Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 December 18

= December 18 =

Hindi literature
i want to know about reserch books on a bhisma sahani. Tips : younger brother of balraj sahani —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.110.170.199 (talk) 06:54, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

i want totally information about a hindi writer bhisma sahani. an di want to know about research on bhisma sahani. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.110.170.199 (talk) 07:01, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * You probably refer to Bhisham Sahni. Please read that article, and follow the links in the article for more information, such as this one on the Congress Library. No such user (talk) 08:25, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Untimely death
The phrase "untimely death" is one you will find sprinkled all over Wikipedia. To me, it has always carried a connotation that "the person died too soon", that is, the speaker implicitly expresses an opinion that the person in question should have lived longer. On the other hand, according to Wiktionary it could simply mean "Any death that takes place at an unusually early age ...". My question is whether "untimely death" is neutral (it is listed in WP:AVOID). For example: "Tupac: Resurrection is a documentary about the life and horribly tragic death of rapper Tupac Shakur." "Tupac: Resurrection is a documentary about the life and untimely death of rapper Tupac Shakur."

While the former is clearly not written from a neutral point of view, what about the latter? Is it conveying anything more than the fact that the rapper died at a relatively young age? Thanks, decltype (talk) 08:14, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It's not altogether neutral, but it's also not altogether precise. What would be a "timely" death? 70? 80? 90? Besides all that, you hear a lot of people talk about, "...when your time is up," presumably as determined by God or Mother Nature or whatever. So, by that viewpoint, there's no such thing as an "untimely" death, because God takes you when He's good and ready to. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:22, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree that the term is best avoided. It's usually clear from the first line of someone's article at what age they died, so no more need be said. If their early death is something for which they are notable, there are other ways in which to draw the reader's attention to this. River Phoenix's article would seem to be a good example in this respect.--Shantavira|feed me 08:58, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * While I don't believe in a supreme being with powers over earthly life and death, some of those who do might think that Wikipedia is presuming to substitute its own judgement for that of the Almighty, in Whose eyes any particular death might be (for all we mortals know) very timely. Death at a young age is probably a more-neutral phrase, if it can be worked in without stylistic awkwardness. —— Shakescene (talk) 09:44, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I think it's a combination of two English traits: politeness and not speaking ill of the dead. --TammyMoet (talk) 13:55, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Untimely death to whom? What person's perspective is being expressed? The person who died? The perspective of someone who might have wanted them to die? The perspective of someone who loved the deceased? Bus stop (talk) 14:08, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Unencyclopedic and pov. Kittybrewster  &#9742;  14:31, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * There's another aspect to this - is it "untimely" if someone dies in an accident, or is shot and killed as Tupac was? When someone dies young from natural causes, it can seem untimely, especially if it's sudden and unexpected. Shakescene raises an interesting point that was explored in The Mysterious Stranger, I think - about a beloved young girl who drowned or something, and in kind of a reverse of It's a Wonderful Life, Satan showed the narrator that had she lived, she would have had a miserable life and everyone would have ended up hating her. Something like that. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:46, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * WP:EUPHEMISM explicitly discourages using the phrase "untimely death" (among other things) at Wikipedia. I say, feel free to shoot it on sight. +Angr 16:27, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It's one of those things like "passed away" (or blown away, in this case). ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm aware of that guideline, I was simply wondering whether in cases like "... a documentary about the life and untimely death of [Tupac]", it's simply a neutral way of saying that he died young. decltype (talk) 19:54, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * For general writing, that sounds ok. But here, where we have a requirement to use neutral language, it's less acceptable.  There is no way of being neutral about whether a particular person's death was timely, untimely or whatever.  Hitler was only 56 when he died, an age that is generally considered the prime of one's life; but does anyone ever refer to "Hitler's untimely death"?  Not that I've ever heard of.  That's because most people were happy he was dead.  In Tupac's case, most people who had any sort of opinion were unhappy he was dead.  Not disagreeing with them, but that's as quintessentially non-neutral as their opinion about Hitler's death.  Had Tupac lived to the age of 85, and then died in the way he did, would his murder still be categorised as an "untimely death"?  To be killed that way shouldn't happen to anyone, at any age; so it's not so much the age at which he died, but the manner of his death that's the salient point.  But that doesn't mean that your first sentence is any more neutral than your second.  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   20:13, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * (ec)What's the dividing line between dying young and dying not-young? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:14, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Or timely vs untimely? Kittybrewster  &#9742;  20:26, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * What's the dividing line between an unusually-shaped vegetable and a usually-shaped one? Is the statement that the melon pictured is "giant" non-neutral? Perhaps its approximate size should be given instead. 213.122.7.102 (talk) 16:24, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Or the ROUS, for that matter. But hey are you comparing Tupac with a vegetable??? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:29, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * (Note for the baffled: I believe my colleague refers to rodents of unusual size.) 213.122.7.102 (talk) 17:01, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I think it is better to state the facts of a person's life (and death), according to reliable sources, and from a neutral point of view, allowing all significant positions representation, and to let the reader reach a conclusion concerning whether the deceased died too soon or too late. Bus stop (talk) 02:26, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Flying_Star_Feng_Shui Kittybrewster  &#9742;  17:00, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Continued at User_talk:Mandarax Kittybrewster  &#9742;  18:28, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * People should comment at Village_pump_(policy). It's inappropriate for us to carry out a wider conversation on Mandarax's talk page. Gigs (talk) 20:05, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Genitalia slangs in English
Of the English slang words about male and female genitals, which one(s) are more vulgar? Consider cock/dick and pussy/cunt/twat. Which is the worse one? I'm sure there are dozens more but these seem to be used most of the time. I believe some of those should be more irritating or disturbing to the listener, but as a non-native nearly all of them sound the same, and I can't grasp the true feeling the words give. I wonder which words are used in different situations.

