User:Soap

__NOINDEX__

Short links

 * English words by silent letter
 * English words with unspelled phonemes
 * words with repeated phonemes
 * User:Lollipop is my alternate account, from which I often read, but rarely edit.
 * User:Soap/etymsearch
 * User:Soap/essays

Scratchpads

 * User:Soap/vector.css
 * User:Soap/Sandbox and User:Soap/scratchpad
 * User:Soap/etymsearch for honest speculation about etymologies

cats

 * 23:00, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Category:Autism Category:Mental_health Category:Health

none are appearing properly as of 23:00, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

quote-comic
The page User:Soap/quote-comic might work better if it were at Template:User:Soap/quote-comic following the pattern of some other sandbox templates.

Other information
I picked up the habit of using ... (ellipses) during a time when a smartphone was my main device, and i found the dash and parenthesis keys more difficult to type. I will try to break this habit as I worry it leads me to look like Im always rambling. My alternate account is Lollipop. I use the Lollipop account to browse in bed on my tablet, phone, and occasionally on a touchscreen laptop, but rarely to edit.

Im currently trying to buttonize the UI as much as possible, though I admit it's somewhat counterintuitive when I go to edit because the buttons arent there in the code. I will do my best to make this work but if I have to scale it back I will save the CSS somewhere so I can restore it if I think of a new way to go forward.

I dont think too many other people will be interested in the code but see /vector.css if you're curious. There are actually many bugs and drawbacks (that is; things that can be fixed and things that can't be fixed), and so I'm almost sure nobody would want to use the code the way I have it now, but people might like to use bits and pieces of it. The most important drawback is the wasted space I see in discussions when people leave a blank line between paragraphs, because for me that means it outdents all the way to the leftmost margin and then indents all the way back in again. This could be fixed if I didn't use so much padding, but the padding is helpful with mainspace entries.

Unorganized short- and long-term projects in English
a hidden category: Category:Requests for definitions in English entries

defence

 * 18:03, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

stabilize defense ~ defence

surfer popup

 * 19:37, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

surfer popup or perhaps surfer + popup, found in an old computer manual. it seems surf is a verb but does not fit the current sense of web surfing, and popup might be something different as well. links

shifty

 * 11:56, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

this edit might have been valid. check for shiftie also

myth

 * 14:09, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

(a)eschromythesis may be an early attempt to describe what we now call Tourette syndrome. found while looking for cognates of mytheme. it uses

kinks and fetishes

 * 16:22, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

There seems to be a general trend, though not consistent, that when a two-word phrase can either mean a kink or something family-friendly, the kink definition takes a bunched spelling while the other sense uses a space. For example, watersports vs water sports. It's as if the bunched spelling is somehow more vulgar just by itself. so let's go into the coalmine

temporary scratchpad

 * 12:22, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

i wrote this when i was not feeling well, and put all these together. i will get to them eventually. Sorry I've cut back lately and this might linger for a while.
 * antitrade Polish Wikipedia says it means literally above, but other sources imply it means higher latitude making it a sonym of westerlies
 * soft play https://www.instagram.com/p/CnzSBhNIN0U/ and from the same artist, despite the different signature (i assume she changed her name?)
 * hypopitys (move to full name) and pityopus
 * find at least one use of self-stimulation in the sense of masturbation. see edit history before Nov 2 2023 for cites
 * child prodigy why THUB? if declared sum of parts it c ould revert to a THUB later, but as it is, the sum-of-parts idea only works because we have a hint of child in one of the five definitions of prodigy.
 * Category:English_orthographic_borrowings
 * ckn is chicken. is chkn also used?
 * tarb obedient (not a brat). Probably doesnt exist. My mother may have made it up, or maybe someone in her family made it up, but it's clearly not in widespread use
 * life stage possibly from German Lebensstufen, though this is a painting from 1835, not the psychology sense. Even so this might have been the same term used by Charlotte Bühler in 1933
 * red sky at night
 * nudy rudy ~ nudey rudey ~ nudie rudie. definitely citable
 * (I dont remember the last word)


