Wiktionary:Tea room/2024/June

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← May 2024 · June 2024 · July 2024 → · (current)

---

mis-

I think the entry for mis- (English prefix) seems to have gotten a little mangled. Between a sub-sense and some questionable differences in senses that aren't really different, I wanted to try to clean it up, but doing so well is probably a bit beyond me, so I thought I'd just post here in case anyone else feels like taking a stab at it. Thanks! Deacon Vorbis (talk) 16:40, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

laquearius, laqueatus

Hoping Latin editors can look over these entries: I can cite laquearius as an English word for an ensnaring gladiator (Citations:laquearius), but our Latin entry only defines it as a ceiling-maker, so is our Latin entry missing a sense? Wikipedia asserts laquerarius and laqueator as other words for such a gladiator, but the first's a redlink and the second's only a verb form, so again, are we missing entries? Alternatively, the scantness and nature of the (overwhelmingly English rather than Latin) cites I found in searching makes me wonder if WP is mistaken to think these are words for net-using gladiators (certainly ‎laqueary and laquearian have few cites). - -sche (discuss) 23:48, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

The "gladiator" terms seem to occur in two alternative versions of Isidore's Etymologies. Laqueator also appears in Hugutius Pisanus's Derivationes, which quotes Isidore: I don't think there is an independent source attesting the name.--Urszag (talk) 02:45, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Etymology scriptorium

I am trying to create the new topic Cyclidium on the main Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium page of June 2024 and I systematically receive an error and I am redirected to the page Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2024/juin. Could you please help me? Gerardgiraud (talk) 07:43, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

IPA pronunciation for Swedish "idiot"

The IPA pronunciation for Swedish "idiot" is /ɪdɪˈuːt/, but the page is protected so I cannot edit it. Can anyone with the perms do this? Akhaeron (talk) 13:43, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Done. Tollef Salemann (talk) 14:04, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

after

Adverb sense:

• On the result of. Often used with verbs related to cleaning.

  I'm tired of picking up after you. Why can't you clean your own messes?

Anyone see why this is an adverb? The definition (which barely makes sense to me anyway, as far as it can be substituted into the example) seems prepositional, as does the example itself. Mihia (talk) 19:45, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Unhelpfully, when I look at other dictionaries, none of the ones I checked list a sense which I was able to recognize as obviously corresponding to this (unless they are treating it as an instance of something more general than we are), in any POS. We ourselves don't seem to have a sense for this at behind (unless, again, we too are subsuming it into something more general), where it nonetheless seems to exist to the same extent as this: google books:"cleaning up behind you", google books:"picking up behind you", google books:"fixing things behind you". On the face of it, I agree with you that it looks more prepositional, and the definition needs to be rewritten. - -sche (discuss) 20:10, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

It is definitely prepositional. I think other dictionaries are trying to be more general. I liked AHD: "5. Subsequent to and because of or regardless of: They are still friends after all their differences." MW 1913 and Online have something similar, 1913 splitting it into "because of" and "regardless of" definitions. I remember my mother saying the first sentence to me. Are there corresponding uses of nach [not in our defs.] and après?

"on the result of" does not fit American English. DCDuring (talk) 02:22, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

escritório in Portuguese

Unfortunately I'm having a bit of a disagreement with another user about this word, @Sarilho1, and after being unable to achieve consensus with them at their talk page, I am turning to the community. Sarilho1 added in September a new definition to this word, which they entered in as the very first definition. Prior to their edit, the entry's first and sole definition was office; afterwards, the new first definition was writing desk. After checking numerous Portuguese monolingual dictionaries, as well as Portuguese-English dictionaries, I haven't found a single one that lists "writing desk" as the first and primary definition, and this accords with my own experience talking and interacting with Portuguese speakers both from Portugal and Brazil, where I have only ever seen it mean office (in the sense of a work place, or in the related sense of "bureau", "ministry", or "(bureaucratic) department"). Every dictionary I have checked has "office" as the very first definition. A few dictionaries do list "(writing) desk" as a third or fourth definition; of these, the Priberam definition, in its third sense of the word, defines it as a "A piece of furniture that was a type of writing desk", while Michaelis, in their second definition of the term, define it as "an antique piece of furniture with a school desk cover or table to write on; desk". The use of "was" and "antique" in these definitions seem to indicate that this is an older, largely antiquated sense of the word, while the Michaelis definition in particular suggests that it applies to a specific type of antoque desk and not writing desks in general. I would also like to point out that the Portuguese Wiktionary entry for the word, pt: escritório, nowhere lists such a definition as "writing desk". Obviously another Wiktionary is not a reliable source per se, but it just adds evidence in favor of my point. I have also consulted with a number of Portuguese native speakers who agreed with me and stated they have never seen "escritório" used to mean writing desk, which, if not necessarily evidence against the word having (had) that meaning in specific contexts or in earlier times, is at least evidence that this is not its primary usage. Also, of particular note, not one bilingual dictionary translates the word as the English word(s) "(writing) desk"; to the extent it appears at all, it is in monolingual dictionaries, and, again, always as a secondary/tertiary (or lower) sense.

