User talk:Herostratus

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Westward Ho!
Hi. Thanks for looking at this. However, the phrases you have added &mdash; while totally worth mentioning in the etymology to explain the phrase &mdash; should not really have part-of-speech subentries of their own, since they are sum of parts. Look at, which covers this meaning. (To put it another way, if a town is called Brown Leaf, that still wouldn't justify the dictionary having an entry for "brown leaf: a leaf off a tree that is brown", since it's self-evident from the parts.) Capitalisation is also an issue, since the everyday phrase "westward ho" does not require the capitals or exclamation mark. So I am probably gonna cut this down a bit later and move your point into the etymology section instead. Equinox ◑ 10:44, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Equinox, thank you! You guys certainly know better than I and I accept and defer to whatever you decide. If this was Wikipedia we would have seperate pages for "Westward Ho!" and "Westward ho", so I don't know if that's what we'd do here or how its handled. If there's be just one page here, maybe the best name was would be "westward ho".


 * I suppose tho that "self evident" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm not entirely convinced that a reader who is going to this page will already know that "westward ho!" means either "I proffer to go west" or "let's go west" (rather than, say, "look to the west" or "get lost" or "let us die bravely" (from go west, to die) or something. Particularly ESL readers who have run across it. If it is self-evident to them, then why are they accessing this page. See for instance have at, where knowing the meaning of "have" and "at" is not sufficient, etc.


 * Unless they are looking for the English town, which I'd guess most aren't, since 1) it's pretty obscure compared to John Wayne movies and such I'd guess, and 2) this is a dictionary why are they even looking for towns here, and 3) if they are looking for a proper noun, there are a lot of other such uses, see Westward Ho at Wikipedia and its not clear that the English town trumps them all put together.


 * But definitely you guys know, I'm a Wikipedia guy and just here to make a landing place for people accessing Westward Ho on that site. So I definitely defer to your judgement, totally, and thank you for the interest. (BTW and FWIW I've added a citations page which didn't exist when you wrote this.) Herostratus (talk) 11:17, 22 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is a bit of an omnium-gatherum whereas we do focus on what are traditionally "words" to be found in a dictionary. Admittedly we have got a lot more place names than any paper dictionary; but I bet you'd be surprised not to find Paris in a printed dictionary, whereas you (hopefully) would be surprised to find a large list of films etc. Those are encyclopaedia material. It seems you pre-date me on here by a couple of years but haven't used it much. So I'll drop the welcome-Wikipedia-user thing again in case you are curious about these differences. cheers, Equinox ◑ 12:16, 22 October 2020 (UTC)