 * microbe, aerobic, etc use a morpheme that is really just /b/, derived from.
 * zuke third cite at
 * the Jp word for someone who wears shorts in cold weather. is on tea room, but now quite old
 * postural ... can it mean "behind the tail"? or "after urination"? i found only one possible hit for the latter and even that is probably meant in the sense "lying down">
 * iatrocide ... only example of -cide where the named party is the perpetrator and not the victim?
 * more feminist neologisms at w:The Matrixial Gaze

animal friendly proverbs

 * This is inspired by, but not restricted to, PETA's coinages. see more than one way to feed a cat and others


 * feed two dogs with one bone, a similar spin on a familiar phrase, just like feed two birds with one scone
 * but "kill two dogs with one bone" is more attestible in print. the feed version seems to be modern as we've become softer
 * there is also an unrelated two dogs with one bone meaning "two people who can never agree" because they have something both parties want but neither can share. this is why i linked it that way

autism
autistics and cousins possibly used in 1993, by a researcher whose name is Cousins. But the terminology may not have been in the origina l paper

shy

 * 15:42, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

bringing this back

call-shy, pee shy, camera shy, gun shy,. what else is there? this suggetss quite a few more

ametropia

 * 00:03, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Stabilize etymologies on ametropia and like pages. 4 etyms for the same word on one page now. See hypotropia and ... these form words for eye conditions that rhyme with the -opia words but do not actually use the suffix -opia. It's possible this is a sort of medical pun (since -tropy exists), but it is nevertheless etymologically sound.

in theory there is also -scopia but we seem to be satisfied ending words with -scope.

cyanopia and glaucopia might exist, and this is a separate meaning from the existing cyanopsia. thus, an -opia/-opsia minimal pair arguably exists, where -opsia refers to a medical condition and -opia to a physical type. But -opia can still be used for the medical meaning too.

there is no *scoptic to parallel optic, apparently because the corresponding ancient Greek verb forms did not exist. instead, the word is skeptic.

yet ANOTHER eye condition that sounds like it contains -opia but doesnt is ectropion and its opposite, entropion.

there is also -opsis, as in Lastreopsis, the shield fern.

pyrope

elementals

 * 19:07, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Rollo Ahmed uses elemental and elementary in the same book. Are they the same thing or not?

spit

 * 18:32, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

I could just spit / I could spit, a mild expression perhaps originally meant literally

metallic soap

 * 02:51, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

w:metallic soap has much ifnormation and could be used for other wikt pages as well

as girls go
there is no convenient title for a redirect to go (this link doesnt work for some reason). "as something goes" is the best i can come up with but it's singular.

nohbdy
and find the original Gk

off

 * 09:16, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

nothing about off-white etc listed at off that i can see. arguably off- could cover it but the defn currently isnt very helpful. ("away from white" would not mean light gray to most people)_

anything else





 * Dilbert Apr 17 1989 date oneself (a pun, containing the idiomatic and the literal sense together)


 * spiteware only used on reddit & twttr


 * for todge


 * hyperoptic listed as a misconstruction of hyperopic, when it might actually be a valid alternative form. There is no predictable pattern determining which words end in -opia ~ -opic and which end in -opsia ~ optic, and hyperopsia might be citable as well.   (I actually thought the definition was going to be a misconstruction of fiber optic when I first clicked.)


 * -sman, really -s- + man. Seems used in formal terms for some occupations, but we have the -s- listed as genitive, when I suspect it's plural. This could perhaps be solved by just saying it's -s, not -s-.

big and little

 * Good Good Good Good
 * Good Good Good

surely the comparatives at little can be handled better than this. Imagine:

and so on.


 * Good Good
 * (unless taken literally)
 * Be the larger person.

Sicyoeae pron & etym if possible. likely Σικυών

very short term projects and other quick notices
Apparently this is a known issue and there is no consensus
 * Fuzhou. address the question of whether an entry can have two Alternative forms sections. Remember alti

kennings
See Category:Old Norse names for Odin and note that one-word kennings might be better classified as heiti.
 * These words have kenning somewhere mentioned on the page. However I did not do an exhaustive search as it would have been four times as many pages to click through:
 * ofljóst daroþ súgr Friðþjófr svartalfar   brjótr  hrafn ~ramn hjaldr  Beowulf  dark elf ból

etymology qiestions
see User:Soap/etymsearch.

Old English
pæcan possibly a misreading of wægan. p ~ ƿ confusion happened also with the word "pail" (here). /p/ is uncommon in word-initial position in native OE words, and it looks like a native word due to its derivation and possible i-mutation.

