Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2008 July 16

= July 16 =

Signatures
Most signatures at the end of letters have a form like this

Sincerely, Jon Doe

I'd like to know if there is a formal name for the "Sincerely," part or any of the words that precede the name (Goodbye, Love, etc...)

♫Deathgleaner 03:56, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * It is usually called the closing. See business letter for the names for the other parts of a letter. Michael Slone (talk) 04:06, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * We have articles at Complimentary close and at Valediction. Deor (talk) 04:08, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

What kinds of nouns are these?
In English, why are the names of the four seasons not considered proper nouns, but names of the months of the year and days of the week are considered proper nouns? Also, into what category do names of sports and games such as "poker" and "baseball" belong? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.134.228.23 (talk) 07:48, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * To your second question, I'd say "poker" and "baseball" are definitely common nouns. To your first, I'd say it's a good question, and indeed I've seen people capitalize the names of the seasons probably more often than almost any other common noun, because there's a strong intuition they "should" be proper nouns. Your question is only answerable if we have an adequate definition of "common noun" and "proper noun", and I'm not sure we do. I always felt like the definition was sort of circular: "Why don't season names get capitalized? Because they aren't proper nouns. — What is a proper noun? A noun that gets capitalized." In French, day names, months, and languages do not get capitalized (i.e. they're considered common nouns), while in English they do (i.e. they're considered proper nouns), so there doesn't even seem to be a universal semantic criterion that can be applied. German makes things easier by simply capitalizing all nouns (but makes things harder by considering adjectives to be nouns in some circumstances, like "good" in the phrase "something good"). Languages written in other writing systems than the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian alphabets make things easier still by not having a distinction between capital and lower case letters. Maybe we should just start writing English in katakana... —Angr 08:36, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Related info: Capitalization rules for days, months, demonyms and language-names in many languages from jnestorius(talk) 08:46, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * It is a good question.. the answers may be historical/etymological
 * The days and months are mostly named after people eg Thursday Thor, Wednesday Odin, similarily the months August, Augustus the other months are mostly numerical in origin eg September from septem - so maybe it's because they are named after things, and are relatively modern that they are capitalised..
 * The seasons are so old and entrenched that it seems meaningless to capitalise them, I'd expect the months to go the same way in many years to come..87.102.86.73 (talk) 10:46, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I dont think etymology is the way to go.


 * R. Quirk and folks (in their big English grammar) have a definition of proper noun that is both semantic and grammatical. For the semantic criterion, proper nouns have unique reference. For the grammatical criteria, proper nouns lack (indefinite/definite) article contrast and number contrast. For example, Louisiana refers to only one thing and *a Louisiana & *the Louisiana and *Louisianas are ungrammatical. The same grammar applies to the West Indies (which has an obligatory the: you cant say *West Indy, *West Indies (with no article), *a West Indy, *the West Indy. Since English is flexible, you can use a proper noun like Louisiana as a count noun, in which case it loses unique reference and gains article & number contrast. (E.g. Lousiana is no longer the Louisiana that she once knew or Did he buy a Rembrandt at the auction last week? or How many George Bushes does it take to screw in a light bulb?). This noun category conversion makes the analysis harder. Anyway, for fun, you can put the seasons through these tests and try to come up with an answer.


 * The capitalization issue is something somewhat connected to proper noun status, but it is not directly correlated. Another thing to mention about capitalization in proper nouns is that you capitalize t in The Hague but not in the United States. Both are proper nouns. There doesnt seem to be any predictability here. I think that generally proper nouns will be capitalized and will retain their capitalization after noun category conversion. Maybe the variable capitalization is connected to nouns that are have membership in both proper noun and non-proper noun categories? (To elaborate, some nouns like cake, brick can be either count or mass nouns. One analysis would be that they dual membership in both count and mass noun categories). – ishwar  (speak)  15:13, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, by those criteria, days of the week at least should be common nouns and uncapitalized: "Monday" does not refer to only one thing, and "a Monday", "the Monday", and "Mondays" are all grammatical. For months it's less clear-cut: "July" does not refer to only one thing either, but "a July", "the July" and "Julys" are starting to sound (to me at least) like transferred usages along the lines of "a Remembrandt", "the Louisiana she once knew" and "George Bushes". The seasons still sound like common nouns: "a summer", "the summer", and "summers" are all okay. Languages are proper nouns too by those criteria, so either French has different linguistic criteria for the distinction or it spells them wrong. —Angr 15:24, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * It seems clearer to me now that 'summer','winter' etc has entered human conciousness as the name (small n) for those seasons, whereas the weeks and months still have titular associations (see http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/titular)..
 * It's also worth noting that weeks/months are not always capitalised (many don't) but it remains convention to do so for instance when marking a date in a letter..87.102.86.73 (talk) 01:51, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Do weeks have names? I've never seen a style guide that permits the names of months not to be capitalised.  Anyone who writes, for example, "13 february" is probably from the same school that writes "i do alot of writing and im a good speller".  --  JackofOz (talk) 07:13, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Decimate
For the past few decades, Lake Superior State University has issued an annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.” …..In general, the list is most informative as a barometer of pet peeves about language: what is it that gets under people’s skin, so much so that they think words (or particularly disliked senses of words) should be removed from the lexicon forthwith? One of the entries on the 2008 list is the beleaguered word decimate, which originally referred to the ancient Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier in a mutinous army regiment. “Word-watchers have been calling for the annihilation of this one for several years,” the press release states. .....And by 1663 the usage of decimate had already expanded to mean “to destroy or remove a large proportion of,” according to citations collected in the Oxford English Dictionary. For nearly three and a half centuries, then, virtually every use of the word decimate has been in this extended sense, except when referring to the harsh old Roman practice. And these days such references seem limited to complaints about the word itself. However, even though there is scant evidence in the history of standard English usage to support the idea that the “one-tenth” meaning is the “real” one, some questions of usage have lingered. From: Should “Decimate” be Annihilated? Lexicography on January 3, 2008  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.121.206.124 (talk) 19:02, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I would like a ruling on the use of decimate or decimation. In your definitions it includes both to eliminate "nearly all," and the obsolete roman/tax use of the form, to remove a decime (10%). For taxes and discipline a decime was a fairly minor amount.