What does one use when talking to his long-time buddy? "Hey buddy, I've got this sore on my dick/cock/penis since last week at Linda's"? Which one is appropriate to use while addressing a doctor? "Uh doc, please come quickly, little Jimmy trapped his penis/willy in his zippers"? What does one say to his/her sexual partner? I'll refrain from making up an example for this one!

And please don't bash me for asking this. I'm counting on the non-censorship policy, using the words were necessary for the question. Thanks all. 78.176.31.157 (talk) 21:43, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * It's probably pretty subjective, and depends on where you live, but, at least in my experience, "cunt" is the most vulgar of these words. Adam Bishop (talk) 22:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Considering just the 'vulgar' slang words (ie, excluding anatomical terms like penis and vagina, and silly euphemisms like willy or love sausage), I think the words for female parts almost always tend to be more offensive than the ones for male parts. Cunt and twat are both considerably worse than cock or dick (and when speaking among themselves, most guys I know use the terms "cock" and "dick" exclusively...I doubt women use "cunt" or "twat" among themselves, unless they're having a fight). r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 22:40, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The terms "dick" and "pussy" are less vulgar than "cock" and "cunt" - Pollinosisss (talk) 23:13, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Willy isn't nearly as silly as love sausage. Willy is the sort of word that a mother would use talking to her little child, or a small child would use themselves. As such, it can be a fall-back option when people are in embarrassing situations and need to use a word for 'that thing' and can't even bring themselves to say penis. The female equivalent would probably be fanny in the UK, although I think it varies much more than willy does. Love sausage, however, has entirely silly connotations: it's a bit Carry On, and would only be used if someone wanted a silly way to refer to a penis with reference to its role in sex.
 * Twat, oddly, seems to spend most of its time divorced from the anatomical meaning, probably helped by its resemblance to twit. I can't imagine a children's author including the word cock, dick or cunt in a book aimed at 10-year-olds because they were under the impression it was just a fairly mild term of abuse, slightly worse than twit. In my childhood, that was the register it had for me too. "Stop buggering about, you twat! (You said the dialysis machine would be ready 5 weeks ago, and you've played 15000 games of Solitaire)." would be considered far more acceptable in the hearing of children than "Stop cocking about, you cunt! (I want my £200 for passing 'Go'.)", although the second has far more potential to be said in a friendly manner. 86.176.191.243 (talk) 01:57, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * "Twat" has different meanings in different parts of the UK. For example in Yorkshire, the verb "twat" means to hit someone hard and possibly knock them out. As an aside, there seem to be many more acceptable words for the male member (like that one!) than there are for the corresponding female part(s). And in England at least, "vagina" means the part that is inside the vulva, not the part that is outside (as seems to be the case in the US per the Vagina Monologues). --TammyMoet (talk) 09:18, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The vagina/vulva confusion is a pretty common one. Also, the one-eyed snake :P Rimush (talk) 14:01, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * ...you can wrap it up in ribbons, you can put it in a sock... TomorrowTime (talk) 15:04, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, when used as terms of abuse ("you're a ---"), cock has a connotation of arrogance, dick of engaging in deliberate bad behaviour for fun, pussy of being cowardly or obsequious, cunt of being evil or unmanagable, and twat of being foolish. In the context of the actual genitals, then, cock sounds somewhat more sexual than dick, which sounds relatively mild and conversational, pussy sounds moderately sexual with seductive overtones, cunt is more obscene, and twat (like dick) is mundane-sounding and faintly ridiculous. My frame of reference here is UK English. 213.122.7.102 (talk) 16:52, 19 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Just out of curiosity, is there a difference in meaning between the twat that rhymes phonetically with rat and the twat that rhymes with what? It's always the latter in Australia, but I've heard some UK English uses of the former.  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   21:46, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