Sigelhearwa a native name (not even a calque) for Ethiopia. If Ethiopia was already Christian, it would be odd to use this name, so perhaps it only appears in the Old Testament and could perhaps be better translated as Kush or some other name.

Spanish

 * chorrear
 * Category:Requests_for_translations_of_Spanish_quotations some are  beyond my skill level so i will go slowly
 * is Plasencia just Placentia all over again? The Wikipedia article stealthily avoids providing an etymology.

Swahili /topi/
Funnily enough there is a Swahili /topi/ that means a type of hat. I want to add both of these entries but will hold off until i can understand the noun classes. Also noting that Swahili is a WDL.

Pöppel
A game piece ("doll"). Ready to create, but I dont know the declension and it isnt yet listed in de.wikt. I would need to find it in Duden or some other dictionary.

Sundanese
I made a large number of edits to Sundanese but didnt finish the project. They may be linked from a page such as Special:DeadendPages. I will finish this, but I dont consider it a priority since I'm mostly just adding wikilinks, and my original intent was to thin down the DeadendPages category so that the remaining pages, which might be there for diverse reasons, would stand out more.

tadpole
come back to this. remember mormoloc and Larve

Japanese 白板 add to /p/ list if ever restored

Talitha

 * talitha <--- a real word?

peaches, pears, papaya, pineapples
try to find etymology of fi pipo and piippa. is the first one a proper name? is the second one sound symbolism? both are related to hats.

Yes, names of fruits often begin with p in English, with c/k right up beside it. This seems to hold true in Romanian too. Note the complete absence of /t/, the commonest voiceless stop in European languages (and probably worldwide too). The theory linking sweet tastes with the front of the tongue has been cast into doubt if not entirely debunked, but since babies learn to talk from the front of the mouth (lips) to the back, and develop tastes by starting with sweet foods and working towards savory foods and then complex tastes, the subconscious association may be real.

This would not explain the overrepresentation of /k/, so I think sound symbolism also plays a role. The well-known bouba/kiki effect might actually have been better described as bouba-titi since /k/ is a sound used often for large round objects (e.g. German Kugel) and thus fits well for fruits as well. The kiki word is meant to sound like a sharp object, but the only sharp parts of our anatomy are our fingernails and our teeth. The teeth are used in many languages to pronounce the /t/ sound, though English prefers to place the tip of the tongue slightly further back. The further back position actually sounds like a sharper sound to me, but it is still the same area of the mouth. So it may be that /p/ and /k/ are two of a kind whereas a fruit with /t/ would sound subconsciously something spiky and unpleasant to eat.

apple and apricot also begin with /p/ in English according to the "first consonant" system of counting, used in poetry, although i think this is intended to apply to situations in which the first syllable is unstressed. e.g. a phrase like a poignant apology alliterates because the listener hears the same stressed /p/ sound twice, but it doesnt really work, in my opinion, when the /p/ is post-tonic.

Malagasy
akoholahy is the word that came to us translated as "gall"

om zeep

 * 20:08, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

see 肥皂

emojis and emoticons
The 😮 emoji is at least 200 years old, likely much older, perhaps 500.

fun things
Who will care in 2023 that the expression go commando meant going out without underwear on the TV series Friends? Dictionaries were invented for less frivolous duty, like pinning down the meaning of is. ---unsigned editorial, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 13 2002

Unicode symbols
Unicode has finally added separate symbols for boys and girls, alongside the well-known symbols for men and women.

idioms
Mastering English means knowing the difference between cream in one's coffee and cream in one's jeans.

weather
Why is Al Gore so worried about global warming? Because it threatens his very existence.

can you Zn of any more?
What a Si you were, hiding Eu under your C-net! You thought you Pb the Cu astray, but then you put your Ne the F  Kr in silence to meet your Bi partners. I hope nobody Cs. Oops! Your just Pt both with your car! What an Fe-y! It was Xe television too. The doctors couldn't He or Cm and they'll never Lv. At least they didnt S too much. Now they Ar. Who will Ba?

