Talk:The Big Bang Theory season 3

1st-contact episode
For ep 62, "The Staircase Implementation", where the apt.-mates argue about the thermostat, i found among other things
 * ... storms out of the apartment and goes to Penny to cool off.

and replaced with
 * ... storms out of the apartment and visits Penny to disengage.

believing that the contributor of "cool off" and i were in agreement that emotional rather than physical "temperature" was foremost in Leonard's mind. I saw it as most important to avoid that ambiguity (and less urgent to stop reflecting the OR of our interpreting the fictchar's state of mind). Part of a helpful colleague's contrib was reverting from "disengage" back to "cool off", summarizing in relevant part
 * "cool off" is probably better than "to disengage" for most readers

which i'm not going to try to puzzle out, tho i assume they would not argue that the ambiguity of "cool off" is what makes it preferable. Now, the situation is complicated by our omission of the detail of whether L. found S's thermostat setting too hot or too cold (a fact that i don't recall clearly) -- which helps somewhat to determine the degree of ambiguity in "cool off":
 * If L. wants it lowered 2 degrees (as my vague memory suggests), then
 * S's insistence that "2° matters because it can be the difference between boiling and not boiling" is ill-chosen (in line, it's true, with S's many blind spots) because it evokes a situation where the extra 2° that S wants would be drastically undesirable, not one where the extra is (as he claims) importantly desirable, and
 * the ambiguity is heightened both by L. wanting the room cooler, and by L. having an immediate reason for needing a break from L's personality.
 * If on the other hand L. wants the thermostat raised, then
 * we editors know that the "cooling" is a L-break, but
 * as it stands we've only said they fought about the thermostat, and the reader lacks the help we could provide for their realizing what we've been discussing on this talk page, about it being clear that "cooling" is a metaphor.

So i am not committed to a form of the word "disengage" or "distance" etc., but i insist that if we let the reversion stand without some other wording that disambiguates "cool off", the problem that my wording addressed persists. I hope others will suggest such a wording. --Jerzy•t 08:15, 2 November 2011 (UTC)


 * The actual content was "Leonard has a fight with Sheldon over the setting of the thermostat. He then storms out of the apartment and goes to Penny to cool off", which was added in this edit (not by me). To the average English speaker, the meaning of "cool-off" in relation to a fight is not ambiguous. It means to "calm down". The actual temperature setting had nothing to do with the choice of the term. Leonard was the one who wanted to set the thermostat higher, at 73 F, rather than at Sheldon's preferred 71 F, so he would have wanted to remain at 73, or even heat up, if anything. Leonard had already disengaged by the mere act of leaving the apartment, so its use was incorrect. Given the circumstances, "cool off" was more appropriate, since he did that in Penny's apartment, after he had disengaged. In any case, I've resolved the issue that you seem to have by removing it entirely, since it's not really needed. --AussieLegend (talk) 09:54, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:List of The Big Bang Theory episodes (season 5) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 01:29, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

"Title reference"
"Title reference: Sheldon's spaghetti dinner with Penny." Really? Are we assuming that people are so dimwitted that they can't tell from the episode synopsis what "The Spaghetti Catalyst" refers to? There seems to be an impression that, because of the nature of the show, these titles are somehow too "advanced" for the lay person to understand, but it's not the case. It seems unnecessary and, frankly, extremely condescending for these to be here. BTW, yes, I know that someone can probably "justify" an anecdotal exception for virtually every one of them. PacificBoy  02:02, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Maybe this isn't the best talk page for the discussion, since the title references appear on every season page, but I'd support removal of them. If you wanted, you could probably invoke WP:OR - and since I doubt many reliable sources would comment on what should be (mostly) obvious, there probably isn't going to be a good source out there telling you what the title means. It would possibly be something that could be mentioned in a full article on the episode, but a GA like The Convention Conundrum (well, I say "like" - that's the only TBBT example) doesn't mention what the title means. Bilorv (Talk)(Contribs) 09:18, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Citations needed for episode section title notes
I initially raised the following issue in the season two article discussion; perhaps further discussion/debate should occur on that page. This section serves as more of an outlining of the problem and a notification as to where it can be discussed.

We can't note where the title comes from unless we can source a RS that explains that; to do so is OR. I will wait about two weeks, as I am guessing that most of the season articles for the series do this. After that, I will remove them completely as unsourced OR. I welcome discussion on the matter until that time. Jack Sebastian (talk) 15:08, 3 August 2023 (UTC)