I have attempted to engage with Sarilho1 about this out of good faith, because they appear to be an experienced user who knows what they are doing, but unfortunately they have stonewalled me and resorted to reverting my edits, without giving me any explanations or evidence that this is a currently a primary sense of the word.

Thus, I am reaching out to other people in the community who know Portuguese to see what they have to say about this.

A summary of dictionaries I have checked:

• Collins English-Portuguese dictionary — "Office" as first sense; no definition corresponding to "writing desk"

• Routledge English-Portuguese dictionary (paper copy) — "Office" as first sense; no definition corresponding to "writing desk"

• Priberam monolingual dictionary — Office as first sense, "writing desk" in a specific and narrow sense as the third definition as discussed above.

• Michaelis monolingual dictionary — Office as first sense, "writing desk" in a specific and narrow sense as the second definition as discussed above.

• Aulete monolingual dictionary — Office as first sense, "writing desk" as the third definition.

• Infopedia monolingual dictionary — "Office" first sense; "writing desk with an inclined cover" as the fourth sense. Brusquedandelion (talk) 01:00, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

@Brusquedandelion This looks like a case of an eternal disagreement on Wiktionary: should entries order things with the oldest first, to show the history of the term, or the currently best known, to put the information that most users are likely to want where it's easiest to find. It's been debated many times, and there's never been a consensus one way or the other.

I suspect that the writing desk sense is the original. There are English terms like bureau and cabinet that started out as furniture and progressed to names of organizational units. Even desk has administrative senses. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:16, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree that the "writing desk" sense is probably the original sense, for etymological and comparative linguistic reasons (c.f. Spanish, Galician escritorio, Latin scriptorium), although I am unsure if this is the reason that Sarilho1 holds their position, since they have decline to clarify their reasons for prefering such an ordering. However, while perhaps not "consensus", in the preponderance of cases, I'm fairly certain, from what I have seen here on Wiktionary, obscure senses get delegated to later positions in the list of definitions, even if they are more primordial. English examples I can think of that are comparable in their obscurity include meat (sense 3 "food in general" is the original meaning), buxom (senses 3/4 and then 2 were its meanings, in that order, prior to the modern, most commonly used sense that is 1), and worm (senses 3 and 9, "dragon" or "any crawling thing, including snakes", the original meaning). In the rare cases where they are included as the first item in the list (the only such word I could think of is decimate), they are marked as archaic/obsolete using {{label}}, something Sarilho1 is also apparently against. I can only conclude from this that our disagreement is actually more fundamental than "how should we order a list of definitions"; they seem to believe the sense of "writing desk" is both current and common, which is at odds with the facts, hence why I am asking other Portuguese speakers to weigh in.

I'm really not talking here about a case where a word still has multiple more or less common definitions, where one is older, but slightly less common; in this case, if you asked 500 Portuguese speakers if escritório can mean "desk", I think you'd be lucky to find one who would agree; in this sense, it is perhaps analogous to "meat" in the sense of "food in general", or "worm" in the sense of "snake" for English speakers.

All this said, if you happen to have links to previous cases of this same sort of disagreement, I would appreciate that; it might shed some light on this issue. Thank you for weighing in. Brusquedandelion (talk) 05:04, 3 June 2024 (UTC)