What a silly con you were, hiding your opium under your car bonnet! You thought you led the copper astray, but then you put your knee on the floor and crept on in silence to meet your business partners. I hope nobody sees 'em. Oops! You just flattened 'em both with your car! What an irony! It was seen on television too. The doctors couldn't heal 'em or cure 'em and they'll never live for more. At least they didn't suffer too much. Now they are gone. Who will bury 'em?

limericks
maybe a Nash-style limerick or two for the ones that wont fit into the story..... The swing set no one had Pln because it was covered in Rn. But wait! That's a gas with a very high mass so how did it ever get Sprn?

although Nash popularized the style of respelling the rhymes according to the most irregular line, it is also seen in parodies of English spelling, especially of surnames, seen on sites like this and this and this. Some of the limericks, especially on the second page, may be quite old, but it's possible that they are modern and written in an antiquated style.

whatever wont fit elsewhere
A chemist turned dentist put a sign on the wall, "Can you please Pl?"

scrambled senses
See /scrambled. My first addition to this page will probably be my best, so I may lose interest in this soon

interpretive etymologies

 * Since soak is originally the causative of suck, does that mean soap is the causative of sup? If so, does that make soap a delicious meal?

Korean
Although it is well known that Korean is written in a featural syllabary, there are some pure ideographic words. For example, the word for soap is 석감, remembering the facial expressions of two people who believed the section above.

Malagasy
Try saying the Malagasy word for "brutal" as angrily as you can.

a wish called wəndə
While you've been sitting around, I've been busy reconstructing proto-Nostratic.

Proto-Borean wəndə
 * Proto-Amerind *wṅdə̆
 * Proto-Macro-Siouxan *mṅdə
 * Lakota mní
 * Proto-Nostratic *wàdʷa
 * Proto-Paleo-Eurasian: *wàdʷa
 * Proto-Paleo-Siberian: *wàgʷa
 * Proto-Trans-Siberian: *wàkʷa
 * Ainu: wakka
 * Proto-Indo-European: *wedweh₂
 * Proto-Italic: *wagua
 * Spanish: agua
 * Proto-Germanic: *wadda (Kluge's Law and syntactic gemination)
 * English: water

Abinomn wi is surely also a cognate, because although it is spoken in southeast Asia, I keep mistaking it for an Algonquian language.

See water/translations for more.

Two more languages arrive at the bar

 * Upper Sorbian: Wait, why is everyone looking at me?
 * Turkmen: I think we're at the  wrong party.

wee
It's good to have  words with meanings as flexible as these, but let's hope we don't get them confused.


 * 1) to sing (songs)
 * 2)  to partake in a citizenship ceremony
 * 3)  to urinate


 * 1) urine
 * 2) to urinate; to pee
 * 3)  to pay attention to someone


 * 1) to be cheerful, to look happy, to rejoice
 * 2) (allegedly) to urinate
 * 1) (allegedly) to urinate
 * 1) (allegedly) to urinate

others

 * 𡳞

I thought it was funny that Armenian uses the same word for "urine" and "us", until I realized that wee do the same thing in English too.

interpretive etymologies II

 * See explanation here.

Poortown and Richtown
Richtown is rich in poor people, but poor in rich people. Poortown is rich in rich people and poor in poor people. Poortown's poor are richer than Richtown's poor but poorer than Richtown's rich. Some say Poortown's richer poor are poorer than the poorest Richtown rich, but Poortown's mayor, Ed Poor, claims Richtown's richest poor are poorer than the richest Poortown poor.

Poortown and Richtown pave their walks with pitch. Richtown mayor Ed Rich knows that the richest Richtown rich are richer in pitch than the richest Poortown rich, but wonders which town's poor are richer in pitch: the richer poor in pitch-poor-poor-poor Poortown or the poorer poor in pitch-rich-rich-rich Richtown?

Poortown truck drivers are donating toy trucks to Richtown school children for Christmas. These annual toy truck truck drives are so famous that Poortown Toy Co has produced a die cast model of the most popular toy truck truck. It's so popular that the list of toy trucks to be distributed on the toy truck trucks will include this toy toy truck truck and Poortown truck drivers have decided to deliver them on a specially requisitioned toy toy truck truck truck.

had had had had had
There is no use/mention distinction involved here, so I consider this sentence much superior to the better-known teacher's classroom example. After all, if use/mention is allowed, why not add a third student who used "had had had"?

The child that the couple had had had had had no breakfast.

The sequence had₁ had₂ had₃ had₄ had₅ breaks down as:
 * 1) The "past perfect" marker
 * 2) To make something happen
 * 3) To conceive a baby, particularly through surrogacy
 * 4) Same as 1)
 * 5) To have, obtain, consume

I will try to explain the five meanings better if I can because I find grammar terms confusing. The most important one, however, is 3), a full verb and not just an auxiliary.

