinds of grammatical variation. By my approximation about half of the objective complements of "wage" occurring within 6 words preceding or following "wage" are headed by "war". The relevant definition of "wage" adequately characterizes the semantic restrictions on the objective complements of "wage".
 * If the threshold for inclusion of particular complements is deemed to include such terms, we had better recruit more contributors in all languages and raise funds to acquire access to corpora such as COCA and BNC to analyze such matters more systematically. DCDuring TALK 10:49, 12 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Note: msh210 voted "delete" for both noun and verb before they were split into separate sub-sections. —Ruakh TALK 19:36, 12 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Very convincing arguments. Delete, please, as it is obvious it can be rephrased. ---&gt; Tooironic 06:34, 13 July 2010 (UTC)


 * wage appears to be a good candidate for a Common Collocates hideable table. Also at war. Then we can delete these entries without loosing the useful information about being standard common collocations. -- A LGRIF  talk 11:19, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I like this experiment. What is a more accessible name for the heading (and label)? I prefer putting such under "derived terms" instead of a separate header to save screen space without overstretching the meaning of "derived terms". DCDuring TALK  14:47, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

wage war
(Adding the noun sense to the RFD.) I don't think the noun sense is idiomatic. It's like price war and : we simply need a sense of war along the lines of "Fierce competition in trade that results in a change in the market" and some good usexes. I'd delete both senses. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 18:41, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I had reworded the previous RfCed noun sense in line with the citations just to make sense of the expression. My best efforts to reword it in line with the citations seem to have yielded a sense that seemed and seems NISoP to me. Perhaps someone sees some other wording or can provide additional citations. I think the sense of war is just a general figurative one, but a business-specific sense might be warranted. Delete. DCDuring TALK 20:12, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I've added the sense to [[war]]. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 16:20, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Deleted entry. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 15:41, 9 August 2010 (UTC)