From experience, the former is always the one used in the UK. --87.115.136.220 (talk) 13:18, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

David Cameron recently used the word Twat in a pun on Tweet, apparently innocent that the former is actually genital slang. It briefly caused a mild media kerfuffle. --Dweller (talk) 11:21, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

I am interested in the history of the usage of the word dick to mean needlessly agressive and stupid. My theory is that the usage was revived during the candidacy of Richard Nixon. I know his law partners repeated stories about his behaviour they referred to as "dick stories".69.116.67.201 (talk)sesquepedalia

I hope this post doesn't get you in trouble with the neighbors...
...Because you have to try it out yourself to see. I am a native English speaker and near native speaker of Spanish. I have found that it is far harder to yell in Spanish than in English. My best guess is that it is the difficulty of transitions between the pure vowels of Spanish, as compared with the dipthong-laden speech that is American English, which have no clear transition between them. This, I think, is what makes it easier. Anyway, if you are bilingual, and your other language is a pure vowel language, try yelling in it and then compare to yelling in English. I'm imagining you will get the same result, which is that you can't yell as loud (or sustained as loud), it's much more straining, and your rate of speech (yelling speech that is) is slower. I can take out much of the difference if I break out my imitation of an American who is just learning Spanish. I just change all the pure vowels to dipthongs (gra°ci°as, becomes graaaaasseeeyassssss) and I can yell better. Anyway, I though it was an interesting observation that I have never heard anyone ever raise before, so I thought I'd share and wonder if anyone has noticed this before and can confirm that they find the same is true for them. By the way, I noticed this just this week and tested it out; some people definitely thought I was a lunatic when I was testing it).--162.83.166.101 (talk) 22:57, 18 December 2009 (UTC)


 * It was common knowledge in choirs I've been in that it's easier to sing very quietly in French than in English, and a generally held view that it was easier to sing loudly in Latin (which was usually sung with 'purer' vowels). I don't know how well that fits, but it indicates you're probably not imagining things or noticing a personal idiosyncracy. 86.176.191.243 (talk) 01:39, 19 December 2009 (UTC)


 * In my experience performing outdoors at Renaissance faires and Shakespeare festivals, it's easier to project the broad sounds of pseudo-rural and pseudo-Tudor English from the back of the throat than the close clipped sounds of Spanish and Received Pronunciation (or BBC or Upper Class English), which, after the Great Vowel Shift, are articulated much closer to the front of the mouth. You're much likelier to strain your vocal chords with the latter, than with the former where you can make more use of your diaphragm and resonate against various parts of your upper torso (like the rib cage).—— Shakescene (talk) 07:29, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The differences you observe may be due more to your language proficiency than to anything inherent in the language. If anything, I would think that having purer vowels would make it easier to yell or shout.  Though it's probably pretty neutral either way.  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  19:25, 19 December 2009 (UTC)