I've traced this to a rec.puzzles entry from 1993, but seemingly with an error, which indicates to me that it might be older than this, and that the 1993 rec.puzzles poster miscopied it from where they'd seen it.

In theory one could produce a sentence with six consecutive hads as well, such as "the child that the couple had had had had had had a child of their own", but since this simply repeats the had₁ had₂ had₃ twice, I prefer the 5-had version.

got
Good

Other repeated words

 * your urine analysises

two twos
A pair of English ballet dancers taught an African leader to play woodwind instruments ... from 1:58am to 1:58pm, in fact. That is,
 * Two tutu'ed Tudor tooters tutored Tutu — two to two to two to two too.

spines
A tribute to the collection at this site:
 * Tired after a long walk in the desert, I laid down against a cactus to rest, but the spines kept poking my spine.
 * In French, there are at least three words corresponding to English spine:   echino-, échine, and épine. All three are unrelated to each other.


 * Buster's busts' busts bu(r)st.

Esau's seesaw
I won't do it here (not diff-by-diff, I mean), but I want to unite the famous Esau's woodsaw and seesaw tongue twisters into a single story, perhaps by first telling about Esau, then about the seesaw, and then a third paragraph where the stories come together.

important knowledge
Note that laik means play and is distantly cognate to both like and lich, as well as the suffix -ly. Like-Like is an enemy from the Legend of Zelda. /laix/ is an acceptable pronunciation of lich in Scots English.

Would a Like-Like-like lich like to laik with a lich-like Like-Like, or would a lich-like lich like to laik with a Like-Like-like Like-Like? Not likelily.

The leech leached the lich's lich with a leech from Lechmere.

Like-Likes like to lick the leeches on my leech's lich.

thesaurus
This hilariously bad "thesaurus dictionary" is the worst attempt at automated language processing I've seen since the day I saw cuatro prominent scientists passed off as Spanish on a now-defunct astronomy website. Try searching the entries for soap, tampon, lizard, and carrot.

I suspect this may be one of those sites where the software is set up, advertising revenue is secured, and then the site enters the maintenance stage as the programmers are no longer necessary. Which means it's probably not going to get better anytime soon. In fact, while I had assumed at first blush that this site was new since I'd never seen it until just a few weeks ago, I just found a blog post from 2017 that uses one of its dinosaur images, so the site has been up and running for at least five years, and likely more.

Portmanteaus
Some of these words have probably been coined independently by many different people.
 * symblematic: a cross between symptomatic, emblematic, and symbolistic.  I created this word independently of anyone else who has used it. As of July 15 2010 it got 139 hits on Google, and likely more if variant spellings are added.  (But really this word is better used in speech, where you can speak quickly and people will not even realize it's not a word.)    Used by Donald Trump in 2012,  but I had already typed this up two years earlier.   The spelling symblomatic also competes with the -e-.
 * techknowledgeable (also spelled technologible). overheard. The seam is smooth enough that I consider this a fairly good pun.
 * errange to erase or wipe out some items in a set, and reorder the remainder. From a middle school teacher
 * confuzzled is probably a portmanteau of confused and puzzled. It reminds me, though, that we might still have a barely productive left-over vowel shortening rule to form diminutives ("YouTubby", not *YouTubey, and so on). In theory this could be over 2,500 years old if it results from Kluge's Law.
 * unsleepable and slumbersome were both in use in the 1800s, and both have transparent derivations, but I think of them as portmanteaus because they each have a far more common word they resemble. If not, they're at least decent puns.
 * femstruate ... according to Megan Yarnall, words like this have started to bleed through our conversation.

There is also rã:ʔ, a word that sounds about halfway between right and wrong. From a high school teacher.

The word examplanation appears in print books going back at least to 1819, the era of movable type, and it is clearly not a scan error. If we read the rules robotically, examplanation would easily pass CFI. However I suspect that most of the uses are typos, even the 1819 one, if we assume people made the same type of motor memory errors with movable type as we do today with keyboards.

Twitter, Reddit, and Usenet

 * 11:57, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Since this keeps coming up.

