User talk:Straydog

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February 2019
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Helen Mirren. Your edits appear to be disruptive and have been or will be reverted. Please ensure you are familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, and please do not continue to make edits that appear disruptive. Continual disruptive editing may result in loss of editing privileges. ''
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"sensational" does not mean the same thing as "sensationalistic", and the latter was clearly the more appropriate word here. It looks like you've made a large number of similar changes to different articles without pausing to think about it (almost as if you were correcting a spelling error) and you even marked the changes as minor - please don't do that. bonadea'' contributions talk 06:44, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Response
Thank you for responding to my edits, you are the first to do so in twelve years!

You question my changing the word "sensationalistic" to "sensational" suggesting that it was done "without pausing to think about it". I read a Wikipedia article that used the word and immediately questioned it as misuse of the word sensational. I checked a couple of dictionaries which did not recognise the word and defaulted to the definition of "sensationalism" which was not appropriate in the context because an adjective is required, not a noun. Having been reassured by my reference to dictionaries I changes the word in that article. Then I wondered whether sensationalistic had been used elsewhere and found that there were many instances. I proceeded to change as many as my patience would allow. Those edits were done in good-faith.

Now, having read your response I have checked further. Thinking that it might be an Americanism I looked in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It defaults to a definition of sensationalism although it does reference sensationalistic without a definition under, "Other Words from sensationalism".

The OED online version defaults to sensationalism the definition of which is much the same as that for sensational. Only a pronunciation is given for sensationalistic.

It occurs in Wiktionary without a definition. It links from there to sensationalist where sensationalistic is described as a derived term.

In Wikipedia sensationalistic is redirected to sensationalism.

You said: "sensational" does not mean the same thing as "sensationalistic", and the latter was clearly the more appropriate word here.

In the interest of learning, I would be interested to see a reference that defines sensationalistic and clarifies how it is a more appropriate word than sensational. Straydog (talk) 10:20, 2 March 2019 (UTC)