Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Misnomer (2 nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Proto::► 11:28, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Misnomer

Procedural note. This nomination wasn't listed when nominated (2006-12-30); it is listed now (2007-01-02). This AFD should be closed 5 days after this listing. —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-01-02 06:25Z

Update: it was correctly listed, briefly, by User:mikkalai, but the listing was accidentally removed by someone else [1]. —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-01-02 06:43Z

• Misnomer (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

del After a year and half since the first nomination it is still a dicdef augmented with a piece of trivial original research (the list of reasons why people may confuse things is endless) & a long list of examples. No references. Both the term and some examples are already wiktionarized. `'mikka 17:51, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per nom. A list alone is not enough to turn a wiktionary article into a wiktipedia article, and the examples cannot easily be referenced as they are partially matter of opinion. — CobraWiki ^{( jabber | stuff )} 21:14, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Keep — Articles like this have their place here. See the newish discussion here on some matters which serve a similar use. This is not a dead tree limited venue after all.
  
  Further, a quick search of this long history page for 'maintenance templates' like {{clean}}, {{copyedit}}, or just "{{" brings up nothing pertinent including no {{unref}} templates. Imho, as much as I hate such in your face detriments to our reputation, those would be a better choice than the AFD tag, as this little article hasn't really been given a lot of maintenance request exposure. None, actually.
  
  If someone were to tag deficiencies thoughtfully with their analysis and cogent and well considered view of it's shortcomings, instead taking the easy way out and nominating such for deletion— given a punch list, why some one like myself with a lesser grasp of minutia and your practiced perspective and experience would probably come along fairly quickly and fiddle it into better shape. // FrankB 04:05, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. This is definitely a valid article subject. --tjstrf talk 04:43, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Procedural note: AFD listed at this point. —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-01-02 06:25Z

• Keep, looks like a valid article. May need cleanup, though. JIP | Talk 07:03, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. This article offers a good and useful survey, an acceptable definition, and lots of helpful links. Wikikiwi 10:21, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
• Comment. If it's going to stay, it'll have to be more than just an indiscriminate and unbound list of misnomers. For that, you ought to just make a Category:Misnomer on Wiktionary. Can we get some sort of real-world context? Did misnomers ever cause any notable misunderstandings? Are there any people writing on the topic of misnomers? Any significance at all beyond lingual curiosity? –Gunslinger47 10:53, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Yes, a number of notable controversies arose from misnomers (American "Indians" aren't from India); there are hoaxes/jokes of national proportions (Erik the Red supposedly intentionally misnamed Greenland) —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-01-03 10:39Z

Heh. The "misnomers" category in Wiktionary is rather small. IMO, this is because no one could agree on what a misnomer is. Wiktionary's own definitions are: "The wrong name or term", which depends on one's notion of "wrong"; "An unsuitable or misleading name (for something)." which is just a bit less subjective and in line with the working definition in the present article; "(Wiktionary jargon) A term whose sense in common usage conflicts with a technical sense." which reflected the way people categorizing things as misnomers seemed to be using the term; "(non-standard: see usage notes) Something that is not true; a myth.". The usage notes just say that the usage is considered incorrect.

So not much help there. Eventually the category fell out of favor and most of the items tagged misnomer were untagged. This is yet another battle in the long-running descriptivist/prescriptivist war in Wiktionary land. The descriptivists appear to have won that one (full disclosure -- I'm a descriptivist ex-Wiktionarian).

A wider-ranging discussion of what a misnomer might or might not be, with examples, was considered more appropriate to Wikipedia, and I tend to concur. I would like to see more of a discussion than just a raw list, but I strongly lean toward trying to fix the article rather than gunning it. -Dmh 05:08, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. I see no strong reason why this article should be deleted. MusiCitizen 17:42, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete This article contains a dictionary definition plus a usage guide plus some original research. Guy (Help!) 19:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep as this is a reasonable topic (beyond a dicdef) and a reasonable list, but it does need references. So tagging. --Dhartung | Talk 23:27, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
• Weak keep. It has the potential to be a good article, though the giant list needs to be trimmed down. Strad 01:04, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. I dislike the original laundry list of "Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?" trifles, and I particularly dislike the "I know something you don't" angle, which is always very selectively applied to things the particular critic happens to know. However, there are a couple of interesting phenomena at work here. First is the process of linguistic change (by which, for example, the term steamroller comes to be applied to something that doesn't run on steam, but we don't call any train engine a steam engine). Second is the selectivity by which only some of the many, many possible candidates actually come to be regarded as misnomers. Some have complained that the list given is too long, but what stands out to me is how short it is.

A misnomer is something that "everybody" uses incorrectly, but "everybody else" knows is "wrong". If I decide to get on a high horse about "down" no longer referring to hills, that's my own private crotchet. But if a generation of school teachers teaches that Koala bears (as they were once called even in Australia) aren't bears, or a widely-read language maven claims that "awesome" should only refer to things inspiring awe, then we've got ourselves a misnomer. This is a social phenomenon worth noting, and it's not material for a wiktionary definition.

This is why I went to the trouble to try to categorize the raw list and to try to tease out what does and doesn't constitute a misnomer (taking into account other editors' edits to my changes :-). Whether this is cataloging or original research is a bit fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure that actual psycholinguists have studied this same phenomenon. Which is why I left a hook for such research in the intro.

I'll see what I can dig up along those lines. As I understand it, if there is such research it would be pretty good evidence that an article is warranted. -Dmh 17:19, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I've been able to scrape up a couple of citations. I would expect that Western psycholinguists are not particularly concerned with "misnomers" per se, but lump it in with the larger question of the perception of "correct" usage.

Here are a the cites so far. The first one appears the more relevant: "Ghotra,Balvinder S . On riding the phenomenon of borrowing of misnomers . Indian Linguistics . Vol.61(1-4), pp.9-12 ." (found on http://www.languageinindia.com/jan2003/indicarticles.html). "Misnomer and the acceptance of misnomers as right ones" (http://www.wanfangdata.com.cn/qikan/periodical.Articles/hfgydxxb-shkx/hfgy2004/0405/040529.htm), main article is in Chinese. -Dmh

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.