Original CFI vote

 * This is the vote in which the two-week discussion clause was added to the CFI criteria. This happened before the votes on Twitter and the other sites, meaning that those votes used the two-week CFI discussions as a background.


 * This is the vote in which we nominated websites to be allowed into what I will call for lack of a better term the two-week voting pool.


 * This is the Usenet vote, a wholly separate discussion. It failed, and serves as a sign that demoting Usenet to the level of Twitter (as I had privately wanted) would also fail .... still, some oppose rationales were about process, not substance. This vote may  become relevant if the Twitter discussion continues down a certain path.

There was also a separate vote on whether to allow sites like 4chan, and they were soundly rejected. This could be relevant only because it puts them in a different category than Twitter. I want to get back to this, because I thought I remembered seeing yet another discussion where there were many more votes than this ... even 4chan was only rejected by a vote of 3 to 2 here, which is not what I remembered.

Twitterpated
Twitter, the only site on the list that seems to be contentious, received 60% support for being allowed into the two-week voting pool, meaning it was closed as no consensus. Reading it narrowly, that means it was rejected, and that Twitter cannot be used in any way to meet the criteria for attestation. Under this view, the only sites that merit two-week votes are established journals like Vice and HuffPo that don't feature user-written content. Therefore it is an utter waste of time to even create pages such as women ☕, as they will forever remain at zero acceptable citations even if thousands of tweets are found.

Status quo argument
Yet, people clearly have different ways of interpreting the vote. Some people interpret the 60% support as a pass, meaning that Twitter is allowed, putting it into a category above sites like 4chan which were strongly opposed. It's possible that many of these people interpret the 60% as a pass because it maintains the status quo of allowing Twitter, and therefore is really a 40% vote to disallow Twitter. Under this standard, 4chan and some other sites still clearly are disallowed, as they were rejected by a huge margin. Clearly many of us take this  view,       as we have been adding Twitter-only words continuously for the five months since that vote, and we have been  holding the two-week discussions regularly when they are brought to RFD/V.

But on these discussions some people maintain  that the discussions are unwarranted, saying that because Twitter was never accepted as a valid online source that it cannot be let into the two-week voting pool. One possible counterargument to the status quo view is that if Twitter was considered a valid source all along, so would any other site be, and we could be theoretically adding words used only on tiny circle-of-friends blogs and the like and saying that those blogs have not yet been rejected with a CFI vote. However I suspect any such words would be voted down at the CFI discussions, and that if those sources came up to a vote, they would also be rejected by a much greater ratio than was Twitter.

Other disputes
Now, five months later, we are still arguing about how to interpret the result of the vote on Twitter. Some people are saying that the September Beer Parlour vote was the two-week CFI vote, and therefore the votes on individual words are out-of-process. We had been having CFI votes for individual words before the Beer Parlour vote, however.

However we interpret the wording, it does not resolve the question over whether the Beer Parlour vote should be interpreted as 60% to allow or 40% to disallow; if we decide that the September discussion was the only discussion we need, then it either means that 0% of Twitter-cited words are allowed or that 100% are.

My own view on Twitter
Although I was opposed to allowing Twitter (and Usenet), I withheld my vote, as I typically don't vote on site-wide discussions like this. When I saw that we were allowing Twitter, I accepted the result and moved on.

Now, having seen the results of the new policy for five months, I would much rather we continue to allow Twitter than to have endless arguments about how to interpret the September vote each time a new word comes up for review. The system we are using now ... allowing Twitter .... is working well, and we should keep at it until someone can demonstrate a problem that isn't reducible to a difference of opinion.

As for Usenet
Twitter is probably more popular today than Usenet ever was, because during Usenet's peak only a small portion of the population had Internet access. Usenet is even less representative today. I've accepted Usenet as a source of citations, but would strongly prefer that it be treated like Twitter, meaning that words whose only cites were from Usenet and Twitter could be challenged specifically on that basis.

Usenet could be exploited to get extremely rare words to pass CFI. For example,, a word I made up, passes CFI through its three cites on Usenet because three other people have also (independently) made the same pun as me and with the same meaning ("bad news" as opposed to the Gospel which is "good news").

It's worth noting, though, that after an initially positive reception, we've held off from doing any of these new vote-based RFV's for the past few months, and it's even possible that there wasn't a single example in all of 2023. This issue is likely to sunset itself, as readership of Usenet has declined and so has addition of words from Usenet. In fact, there is now no easily accessible gateway, so addition of words may stop entirely (though old posts are still accessible).