In general usage and in older unabridged dictionaries, to decimate means to move the decimal point to the left (100.0 to 10.00) or to be left with a tenth....a loss of an order of magnitude.

In short, the decimation of the Irish potato crop did not mean that 90% of the potatoes were fine.

If you have a dollar and spend a dime, have you decimated your resources?

And no modern military commander would send in a squad of 10 if the injury of one person would decimate their chances of victory.

A one million, one hundred thousand dollar fortune decimated in the Great Depression did not mean they kept a $Million.

My vote, as you see, is that decimate is (roughly) the loss of a resource in the range of an order of magnitude, a decimal. While a decime, is a dime. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.121.206.124 (talk) 12:38, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree -LambaJan (talk) 12:50, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd be inclined to agree too, for general purposes. For writing about taxation or Roman history, perhaps it's better to reserve the word for the reducing-by-a-tenth sense - these seem to be the places where the word could cause most confusion. In any case, in a Wikipedia article it might be a good idea to link the word to the article for the sense that's intended (Decimation (Roman army) for reducing by a tenth, Decimation (Roman army) for reducing by a large proportion). AJHW (talk) 14:39, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * We do not do "rulings" of the sort you are asking for. It's clear from the article that the formal meaning is reduction by 10%, and that the "reduction by a large amount" use is not universally accepted, not least since it pays no heed to what the word actually, as opposed to colloquially, means. Yes, the word is, like all others, on a language treadmill which sees the meaning shift. but we should certainly not elect to use the word in the clumsy not-universally-accepted wrong but colloquial sense, since we purport to be writing an encyclopedia which depends on people being able to understand what we mean. The easiest solution is, do not use the word except in its formal sense - reduction by 10%. Choose another word or phrase if you mean something else (like "reduce by an order of magnitude"). --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:32, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * And while we're at it, quantum leap. I mean, WTF? Why not just stick a label on your forehead stating "I have not got a clue what the words I use actually mean".--Tagishsimon (talk) 17:34, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm with Humpty Dumpty on this. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'  -- Q Chris (talk) 07:19, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I am going to look into this further, including the Roman practice. The simple notion (clumsy or not) that because the word contains a "dec," it means to reduce by 10% is a recent (since WWII) shift in use.....perhaps technically correct, or perhaps due to a superficial interpretation and conclusion. The leap seems flawed to me. While dec linguistically equals ten....it is not always percent. And while the Roman military practice operated on the principal of random selection by sequential lots of tens (1000 warriors divided into 100 groups of ten men, of which ten groups are chosen, of which 1 in 10 men were killed...) ten out of a thousand is a reduction of 1 percent of the legion...not ten percent. But this practice is said to have destroyed (decimated) 100 percent of the morale. Kathryn (original poser of the question).
 * We reduced our development databases at work to 10% of the production size. We were quite proud of the phrase we used to describe this immense project - "database decimation". I thought decimation was a coined, off-the-cuff word, without bothering to research usage at the time. I found it quite interesting to read the discussion above! Sandman30s (talk) 22:12, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Kathryn, I'm not quite clear what windmill you're tilting at right now with your "look into this further" and your "perhaps due to a superficial interpretation and conclusion". The OED finds examples of decimate meaning "To kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of" from 1663. Where you get the idea that this is a "since WWII shift" from is beyond me. Equally the OED states that the word is used rhetorically or loosely to mean "to destroy or remove a large proportion of". --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:24, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Joshin ya
Where did the term, "I was just Joshin ya," come from? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.207.198.130 (talk) 16:52, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Moved from Miscellaneous Desk. There's a definition in josh but no etymology. -- Coneslayer (talk) 17:00, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Merriam-Webster dates the verb form from 1845, but says "origin unknown". The Online Etymology Dictionary (aka the other OED) says probably from the name Joshua, but doesn't have a lot to back that up.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  17:34, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Merriam-Webster-Shebster. The OED says of the etymology "Cf. Josh Billings, pseudonym of an American humorist." From our article we find "Josh Billings was the pen name of humorist born Henry Wheeler Shaw (20 April 1818 – 14 October 1885). He was perhaps the second most famous humor writer and lecturer in the United States in the second half of the 19th century after Mark Twain." The inference is that to josh is derived from his assumed forename. The earliest use is confirmed at 1845, so he'd have had to have been a reasonably precocious talent. Or else there was something else going on that the OED has not picked up on, such as that josh, to joke, originated prior to Shaw assuming his pen-name and indeed guided him towards the choice of forename. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:32, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't see the need to denigrate one of my sources, I simply reported what it said. And if you had bothered to read my other link, you'd have seen "The word was in use earlier than the career of U.S. humorist "John [sic] Billings," pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818-85), who did not begin to write and lecture until 1860; but his popularity after 1869 may have influence [sic] that of the word."  -- LarryMac  | Talk  19:47, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh dear. Sense of humour failure. Ah well. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:49, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * "Humor". This is Amerkin stuff we's discussin. --jpgordon&#8711;&#8710;&#8711;&#8710; 20:19, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Gosh, U've shawly taken the "me" out of humour with that josh against Mark mark against josh. Seriously though, why would you "shebster" Merriam-Webster and then confirm its answer to the questioner? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 14:45, 17 July 2008 (UTC)