Renaming Twitter to X

 * 09:45, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

It hasnt come up yet, but I expect soon we will rename all our templates to say X instead of Twitter, or start a discussion about doing so. I hope there is a discussion, because I think there are good reasons to keep them as Twitter, but I don't hold so strong an opinion on it that I'll complain if we make the change. — Soap — 09:45, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Ideas for templates
I would like to see a quote-comic and a snowclone template. These are two completely unrelated ideas and would serve different purposes. It's just that I got the idea for the second after thinking about my idea for the first.

Snowclone template
The snowclone template would be used on just two pages and would most likely consist of just a single line of code. The only reason I want to see a template is that it would make editing Appendix:English snowclones and its companion page easier and reduce the need for redundant typing. As it stands now, all of the entries must contain the same text twice in order to produce usable links.

the code of 1 is something like but there are so many brackets that i'd have trouble making even a slight modification.

calvin & hobbes jun 22 1988 has the "if you've seen one star, you've seen them all"

quote-comic template
Whereas the comic template, as I imagine it, would be some sort of fusion of quote-av and quote-book, so that it would cover webcomics, print comics, and comics that are both without the need to keep switching back and forth or give precedence to the print form of a comic that is today primarily accessed online. One benefit of having a template specifically for comics is that it would allow us to dispense with the annoying repeated parentheses, such as (For Better or For Worse) (comic) which as of yet can only otherwise be avoided by leaving out the genre, potentially meaning that readers will not realize that we're quoting a comic strip. Another benefit would be the addition of a role= parameter, as in quote-av, which quote-book currently lacks.

Another problem with parentheses occurs when quoting a comic strip in a newspaper, as below:

This makes it looks as if the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, rather than Tangelo Pie, is the comic strip. Since this particular strip was once also published in a paperback format, I went with quote-book, but I dont have that book  with me anymore and can't  provide a page number.

I am still interested in this, but for the meantime I will be using quote-book. If we ever create a separate template for comics, I will make sure that the parameters are compatible so that all I will need to do is change the template name.

usex vs quote
Naively, one would think that quotes (citations) would show immediately upon viewing an entry, and use examples (usexes) would require the reader to press a button to expand them, but in fact it is the other way around. Why is this? I can imagine a few reasons:
 * 1) Quotes take up more space on the screen, and most readers are just looking for the quickest way to get from one definition to the next, so it is better to hide the quotations except from those who specifically press the button to uncoil them.
 * 2) Any editor can create new use examples, but only published authors can create new quotes, so it helps the spirit of the project to show users' work right in front of them when they hit Save, instead of intimating that what they wrote is of inferior quality to what was there before.

An unspoken consensus suggests that quotes are more valuable than use examples, and I agree, though there are a few occasions in which I will add a use-example where a quote could have done. One case includes technical terminology and jargon, where people using the word are communicating only with others who know what it means, and therefore use it in opaque situations that would be unhelpful to a reader seeking more information. Not all of these are related to technology: it is easy to find people using the term plant-based in recipes, advertisements, and so on, but much more difficult to find someone simultaneously using it and explaining precisely what it means (it has two distinct meanings in fact). Another example where i prefer to type out a use-example is ungrammatical words, such as sleeped, where I chose to paraphrase two users' posts rather than link directly to them.

Google Books search throws up spurious results
This morning I searched Google Books for the phrase did not choose to comply with her wishes, which appears in a book quote on our entry for blow up. Among the very few results I got were .... OTHER book quotes that also appear on our page for blow up, even though they have nothing to do with the book I quoted from, and even though my query string didn't even contain the phrase blow up. This is yet another demonstration of how Google Books search is unreliable, and direct irrefutable confirmation that they are inflating search results with books that absolutely cannot by any stretch of the imagination be helpful to the person searching for a specific quote.

exicornt
yes, they even return four hits for exicornt, a word that was invented on Wikipedia in late 2005 and quickly revealed as a hoax. And two of those four book cites are from before 1930. (No need to bother looking ... I assure you none of Google's four hits actually contains the word.) On a happy note I would like to point out that the person who originally added the exicornt hoax has been let back in to Wikipedia and has since edited primarily about baseball.

time travel
Amazingly typeset self-help book published in 1900 tells us about laptops and cars.